How the flu virus enters a cell in the body. Evaluating economic policy impacts of potential future climate change. Understanding the dynamics and physics of atomic matter during galaxy cluster formation. These are just a few of the research projects being pursued by the 11 science and engineering teams from across the country who were awarded time on the Blue Waters supercomputer through the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation. Over a twelve-month period, these science and engineering teams will have a combined total of more than 4.3 million node hours on Blue Waters.

For the past five years, Weinberg – whose own research has been buoyed by the Ohio Supercomputer Center for the past 15 years – has been on NASA’s Science Definition Team for the preliminary study of WFIRST along with Ohio State colleagues Scott Gaudi and Chris Hirata. After that preliminary study, NASA announced in February it would move forward with the WFIRST mission. “It’s definitely been exciting to be a part of,” Weinberg said. “To finally have an official start is great for all the people who have been working on this mission.” The new space telescope is moving into construction just as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which has a much larger mirror but observes only a tiny patch of sky at a given time, approaches its launch in 2018.

Denver-based Boom Technology is leveraging Rescale’s cloud-based simulation and optimization system to enable a rebirth of supersonic passenger travel. According to Krall, Boom’s aircraft is faster than Concorde yet dramatically more efficient and affordable. Concorde was designed 50 years ago, in an era when aerodynamic optimization required painstaking wind tunnel testing, with each iteration costing millions and taking months. Today, modern computational fluid dynamics simulations enable months of wind tunnel testing to be accomplished in minutes of simulation. Rescale’s cloud-based platform enables Boom to access world-class CFD resources without the expenditures required for an on-premises computing cluster or the custom software development required by other cloud platforms.

The head of Intel’s data center group was at Computex in Taipei, in part to explain how the company's latest Xeon Phi processor is a good fit for machine learning. Machine learning is the process by which companies like Google and Facebook train software to get better at performing AI tasks including computer vision and understanding natural language. It’s key to improving all kinds of online services. It requires a massive amount of computing power, and Bryant says the 72 cores and strong floating point performance of Intel’s new ‘Knight’s Landing’ Xeon Phi, released six months ago, give it an excellent performance-per-watt-per-dollar ratio for training machine learning algorithms.

To make robots more cooperative and have them perform tasks in close proximity to humans, they must be softer and safer. A new actuator developed by a team led by George Whitesides, Ph.D. - who is a Core Faculty member at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) - generates movements similar to those of skeletal muscles using vacuum power to automate soft, rubber beams. Like real muscles, the actuators are soft, shock absorbing, and pose no danger to their environment or humans working collaboratively alongside them or the potential future robots equipped with them.

New report offers policy recommendations to sustain momentum for computer science education. U.S. schools should make every effort to expand computer science education to keep up with workforce demands, according to a new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). And though interest in computer science education, and access to it, is growing, the report found that not enough students are taking high-quality computer science classes at the high school and university levels. The report found that just half of U.S. states actually count computer science as a math or science credit rather than an elective, and 29 states lack computer science teacher certification programs.

“We just need a technical co-founder!” “We have the idea, we’re just trying to find a CS major to build it!” In 2016, everyone and their mother has an idea for an app. This is especially true on college campuses, where starting an app has seemingly replaced beer pong as the most popular extracurricular activity. The only problem is that there are far fewer developers than ideas, and no CS major is going to turn your napkin sketches into a full-fledged app for a 3 percent stake in the business. That being said, the trend of students starting companies (app-based or not) is great. It provides a type of entrepreneurial education that is unobtainable in the classroom, and can even spur the economy if it turns into a full-fledged business.

Yale physicists have given Schrödinger's famous cat a second box to play in, and the result may help further the quest for reliable quantum computing. Schrödinger's cat is a well-known paradox that applies the concept of superposition in quantum physics to objects encountered in everyday life. The idea is that a cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive source and a poison that will be triggered if an atom of the radioactive substance decays. Quantum physics suggests that the cat is both alive and dead (a superposition of states), until someone opens the box and, in doing so, changes the quantum state.

Reducing errors made during surgery, bringing school books to life, enabling us to browse shops from the comfort of home—virtual reality is not just about gaming, it will change our lives, according to some tech leaders. "VR" is the buzz industry at Asia's largest tech fair, Computex, being held in Taiwan's capital Taipei this week. The island is hoping to become a development hub for virtual reality technology. But while VR is currently aimed at gamers, its evangelists forecast it will eventually be about much more than entertainment.

The State Board of Education’s approval of Florida’s inaugural K-12 computer science standards was not a “meaningless gesture,” as claimed by FSU’s professor Paul Cottle in a My View last week. As a longtime computer science advocate and vice chair of the board, I’m happy to acknowledge this seminal action — by itself — will not move the needle very much. But Florida is behind and must get going, and having standards is better than not having standards, I think.

Everyone seems to be jumping on the bot bandwagon. Chatbots are not only being touted as the end of apps, but also the next paradigm in human-computer interaction — and, if you believe the hype, the end of many customer service jobs, too. But bots are unlikely to live up to these outsized expectations anytime soon. The fact is that the AI technology used to power chatbots simply isn’t mature enough to come close to replacing humans for anything but the most trivial tasks — the same ones that are already well-suited to apps. With expectations set so high, be prepared to see a lot of frustration and disappointment as reality sets in.

Viruses like dengue fever, Ebola and Zika have become global health epidemics, and one of the biggest challenges in fighting off these viral infections is how rapidly they mutate and become drug resistant. IBM Research and Singapore’s Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) have identified a new breakthrough macromolecule that acts as a ‘magic bullet’ capable of preventing deadly viral infections, regardless of their ability to mutate.

Calling a game "hard" would seem to be a matter of personal judgement. Not so, according to an international team of computer scientists. For the past several years, the scientists have been analyzing Super Mario Bros. as if it were a math problem and beating a particular level is the solution. Now, they've extended their analysis to cover any possible arbitrary level, and they've shown that Super Mario Bros. belongs to a class of problems called PSPACE-complete.

The consumer marketplace is flooded with a lively assortment of smart wearable electronics that do everything from monitor vital signs, fitness or sun exposure to play music, charge other electronics or even purify the air around you -- all wirelessly. Now, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers has created the world's fastest stretchable, wearable integrated circuits, an advance that could drive the Internet of Things and a much more connected, high-speed wireless world.

Living cells are capable of performing complex computations on the environmental signals they encounter. These computations can be continuous, or analogue, in nature -- the way eyes adjust to gradual changes in the light levels. They can also be digital, involving simple on or off processes, such as a cell's initiation of its own death. Synthetic biological systems, in contrast, have tended to focus on either analogue or digital processing, limiting the range of applications for which they can be used. But now a team of researchers at MIT has developed a technique to integrate both analogue and digital computation in living cells, allowing them to form gene circuits capable of carrying out complex processing operations.

Imagine your city as it might be in the not-so-distant future. Transportation in this city is various, pleasant, and low-impact. There are safe and efficient bike lanes, and anyone can order a cheap ride from an autonomous, minimal-emissions vehicle. Because fewer people drive, and almost no one idles in traffic, air quality is high. There are plenty of parks and open spaces because cars are less prevalent. Life in your city is happy, healthy, and sustainable. Your city is, above all, a smart city.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions may sound like a tech-wonky excursion into topics where only the bored dare venture, but trust me, it’s not. This book will surprise you, and don’t be shocked if you find yourself going back to it for advice on situations you’re facing in your life. That’s right–it’s a solid, research-based book that’s applicable to real life. The algorithms the authors discuss are, in fact, more applicable to real-life problems than I’d have ever predicted.

By now everyone has heard of Google’s RankBrain, the new artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm that is supposed to be the latest and greatest from Mountain View, Calif. What many of you might not realize, however, is just how fast the SEO industry is changing because of it. In this article, I’ll take you through some clear examples of how some of the old rules of SEO no longer apply, and what steps you can take to stay ahead of the curve in order to continue to provide successful SEO campaigns for your businesses.

On Tuesday, Cray unveiled a new supercomputing platform designed with highly iterative and interactive analytics in mind. Dubbed Urika-GX, the new system is the first agile analytics platform to fuse supercomputing with an open, enterprise framework, Cray said. Due to be available in the third quarter, Urika-GX promises data scientists new levels of performance and the ability to find insight in massive data sets quickly. The system is tuned for highly iterative and interactive analytics, and integrated graph analytics offers rapid pattern matching. Urika-GX enables concurrent workloads using Hadoop, Spark and graph technologies.

In the popular media, we talk a lot about robots stealing jobs. But when we stop speculating and actually look at the real world of work, the impact of advanced robotics is far more nuanced and complicated. Issues of jobs and income inequality fade away, for example — there aren’t remotely enough robots to affect more than a handful of us in the practical sense. Yet robots usually spell massive changes in the way that skilled work gets done: The work required to fly an F-16 in a combat zone is radically different from the work required to fly a Reaper, a semi-autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle, in that same zone.

At the 12th HPC Connections Workshop in Wuhan, China, Beihang University Professor Depei Qian disclosed new information regarding HPC development in China and exascale plans. Professor Qian confirmed that work is continuing on the two latest 100-petaflops systems, which are considered the next iteration of the Tianhe-2, which currently holds the tops spot in terms of number crunching in the world. He also walked through the Chinese government’s ambitions exascale plan, which they plan to achieve before the year 2020 within a 35MW power limit.

The consumer marketplace is flooded with a lively assortment of smart wearable electronics that do everything from monitor vital signs, fitness or sun exposure to play music, charge other electronics or even purify the air around you—all wirelessly. Now, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers has created the world's fastest stretchable, wearable integrated circuits, an advance that could drive the Internet of Things and a much more connected, high-speed wireless world.

Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg are two tech giants who are looking to become advocates for K-12 computer science education. The Apple and Facebook CEO’s have taken it upon themselves to appeal to congress in hopes to get the government to fund K-12 computer science education. Some of the biggest names in tech and corporate America, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, have teamed up with governors and educators to ask Congress to provide $250 million in federal funding to school districts in order to give every single K-12 student in the nation an opportunity to learn how to code.

The supercomputer IBM Watson has now turned its talents to addressing the cybersecurity skills gap by teaming up with multiple universities to develop a cognitive system to help cybersecurity analysts search through data for patterns that indicate cyberattacks faster. IBM has launched the Watson for Cyber Security research project, which will see Watson fed huge amounts of data relating to cybersecurity research over the last 20 years, including over 100,000 documented vulnerabilities and 8 million spam and phishing attacks, for a year-long research project.

Weather forecasts should continue to become more accurate due to improvements in the main National Weather Service weather computer model. NOAA's main weather forecast model, called the Global Forecast System (GFS), had upgrades implemented May 11, 2016. Glenn White, Ph.D., research scientist at NOAA's Environmental Modeling Center, says there were three big improvements in how the GFS is run. White says these improvements show small increases in accuracy for several weather parameters. The improvements are mostly centered around inputting better and more data into the starting conditions of the model.