A team of researchers from the University of Maryland say they have developed a software-programmable quantum computer. UMD’s Joint Quantum Institute describes it as the first re-programmable quantum computer ever, and a major advance over previous demonstrations of quantum computing, which have generally been static devices designed to run only one type of operation. The details of the science are not for the faint-hearted. The device uses five quantum bits, or “qubits,” the equivalent of a single bit or switch in a conventional computer. That might not sound like much, but the revolutionary potential of quantum computing hinges on the ability of these bits to represent a greater number of states than the simple on-or-off options of an electronic bit.

In a world increasingly dominated by the QWERTY keyboard, UCL computer scientists have developed software which may spark the comeback of the handwritten word by analysing the handwriting of any individual and accurately replicating it. The scientists have created 'My Text in Your Handwriting', a programme which semi-automatically examines a sample of a person's handwriting, which can be as little as one paragraph, and generates new text saying whatever the user wishes, as if the author had handwritten it themselves.

In the world of driverless vehicle research, automakers are scrambling to find the best navigation formulas. Toyota believes human drivers can provide the answers. In January 2016, Toyota announced the creation of the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), a $1 billion investment in AI to develop autonomous driving capabilities as well as home-care robots. Jim Adler, the first head of data at TRI, has been on the job for just two months. Before that, he was an executive at Metanautix, a data analytics platform that sold to Microsoft last year. Adler talked about how Toyota is using data and simulation to teach cars to drive themselves.

Can a supercomputer beat humans in a hacking contest? We're about to find out. For the first time, a fully automated supercomputer is trying to compete with humans in a major hacking contest, and so far the machine is hanging in there. The supercomputer, known as Mayhem, is among the teams taking part in this year’s Capture the Flag contest at the DEF CON security conference in Las Vegas. The game involves detecting vulnerabilities in software and patching them, and humans have been playing it at DEF CON for years. Now computers are getting in on the act. DARPA, a U.S. defense agency, recently held an all-machine competition, awarding $2 million to the team that did best. Mayhem was the winner, and it's now competing against humans in the three-day event this weekend.

Japan’s research institution RIKEN once again captured the top spot on the Green500 list with its Shoubu supercomputer, the most energy-efficient system in the world. With rating of 6673.84 MFLOPS/Watt, Shoubu edged out another RIKEN system, Satsuki, the number 2 system that delivered 6195.22 MFLOPS/Watt. Both are “ZettaScaler”supercomputers, employing Intel Xeon processors and PEZY-SCnp manycore accelerators. The 3rd most energy-efficient system is China’s Sunway TaihuLight, which currently holds the number 1 spot on the TOP500 list as the world’s fastest supercomputer.

Princeton University and Simons Foundation researchers have developed a machine-learning approach that for the first time analyzes the entire human genome to predict which genes may cause autism spectrum disorder, raising the number of genes that could be linked to the disorder from 65 to 2,500. The findings will appear in the journal Nature Neuroscience. ASD is a complex neurodevelopment disorder with a strong genetic basis, but only about 65 autism genes out of an estimated 400 to 1,000 have been found through sequencing studies. Because of the how complex autism is, sequencing/genetics studies alone are severely underpowered to uncover the genetic basis of autism.

In the Nevada desert near Las Vegas, more than 10,000 mirrors focus the sun’s energy on a 640-foot tower. This concentrating solar power, or CSP, plant can generate 110 megawatts of electricity (enough for roughly 18,000 homes) by using the sun’s energy to heat a salt solution. That solution boils water, producing steam that turns a turbine generator. But to run at night or on a cloudy day, the heat-transfer medium – molten salt in this example – must stay hot as long as possible, and that’s a challenge. “How long you can maintain a high temperature depends on the heat-transfer medium, the insulation of the thermal energy storage tank and so on,” says Dominic Lee, manager in the sustainable electricity program at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

XSEDE reports that this year’s International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences was a rousing success. A total of 79 graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from 18 countries from institutions in Canada, Europe, Japan and the United States gathered in the European Green Capital 2016, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in the last week of June 2016. These students were selected from among the best in theirs fields through a rigorous review process from several hundred applications, to participate in the Seventh Annual International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences. Twenty-seven nationalities and four continents were represented, with a female participation of 23 percent.

Engineers from the University of Bristol have developed a new shape-changing metamaterial using Kirigami, which is the ancient Japanese art of cutting and folding paper to obtain 3D shapes. Metamaterials are a class of material engineered to produce properties that don't occur naturally. Currently metamaterials are used to make artificial electromagnetic and vibration absorbers and high-performance sensors. Kirigami can be applied to transform two-dimensional sheet materials into complex three-dimensional shapes with a broader choice of geometries than 'classical' origami.

The one’s and zero’s are all around us. Computer science and code have completely changed the world and how we interact with it. Just for a quick rundown, source code (often simply referred to as code) is at the core of how computers operate. Code is essentially a set of human written instructions that govern how computers of all types operate.

Paul Fain, in Inside Higher Ed, says one of the biggest criticisms levelled against bootcamps is they “don’t attract many low-income students.” The evidence certainly seems to support this. According to bootcamp industry-watcher Course Report, 79 percent of bootcamp students have a Bachelor’s Degree or higher before enrolling. Additionally, Course Report found the average pre-bootcamp salary to be $46,600, putting bootcamp students squarely in the middle class.

If you’d like to save your phone screen, put some bling on it. More than a decade ago, scientists figured out how to grow synthetic diamond as a potential replacement for the silicon MEMs or microelectromechanical systems. Now AKHAN Semiconductor says it’s figured out how to build on that original breakthrough, further refining the production process to create what may be the first-ever diamond-reinforced glass. Diamond is attractive as a potential smartphone display cover not only because it’s the hardest material known to mankind, but also because of its chemical inertness, thermal capabilities and high resistance to contaminants.

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a flexible wearable sensor that can accurately measure a person's blood alcohol level from sweat and transmit the data wirelessly to a laptop, smartphone or other mobile device. The device can be worn on the skin and could be used by doctors and police officers for continuous, non-invasive and real-time monitoring of blood alcohol content. The device consists of a temporary tattoo—which sticks to the skin, induces sweat and electrochemically detects the alcohol level—and a portable flexible electronic circuit board, which is connected to the tattoo by a magnet and can communicate the information to a mobile device via Bluetooth.

IBM scientists have created randomly spiking neurons using phase-change materials to store and process data. This demonstration marks a significant step forward in the development of energy-efficient, ultra-dense integrated neuromorphic technologies for applications in cognitive computing. Inspired by the way the biological brain functions, scientists have theorized for decades that it should be possible to imitate the versatile computational capabilities of large populations of neurons.

In a first study of its kind, a team led by the University of Washington’s Aurel Bulgac captured the real-time dynamics of a fissioning plutonium-240 nucleus by simulating the process on the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility. To create feasible nuclear fission models for current supercomputers, nuclear physicists had to devise shortcuts that often rely on approximations and constraints. The most successful of these approaches, density functional theory (DFT), describes nuclear dynamics by tracking changes in the density of the nucleus.

We already interact with artificial intelligence in our daily lives. Furby and Clippy were early forms; driverless cars and Facebook's chatbots pick up the mantle today. But if AI is to continue its evolution, it'll have to get more convincingly human. Right now, its capacity for emotional depth is seriously lacking. At a cognitive architectures conference in New York, Alexei Samsonovich, a professor in the Cybernetics Department at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, proposed a multi-part test. It would involve a human and a machine interacting, but under the guise of avatars in a virtual world.

DNA contains all of the genetic information for a living organization and is involved in many fundamental biological processes. Information in DNA is stored in chemical bases that pair up. The order of these base pairs contain essential information for an organism. Physical properties of DNA, such as elasticity, strength, and elongation, also play an important role in cell interactions. The smallest error, such as a molecule inserted between two neighboring base pairs — called an intercalator — can change the structure of DNA and lead to genetic abnormalities that cause cell death. Because cancer is a disease caused by the uncontrollable division of cells, many anti-cancer drugs exploit this biological error.

IBM has provided its technology and expertise to help better monitor spread of the Zika virus disease in South America. The technology firm has partnered with Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a research institution affiliated with the Brazilian Ministry of Health, which will use IBM’s technology to analyse clues such as mentions on social media and official data about human travel patterns. The researchers will use IBM’s software STEM, which models and visualises the spread of infectious diseases. The system can take into account factors such as geography, weather, time, roadways and airports to gain a better understanding of the spread of the disease. The technology was previously used to predict the spread of Ebola, malaria and dengue fever.

Parallel file systems were developed to overcome delays servers experienced when accessing files on disk storage systems. Flash arrays get rid of disk access latencies and so weaken the need for parallel file systems. Spectrum Scale, the renamed GPFS (General Parallel File System) and Lustre are two such parallel file systems. Instead of waiting for one IO stream to fill a server with data from a file system, they use multiple simultaneous IO streams which fill the server much more quickly. Such technologies are used with parallel compute clusters for high-performance computing applications such as simulations, seismic analysis and reservoir modelling, and enable the storage resource to support many more IO requests over a period of time.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a five-year $15 million grant to a collaborative team led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego to establish a Science Gateways Community Institute to accelerate the development and application of highly functional, sustainable science gateways that address the needs of researchers across the full spectrum of NSF directorates. The Institute’s goal is to increase the number, ease of use, and effective application of gateways for the greater research and engineering community, resulting in broader gateway use and more widespread engagement in science by professionals, citizen scientists, students, and more.

South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Program Director Kagiso Chikane recently welcomed 100 guests to the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town for the dedication of the fastest computer on the African continent. “Lengau,” which means “Cheetah” in the African Setswana language, ranked 121 on the June TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. However, none hold a candle to Lengau’s potential when it comes to solving the world’s grand challenges that are deeply rooted in Mother Africa.

There's been a lot of talk about Russian hackers infiltrating the Democratic National Committee's servers and then leaking sensitive emails via WikiLeaks. The breach, which happened in June but was revealed this week, may sound like a high-level hacking plot by international spies that doesn't have anything to do with your personal cybersecurity. We are here to tell you, that is incorrect. In times like this, it is good to remember Russia, or any government for that matter, could turn its attention to you — if, for some reason, they decided you had some information they needed to obtain. Perhaps you work for an important company or you are the love child of a Soviet spy. Whatever the reason, it is a good time to consider your privacy online.

Imagine a world where bots are ubiquitous… a world where nearly every online interaction takes place with a Siri, Alexa, Cortana or some soon-to-be-named artificial being. Here, banking is a breeze, as a customer service bot can quickly extrapolate your banking preferences from your online search history. In this world, your cupboards and refrigerator are always full, because your groceries are reordered every week automatically, based on consumption data. But in such a world, where bots provide the ultimate convenience of a futuristic lifestyle, is there still room for human help?

Civics tries to help companies be more data driven in their decision-making. This is the magic of data science. You can take a person, and you can have thousands of attributes, pieces of information about that person, and throw that against a modeling algorithm, and get back which of those attributes matter and which of them don’t for whatever outcome you’re trying to measure. I didn’t personally work on the campaign, but during Obama 2012, our CEO, Dan Wagner, was chief data scientist of the Obama campaign. There’s a lot of technology that gets built during a campaign that sort of disappears when the campaign disappears.

Melinda Miller is one of 300 teachers from around the nation learning to deliver what they believe every child should have in the classroom -- equality. "Computer science was something that my principal wanted to offer," Miller said. "I serve predominantly African-American and Hispanic students and it's a great need. Our students don't have a lot of options." Miller teaches in Dallas. But, she was given a free trip to the Colorado School of Mines to attend CSPd week. Miller can receive professional development in computer sciences from four different organizations all backed by the National Science Foundation.