These days, it may seem as if 3-D printers can spit out just about anything, from a full-sized sports car, to edible food, to human skin. But some things have defied the technology, including hair, fur, and other dense arrays of extremely fine features, which require a huge amount of computational time and power to first design, then print. Now researchers in MIT's Media Lab have found a way to bypass a major design step in 3-D printing, to quickly and efficiently model and print thousands of hair-like structures.

Biologists and mathematicians from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) have accelerated the rate at which a computer can predict the structure of protein complexes in a cell. The research was carried out by MIPT in collaboration with Stony Brook University and other scientific research centers. The study has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. The research will help scientists to better understand the function of cells leading to more efficient drug development in the future. The new algorithm developed will soon become part of ClusPro – an automated system for calculating protein-protein interactions.

Comic book readers might know about gamma rays. The Incredible Hulk was transformed from mild scientist into wild superhero by gamma rays from a nuclear explosion. The real gamma rays form in nature from radioactive decay of the atomic nucleus. Besides hazardous materials, you'd have to look in exotic places like near a black hole or closer to home at lightning in the upper atmosphere to find natural forces capable of making gamma rays. Scientists have found that gamma rays, like the Hulk, can do heroic things too — if they can be controlled.

Despite the mainstreaming of science and technology-powered fitness and health initiatives in recent years, a new survey indicates there's a limit to what we'll accept in the race to become "superhuman." Specifically, the survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center, refers to the emerging area of methods (often referred to as transhumanism) designed to enhance our minds and bodies using everything from chip implants, to synthetic blood and even to genetic engineering. According to the survey, almost 70 percent of Americans have concerns about the unforeseen issues around brain chip implants as a means to improve cognitive ability.

A computer science degree from a top university can help graduates land their dream job at companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook. But which computer science courses are the best ones to try and to get onto if you want to impress employers? Using the QS World University Rankings, we took a look at the universities with the top computer science and information systems courses.

Synthetic biology allows researchers to program cells to perform novel functions such as fluorescing in response to a particular chemical or producing drugs in response to disease markers. In a step toward devising much more complex cellular circuits, MIT engineers have now programmed cells to remember and respond to a series of events. These cells can remember, in the correct order, up to three different inputs, but this approach should be scalable to incorporate many more stimuli, the researchers say.

Imagine walking through the bathroom door at 7am and the shower starts itself at optimal water heat and pressure. The thermostat adjusts when you enter the room. Want a new bathroom tub? What if you could 3D print it? High-tech homes are about to revolutionize the way we live. While interior design once relied on color schemes and playful accents, new tech trends are completely revamping how we design, build and live in our spaces. Even more, they’re having a social impact, enabling users to reduce their carbon footprints and increase efficiency as they go about their daily lives.

Using today's advanced microscopes, scientists are able to capture exponentially more information about the materials they study compared to a decade ago—in greater detail and in less time. While these new capabilities are a boon for researchers, helping to answer key questions that could lead to next-generation technologies, they also present a new problem: How to make effective use of all this data? At the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, researchers are engineering a solution by creating a novel infrastructure uniting the lab's state-of-the art imaging technologies with advanced data analytics and high-performance computing (HPC).

Glioblastoma is a highly aggressive form of brain cancer with a survival rate generally less than 16 months. With no effective treatments available, a team including researchers from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego and John Wayne Cancer Institute at Providence Saint John’s Health Center sought to uncover several underlying molecular networks that may yield attractive therapeutic targets for this deadly disease. The results, published in the July 16 online issue of Oncotarget, focus on a transcription factor called OLIG2 (Oligodendrocyte lineage transcription factor), known to play a critical role in brain tumor development. Transcription factors control which genes are turned “on” or “off” at any given time.

This is RoboCup! This annual gathering sees robotics experts from all over the planet fielding teams of battling soccerbots in a bid for robot football supremacy. This year's tournament took place in Leipzig, Germany, where robots across both humanoid and non-humanoid leagues went head-to-head. Meet the Australian team out to defend their title, see why a change to the regulation ball has scores of robots baffled, and enjoy the sight of extremely adorable robots falling over -- then hopping right back up again.

The Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine determined that a dual-socket Intel Xeon E5-2699v3 (Haswell architecture) chipset delivers better performance than an NVIDIA K40 GPU using 16-bit arithmetic (which doubles GPU performance) when training deep learning neural networks for computational drug discovery using the Theano framework. Theano is a Python library that lets researchers transparently run deep learning models on CPUs and GPUs. It does so by generating C++ code from the Python script for the destination architecture. The generated C++ code can also call optimized math libraries.

A computer science and engineering professor at Michigan State University is trying to help police unlock the cellphone of a murdered man in hopes it can provide clues about the perpetrator. Police in Michigan are asking the professor, Anil Jain, to unlock the iPhone with a 3D replica of the victim’s fingerprints, report Fusion, the Guardian and the Chicago Tribune. Jain is using a scan of the fingerprints taken from a previous arrest. Jain and his assistant, PhD student Sunpreet Arora, are still working on the replica, which coats the 3D fingers with metallic particles that can be read.

According to the latest figures compiled by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), computer science graduates are still at the top of the UK’s higher education unemployment rankings. During the academic year of 2014/2015, 10 percent of computer science graduates were unable to find a job six months after graduation. This figure is even higher than the 7.7 percent for students, who studied Mass Communications and documentation, Physical sciences, or Engineering and technology, that had difficulty finding work after graduation.

This fall, my computer science class will follow the new AP Computer Science curriculum framework while also including culturally responsive instruction that makes use of students’ interests, community settings, and cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Some of the students enjoy freestyle rap and dance, so they will learn how to simulate or enhance their performances using code. Other students study drawing and painting, so they will learn how to use code to create their artwork. This approach is a gateway to computer science, using coding to foster creative expression, and supporting cultural responsiveness that addresses underrepresented students’ lack of exposure to computer science.

When in high school and preparing for a career in computer science, a few things come to mind that might be helpful. First, you need to make sure that you can get into the major. That is an increasingly nontrivial challenge. If you get into elite schools like the Ivies or Stanford/Duke/MIT, you shouldn’t have a problem choosing your own major. But at many public universities, it is increasingly hard to get into CS because of the sheer demand by incoming undergrads. You need to make sure that your application is strong enough to get into the CS major if the school separates admission by major (as do most of the UCs, including UCSB).

Processing the high-volume datasets, particularly image data, generated by modern scientific instruments is a huge challenge. Last week, a team of researchers from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center reported a novel approach to coping with the data flood – the Virtual Volume File System (VVFS) – which they say significantly reduces storage capacity requirements and facilitates on-the-fly processing to minimize I/O traffic and latency limitations. Although the researchers developed VVFS capabilities with a life sciences use case (electron microscopy datasets of mouse brains) in mind, they noted the challenge spans many domains such as astronomy, physics, materials science, geology, biology, and engineering.

The nonprofit organization Girls Who Code states that in middle schools, 74 percent of girls express an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), but when choosing a college major, only 0.4 percent select computer science. Growing up, I had always shown an interest in the sciences, but had never considered a career in computer science specifically because I had no prior exposure to the field. I thought that it would be too difficult to jump into, and it was disheartening to never see or know of any women or people of color pursuing this field.

Centipedes move quickly. And when one is coming directly at you, you might not care to spend a moment pondering its agility. So perhaps our lack of understanding about just why centipedes move with such dexterity, even over obstacles, has been related to fear. But undeterred, researchers at Kyoto University have asked precisely this question, and have turned to computer simulations and ultimately robotics to find an answer. What they have uncovered is a surprising insight into the mechanics of locomotion itself, namely that taming instability -- a factor that might be a disadvantage -- is a key to the centipede's success.

A new leader of the free world will soon be voted into office. Shortly thereafter, he or she will begin a minimum four-year journey to steer the country toward prosperity, safety and global leadership. With many changes undoubtedly coming, let’s take a look at the technological impact of one of the biggest initiatives that President Obama has championed: healthcare reform. Whatever your stance on the Affordable Care Act, there’s little doubt that it has been responsible for ushering into the U.S. healthcare system a new era of technology. The controversial law ignited an explosion of new digital health offerings, and set the entire healthcare system on a path of advancement that will continue to extend access and increase the quality of healthcare administration for years to come.

The secret to our data storage woes could be an atom or, more precisely, a grid of them. Atoms, the smallest building blocks in nature, have their appeal as a storage medium. We certainly need a new storage paradigm. Something that takes up considerably less space than the current large-scale solution: data centers. Dotted throughout the world, data centers are like highly organized versions of our basements, crammed full of stuff we only occasionally access, but still consuming vast amounts of space and energy. According to the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), these data centers eat 70 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year (as of 2014).

For the past few years, scientists around the world have been studying ways to use miniature robots to better treat a variety of diseases. The robots are designed to enter the human body, where they can deliver drugs at specificlocations or perform precise operations like clearing clogged-up arteries. By replacing invasive, often complicated surgery, they could optimize medicine. Selman Sakar teamed up with Hen-Wei Huang and Bradley Nelson to develop a simple and versatile method for building such bio-inspired robots and equipping them with advanced features. They also created a platform for testing several robot designs and studying different modes of locomotion.

When most people think of a supercomputer center, they may think of one massive computer performing a single task. Inside the data center at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego, however, there are several large supercomputer systems, each performing multiple tasks simultaneously across a wide range of science domains. Keeping SDSC’s main data center cool enough so that its Comet and Gordon supercomputers, among smaller clusters, don’t overheat is a complex yet mission-critical task, according to Todor Milkov, SDSC’s senior project engineer.

As the internet social turf wars continue to mature, the land grab is becoming much better understood. With a few companies controlling 95 percent of the social data, the internet is more closed and much more controlled than ever before. The term (and concept behind) big data has been thrown around a lot over the past 15 months. What I’m referring to here is user data, primarily from social businesses that can be leveraged to build other apps and businesses if done within the confines of a company API.

When playing with Cozmo, Anki’s palm-sized artificial intelligence robot, it’s easy to forgot all of the engineering and software running behind the scenes. Every action, from Cozmo’s audible chirps of victory when it wins a game to its childlike mannerisms when it recognizes your face, conceals tens of thousands of lines of code. When the product launches this October, Anki hopes consumers won’t think of its AI robot as undecipherable technology. Instead, the company wants people to wonder what’s going on under the hood — and, eventually, to alter it themselves.

A new world record was set by the Huazhong University team at the Student Cluster Competition at ISC 2016. Using Nvidia Tesla K80 GPUs, the team recorded 12.56 teraflops on the LINPACK benchmark, while staying within a 3-Kw power consumption limit. This is the third straight time the Tesla K80 has been used to break this record since the GPU was launched a year and a half ago. A team from Zhejiang University, of China, set the previous mark, at the Asia Supercomputer Community 2016 challenge in April. At the same event a year earlier, a team from Singapore Nanyang Technological University was the first to use the Tesla K80 to set the LINPACK record.