Expansion of a new Advanced Placement computer science course aimed at drawing young women and minorities into high-tech fields is being hampered by a nationwide shortage of teachers qualified to teach it. Only a fifth of California high schools, about 260, will be offering the course in the 2016-17 school year. The new course – AP Computer Science Principles – is being offered for the first time this month after seven years as a pilot program in 45 schools across the country. It is a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s Computer Science for All initiative with a goal of offering the new course in as many high schools as possible, starting in the current school year.

Looking for an artificial intelligence that can write all your email messages so you don’t have to? Too bad. That dream is still years away. But in the meantime, a startup called Boomerang wants to take you at least part of the way there. Boomerang makes a plug-in for Gmail and Outlook that lets you hit the “snooze button” on certain messages. They’ll disappear from your inbox but then reappear at later time. But today, the company added a new twist to this plug-in: a new AI-powered tool called “Respondable.” Respondable analyzes your messages as you write them, predicts how likely they are to get a response, and then suggests ways you can improve them.

A future of soft robots that wash your dishes or smart T-shirts that power your cell phone may depend on the development of stretchy power sources. But traditional batteries are thick and rigid — not ideal properties for materials that would be used in tiny malleable devices. In a step toward wearable electronics, a team of researchers has produced a stretchy micro-supercapacitor using ribbons of graphene.

Researchers at the University of Oxford have achieved a quantum logic gate with record-breaking 99.9% precision, reaching the benchmark required theoretically to build a quantum computer. Quantum computers, which function according to the laws of quantum physics, have the potential to dwarf the processing power of today’s computers, able to process huge amounts of information all at once.

Contrary to a prevailing theory, coral larvae could not survive the five-thousand-kilometer trip across the Pacific Ocean to replenish endangered corals in the eastern Pacific, according to new research. Researchers used a supercomputer to simulate billions of coral larvae traveling on ocean currents over a 14.5-year period. The simulations showed that even during extreme environmental events that speed ocean currents, like the 1997-1998 El Niño, coral larvae could not survive long enough to make the trip from coral reefs in the western and central Pacific to help corals in the east recover from environmental damage.

Six graduate students recently concluded the DOD High Performance Computing Internship Program, or HIP, at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. “The intern’s summer projects were highly relevant and critical to our mission,” said Dr. Luis Bravo, Vehicle Technology Directorate. “They really took the lead in creating complex models that push the boundaries of engine combustion and turbomachinery sciences and have exploited the use of DOD’s Supercomputing platforms.” The annual HIP program funds interns to enhance computational skills and experience in order to support the DOD’s future warfighter needs.

The universe is full of mysteries. Mysteries that cannot be solved by observation alone, but researchers can examine them using modelling. However, this requires enormous processing power and is very expensive. Now researchers from Astrophysics and Planetary Science at the Niels Bohr Institute have just been granted 91 million CPU hours on European supercomputers for three major research projects. "Astrophysics and Planetary Science is entering a busy, but exciting time," says Klaus Galsgaard.

Knowledge of the soybean in the U.S. has come a long way since its humble start, namely as seeds smuggled by ship from China in the 1700s. A sanction back then from emperor Qianlong prevented trade outside of Canton. Undeterred, a former seaman with the East India Trading Company named Samuel Bowen first brought soybeans to Savannah, Georgia, in 1765. Today, an ambitious project called Soybean Knowledge Base developed at the University of Missouri-Columbia aims to find and share comprehensive knowledge from within the soybean, its genetic and genomic data, all publicly available and achieved through the use of high-performance computing.

Knowing how to code is the wave of the future. Being able to code helps you to break down problems procedurally and think of new ideas in terms of processes. If you see something in the world that’s inefficient, a knowledge of code allows you to come up with concrete solutions. Learning to code is empowering for kids because it gives them a platform to actively take on the challenges they want to solve. More and more innovations across multiple industries are being brought to fruition using code.

We are officially in the midst of the scorching summer months, and the great vacation migration to points all over the world has begun. While preparations and packing for these trips can be mind-numbing, many of the unknowns that keep mom and dad up the night before are being safeguarded by an unsuspected ally: high-performance computing (HPC) systems. An incredible shift is underway in the HPC market. HPC and the big data phenomenon have converged, moving HPC out of its comfort zone of research institutions and oil and gas companies, and into industries like travel, automotive, and financial.

High-performance computing (HPC) has become increasingly more popular and important in the world of engineering. But defining what HPC is and figuring out how it can be deployed to aid designers can be tricky. And, honestly, it shouldn’t be that way. In this article, I’m going to present a clear definition of what HPC is, how it can be effectively used in engineering and what kind of HPC solutions are on the market today.

These orderly patterns of dark blue dots indicate where individual chlorine atoms are missing from an otherwise regular grid of atoms. Scientists manipulated these vacancies to create a supersmall data storage device. The locations of vacancies encode bits of information in the device, which Sander Otte of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and colleagues describe in Nature Nanotechnology. The team arranged and imaged the vacancies using a scanning tunneling microscope. The storage system, which can hold a kilobyte of data, must be cooled to a chilly −196° Celsius to work.

Carbon nanotubes are one of those supermaterials — a cylinder with a diameter of one or two nanometers — that are full of dreamy applications, ranging from supercomputers to ultra-efficient smartphones. The problem is, they are difficult to manufacture, and commercializing these applications may require 10 or 15 years. A nanotube is a tube-like molecular structure made of one element, usually carbon. In particular, carbon nanotubes (which were accidentally discovered in 1991) are known for their exceptional electrical and mechanical properties.

The bus stops, and then moves forward, but the driver's nowhere to be seen. Two self-driving minibuses began plying the roads of Helsinki this week -- in real traffic. The small electric buses were developed by a French company EasyMile and can transport up to nine passengers. They are able to travel at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour, although they are restricted to seven miles per hour during their trial period. The buses are being used to move passengers between two busy public transit stations in the city's waterfront Hernesaari district. A driver is stationed on board in case of an emergency.

Fans of Superman surely recall how the Man of Steel used immense heat and pressure generated by his bare hands to form a diamond out of a lump of coal. The tribologists -- scientists who study friction, wear, and lubrication -- and computational materials scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory will probably never be mistaken for superheroes. However, they recently applied the same principles and discovered a revolutionary diamond-like film of their own that is generated by the heat and pressure of an automotive engine.

The traditional Silicon Valley view is that innovation happens in spite rather than because of government. But according to Accenture Senior Director of Strategy, Anand Shah, government does have an important role to play in stimulating growth. But it’s not the old top-down New Deal kind of government focused on massive investment in infrastructure and the creation of “shovel ready” jobs. Instead, Shah – one of the authors of the recent World Economic Forum’s Digital Transformation of Industries report – believes that the role of government is now as a collaborator with industry.

Raise your hand: who hasn't fallen victim to cyberscams or at least come pretty close. Among the most lucrative con games are technical support scams that scare people into buying expensive software to fix non-existent problems. But a French security researcher now claims to have avenged us all. In a blog post, Ivan Kwiatkowski recounts how he played along with the tricksters and duped them into downloading an attachment containing ransomware when they asked for his credit card details.

Researchers at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, using the liquid crystal elastomer technology, originally developed in the LENS Institute in Florence, demonstrated a bioinspired micro-robot capable of mimicking caterpillar gaits in natural scale. The 15-millimeter long soft robot harvests energy from green light and is controlled by spatially modulated laser beam. Apart from travelling on flat surfaces, it can also climb slopes, squeeze through narrow slits and transport loads.

Software developers listen up: if you want people to pay attention to your security warnings on their computers or mobile devices, you need to make them pop up at better times. A new study from BYU, in collaboration with Google Chrome engineers, finds the status quo of warning messages appearing haphazardly—while people are typing, watching a video, uploading files, etc.—results in up to 90 percent of users disregarding them. Researchers found these times are less effective because of "dual task interference," a neural limitation where even simple tasks can't be simultaneously performed without significant performance loss. Or, in human terms, multitasking.

You’ve heard of Siri. You’ve probably even heard of Alexa. Now meet Amelia. “She” is an avatar dressed in a business suit, a virtual customer service representative powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Amelia was developed by managed IT services firm IPSoft, and she can analyze and learn from vast amounts of data, making independent decisions without programmers (also known as machine learning). Amelia communicates with customers through chat, but she is more highly evolved than most chatbots.

The number of computing teachers in Scotland has dropped by 25 per cent in the past decade amid fears that many specialists are moving south of the Border. New figures show there are now just 598 active computer science teachers in Scotland compared with 802 in 2005. Seventeen local authorities had schools with no computing teachers, with two thirds of Highland schools having no specialists. There were only 26 new registrations of computing teachers in Scotland last year compared with 85 in 2005. The figures were obtained from Scottish councils under the Freedom of Information Act by an organisation which promotes technology in education.

What does a network look like? It typically depends on what scale you're analyzing. Researchers often want to know what hidden structures lie within data representing real-world networks, from power grids to the internet. To do this, they employ a variety of methods and metrics, but these methods are limited. Approaches that identify microscopic features miss the big structural picture. Methods that reveal macroscopic organization don't reliably show how the network is constructed – and also tend to be computationally intensive.

Computer scientists at the world-famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a system that can reliably make websites load 34 per cent faster. As internet speeds have increased, websites have got more complex, leaving some pages sluggish and unresponsive. This is a problem for companies like Amazon, who say that for every one-second delay in loading time, their profits are cut by one per cent. But a team of researchers, working at the university's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, may have found the solution.

Fujitsu Laboratories has announced the development of software technology that uses multiple GPUs to enable high-speed deep learning powered by the application of supercomputer software parellelisation technology. A conventional method to accelerate deep learning is to use multiple computers equipped with GPUs, networked and arranged in parallel. According to the company however, the issue with this method is that the effects of parallelisation become progressively harder to obtain as the time required to share data between computers increases when more than 10 computers are used at the same time.

Our increasing reliance on the Internet and the ease of access to the vast resource available online is affecting our thought processes for problem solving, recall and learning. In a new article published in the journal Memory, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz and University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign have found that 'cognitive offloading', or the tendency to rely on things like the Internet as an aide-mémoire, increases after each use. We might think that memory is something that happens in the head but increasingly it is becoming something that happens with the help of agents outside the head.