University of Texas at Arlington physicists are preparing the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee to support the analysis of data generated from the quadrillions of proton collisions expected during this season’s Large Hadron Collider particle physics experiments. The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN near Geneva in Switzerland. The new collaboration will allow scientists to verify many of their experiments by comparing them with new data generated by the LHC and the Titan supercomputer.

High school junior Moksh Jawa is only 16 years old, but thousands of people around the world are turning to him to learn a valuable skill: coding. Jawa, the author of "Decoding AP Computer Science A: For a High Schooler, By a High Schooler," is also the self-taught brains behind a free online computer course that has 4,000 students enrolled. His 114-lecture online course, rated 4.5 stars by his students, all started because Jawa was willing to persist toward his goal, he said. Though his parents aren't coders, Jawa latched onto his interest in computers growing up near Silicon Valley, picking up skills from a website called Code Academy in seventh grade. By eighth grade he was developing his first app to help toddlers learn grammar.

The Genome Analysis Centre in Norwich has invested in what it believes is game changing capability to boost international genomics research. TGAC’s new supercomputing platform gives the research Institute access to the next-generation of SGI UV technology for genomics. It leverages the world’s largest SGI® UV™ 300 installation for Life Sciences. The extra capability enables TGAC researchers to store, categorize and analyze more genomic data in less time for decoding living systems and answering crucial biological questions. In particular, the system will dramatically reduce the time to perform large genome assembly that TGAC researchers specialize in, as well as the analysis of wheat genotype and phenotype data generated by the ‘Seeds of Discovery’ program.

Students taking an online course at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing were duped into thinking one of their teaching assistants, named Jill Watson, was an actual human. And how can you blame them—the virtual TA managed to answer many of their questions with 97 percent certainty. The students were not told anything about their virtual TA until April 26th. When the news broke, the response was overwhelmingly positive. The course was called Knowledge Based Artificial Intelligence, a core course for their masters of science in computer science program. To develop the system, Goel and his team collected roughly 40,000 questions that had been asked in the class forums since the course was launched back in 2014. They then fed Jill all these questions and answers.

Computer Science education will be added into K-12 classrooms. Virginia is one of the first states to add this kind of education. The bill, delivered by a robot and signed by Governor Terry McAuliffe, adds computer science into math and science Standards of Learning. Now it goes to the Virginia Board of Education, who will make decisions about what will be added with input from teachers, parents, non-profits, like CODE VA, and businesses. “Our students have to learn these computer-adaptive computer science courses, because these are the high-paying jobs that exist in Virginia today,” said McAuliffe.

The Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing (JCAHPC) in Japan today released the details of its next generation supercomputer – Oakforest-PACS – which will deliver 25 PFLOPS, use Intel’s Xeon Phi (Knights Landing) manycore processors and Omni-Path Architecture, be built by Fujitsu, and be operational in December 2016. When fired up, the Oakforest-PACS will be the fastest supercomputer system in Japan for the moment. Twenty-five PFLOPS would have taken the second spot on the TOP500 last November – ahead of Titan (DoE/Oak Ridge NL, 17.5 PFLOPS) but still short of Tianhe-2 (National Supercomputer Center, Guangzhou, 33.8 PFLOPS).

More than seven decades after the end of WWII, radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project is still awaiting cleanup. Progress at sites around the country—the largest is Hanford in southeastern Washington—has been slow, costly and plagued with problems. Cleaning up radioactive waste is incredibly complicated. Now a coalition of scientists is using GPU-accelerated supercomputing to better understand the radioactive materials inside storage tanks and find safe, inexpensive ways to remove and store them. The scientists are using one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to study the chemistry of radioactive elements called actinides.

Coding may be the new educational buzzword, but how can schools teach computer science in a meaningful way when their resources are already stretched to the max? At "Ready, Set, Code: The New Essential Skill" – a breakout session of the U.S. News STEM Solutions Conference in Baltimore on Wednesday – four experts spoke about the challenges they face in making coding and computational thought an integral part of K-12 curriculae, and to instill an interest in STEM that lasts long after the school day is over.

Today, there’s a thriving interaction between TCS and physics (mostly centered around quantum computing, but also around, for example, phase transitions in random constraint satisfaction problems). There’s also a thriving interaction between TCS and economics (e.g., combinatorial auction design, computational game theory), and a third thriving interaction between TCS and biology (DNA sequencing algorithms, phylogenetic tree reconstruction, inferring gene regulatory networks…). Meanwhile, the thriving interaction between TCS and neuroscience is something many outsiders would expect to be there, but isn’t. Off the top of my head, I can think of exactly three theoretical computer scientists who have seriously pursued such a connection.

I played a lot of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty online when it launched. And by that I mean a lot. As a result, I inevitably drifted into watching streams of other players competing in order to improve my own game. I even remember having my favorite casters, Husky and TotalBiscuit, in addition to following Team Liquid. Eventually I stopped playing as much, and even stopped following the e-sports scene. However, this period only marked the very beginning of the professional e-sports industry. Twitch had just launched, and only the top players could make a living of the winnings.

Quantum computers are largely hypothetical devices that could perform some calculations much more rapidly than conventional computers can. They exploit a property called superposition, which describes a quantum particle's counterintuitive ability to, in some sense, inhabit more than one physical state at the same time. But superposition is fragile, and finding ways to preserve it is one of the chief obstacles to developing large, general-purpose quantum computers. In today's Nature, MIT researchers describe a new approach to preserving superposition in a class of quantum devices built from synthetic diamonds. The work could ultimately prove an important step toward reliable quantum computers.

Virtual Reality (VR) has been with us for many decades - at least as an idea - but the technology has now come of age. And it's not just gamers who are benefiting from the immersive possibilities it offers. Four experts, including Mark Bolas - former tutor of Palmer Luckey, who recently hand-delivered the first VR handset made by his company Oculus Rift - talked to the BBC World Service Inquiry programme about the future of VR.

Computers are pretty good at stocking shelves and operating cars, but are not so great at writing poetry. Scientists in a Dartmouth College competition reached that conclusion after designing artificial intelligence algorithms that could produce sonnets. Judges compared the results with poems written by humans to see if they could tell the difference. In every instance, the judges were able to find the sonnet produced by a computer program. The yearlong competition was a variation of the "Turing Test," named for British computer scientist Alan Turing, who in 1950 proposed an experiment to determine if computers could have humanlike intelligence.

Researchers at Washington State University are using ideas from animal training to help non-expert users teach robots how to do desired tasks. The researchers recently presented their work at the international Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems conference. As robots become more pervasive in society, humans will want them to do chores like cleaning house or cooking. But to get a robot started on a task, people who aren't computer programmers will have to give it instructions. "We want everyone to be able to program, but that's probably not going to happen," said Matthew Taylor, Allred Distinguished Professor in the WSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "So we needed to provide a way for everyone to train robots -- without programming."

It’s been almost five years since we heard that “software is eating the world.” The number of SaaS applications has exploded and there is a rising wave of software innovation in the area of APIs that provide critical connective tissue and increasingly important functionality. There has been a proliferation of third-party API companies, which is fundamentally changing the dynamics of how software is created and brought to market. The application programming interface (API) has been a key part of software development for decades as a way to develop for a specific platform, such as Microsoft Windows.

Around 40 million UK adults – 78% of us – go online every day or almost every day. By posting on social media, booking tickets or buying a DVD, we add to the 2.3 billion gigabytes of internet data created daily. The data trail we leave on our online journey says much about our habits and our tastes. This information is, of course, much in demand. The benefits of analyzing personal data are becoming clear and many interested parties are already busy doing it. But should we try to cover our footsteps? Do all those who monitor our online behavior represent a threat to us, or can it benefit our lives?

A panel of privacy experts and technology companies organized by the Obama administration has issued guidelines for using drones without being overly intrusive. The suggestions are voluntary, but some business interests involved in the debate hope the guidelines head off tougher regulations that they fear could smother the drone industry in its infancy. News organizations are exempt from the guidelines on free-press grounds. Supporters say drones could provide huge benefits, from inspecting power lines to delivering medicine to remote areas. Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. want to use them for deliveries. Falling prices have made drones popular among hobbyists, too. However, their small size and ability to go just about anywhere have raised privacy concerns.

Twilio recently had the opportunity to meet with members of Congress and their staff who have taken on the difficult task of balancing security and privacy. We were struck by the sincere desire to understand how actions proposed by those in Washington impact smaller technology businesses. It’s been clear to us for some time that, in order to get the full picture, Congress needs to hear from tech companies at all stages of growth; we were encouraged to see that realization dawning on the Hill, as well.

White dudes are disproportionately represented all across the United States work force, and there is even less diversity among jobs that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission labels "high tech." In a report released by the EEOC following a Wednesday hearing on tech sector diversity, the commission outlined 2014 stats that show people employed in "high tech sector" jobs are whiter and more male than the average private industry job. In the tech sector, which the report defines as "industries that employ a high concentration of employees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics," 68.5% of employees are white, compared with 63.5% across the private sector.

A solar-powered plane landed in Dayton, Ohio on the latest leg of a record-breaking trip to circle the globe without consuming a drop of fuel. Solar Impulse 2, piloted by Swiss businessman Andre Borschberg, arrived at 9:56 pm at Dayton International Airport after a flight from Tulsa, Oklahoma that lasted a 16 hours and 34 minutes, a live video feed showed. "Amazing to have landed in #Dayton after being in the sky for 17 hours!" Borschberg tweeted. The slow-moving, single-seat plane with the wingspan of a Boeing 747 cuts a flimsy figure, but it has traversed much of the globe in stages since taking off March 9, 2015 from Abu Dhabi. The project aims to promote renewable energy.

The RoboBee, pioneered at the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, uses an electrode patch and a foam mount that absorbs shock. The entire mechanism weighs 13.4 mg, bringing the total weight of the robot to about 100mg -- similar to the weight of a real bee. The robot takes off and flies normally. When the electrode patch is supplied with a charge, it can stick to almost any surface, from glass to wood to a leaf. To detach, the power supply is simply switched off. In a recent article in Science, Harvard roboticists demonstrate that their flying microrobots, nicknamed the RoboBees, can now perch during flight to save energy -- like bats, birds or butterflies.

Scientists at U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory are turning to the world of computation to guide their search for the next new material. Their program uses software code developed to map and predict the distinct structural, electronic, magnetic stable and metastable features that are often the source of an advanced material's unique capabilities.

Crowdsourcing has brought us Wikipedia and ways to understand how HIV proteins fold. It also provides an increasingly effective means for teams to write software, perform research or accomplish small repetitive digital tasks. However, most tasks have proven resistant to distributed labor, at least without a central organizer. As in the case of Wikipedia, their success often relies on the efforts of a small cadre of dedicated volunteers. If these individuals move on, the project becomes difficult to sustain. Scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) are finding new solutions to these challenges.

With an advance that one cryptography expert called a "masterpiece," University of Texas at Austin computer scientists have developed a new method for producing truly random numbers, a breakthrough that could be used to encrypt data, make electronic voting more secure, conduct statistically significant polls and more accurately simulate complex systems such as Earth's climate. The new method creates truly random numbers with less computational effort than other methods, which could facilitate significantly higher levels of security for everything from consumer credit card transactions to military communications.

A new paradigm of economic cooperation is underway — a digital democratization of business. Over the past couple of weeks a project with no mainstream press has become the second biggest crowdfunding project in history. It’s not crowdfunding a product, an artwork or a new cryptocurrency. It’s crowdfunding — or more accurately, crowd-founding — a corporation called “The DAO.” This is a corporation whose bylaws are written entirely in code.