Fed up with their hefty electricity bill, managers at Cochin International Airport in southern India took matters into their own hands. Three years ago, they began adding solar panels -- first on the roof of the arrivals terminal, then on and around an aircraft hangar. The success of those initial efforts led to a much bigger endeavor. Last year, the airport commissioned the German company Bosch to build a vast 45-acre solar plant on unused land near the international cargo terminal. The plant came online in August, making Cochin the world's first fully solar-powered airport.

The floors of the New York and London Stock Exchanges now exist mostly for show. The real trading is done automatically by robots. About three-quarters of trades on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq are done by algorithms - computer programs following complex sets of rules. And this "robo-trading" is having a profound effect on the investment world, from global hedge funds right down to personal savers. But what are the advantages and disadvantages of allowing computers to manage the world's trillions of dollars?

A new analytical model for e-sports developed by researchers in Sweden, Denmark and Germany, not only helps game developers better understand how players perform, but can also predict the outcome of the game. E-sports is the term used for the increasingly popular phenomenon of competitive computer and video gaming, where individuals or teams play against each other in various online environments. The game has millions of active players around the world that play tournaments and compete for prestigious prizes. In addition, games broadcasted live over the Internet and on TV attract millions of viewers.

Researchers at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) reported simulating global seismic wave propagation with a best-ever accuracy of 1.2 sec seismic period for a three-dimensional Earth model on Japan’s K supercomputer. Optimizing the code allowed them achieve sustained performance of 1.24 petaflops on the K computer, which is 11.84% of its peak performance. Their work is reported in the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (A 1.8 trillion degrees-of-freedom, 1.24 petaflops global seismic wave simulation on the K computer). The study will help understand earthquake occurrence mechanisms and the Earth’s internal structures more precisely and is expected to make significant contributions to disaster prevention and mitigation.

Breakthroughs, by their nature, are rarely generated on demand. That said, the energy problem in computing today is so acute that the National Science Foundation and Semiconductor Research Corporation are joining forces to stimulate research into developing ‘breakthroughs’ in energy-efficient computing. The new NSF-NRC grants program, Energy-Efficient Computing: from Devices to Architectures, has a budget of up to $4 million per year and is currently seeking proposals due in late March. “Truly disruptive breakthroughs are now required, and not just from any one segment of the technology stack. Rather, due to the complexity of the challenges, revolutionary new approaches are needed at each level in the hierarchy.

First gravitational waves opened a new window on the universe. Now data from the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, in Switzerland could change the standard model of physics. Physicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences analyzed LHC information from 2011 and 2012 and noticed an anomaly that wasn't predicted by the standard model, the institute said in a press release.

One of the main predictions of the current model of the creation of structures in the universe, known at the Lambda Cold Dark Mattermodel, is that galaxies are embedded in very extended and massive halos of dark matter that are surrounded by many thousands of smaller sub-halos also made from dark matter. Around large galaxies, such as the Milky Way, these dark matter sub-halos are large enough to host enough gas and dust to form small galaxies on their own, and some of these galactic companions, known as satellite galaxies, can be observed.

Researchers in the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel have developed a new method that allows them to record the vast range of antibodies in an individual, genetically in one fell swoop. For example, they can track very precisely how the immune system produces antibodies following a vaccination or an infection. The new genetic method, established by scientists led by Sai Reddy, Professor of Biomolecular Engineering, delivers far more information than the previous decades-old antibody detection techniques.

Asked what inspired him to write the cult 1979 hit single Video Killed the Radio Star, songwriter Trevor Horn said it came from the idea that "video technology was on the verge of changing everything". More than 35 years later, it's digital video - particularly on mobile - that is changing everything again. Video will account for 80% of all internet traffic by 2019, up from 64% in 2014, says technology giant Cisco. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says that 90% of the social network's content will be video-based by 2018.

The Federal Communications Commission wants to make it harder for Internet service providers to share your personal information without your permission. On Thursday, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler laid out a new proposal to regulate companies such as Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T. The rules would require ISPs to get customer consent in order to give their data to affiliates and other third-party companies. Giving customers "choice, transparency, and security" are the "core principles" of the proposal, senior FCC officials told reporters on a conference call. "Consumers must be empowered to protect their own privacy," they said. "Consumers should have effective control over how their information is shared . . . because it is your data."

Scientists have created the world's thinnest lens, one two-thousandth the thickness of a human hair, opening the door to flexible computer displays and a revolution in miniature cameras. Lead researcher Dr Yuerui Lu from The Australian National University said the discovery hinged on the remarkable potential of the molybdenum disulphide crystal. "This type of material is the perfect candidate for future flexible displays," said Dr Lu, leader of Nano-Electro-Mechanical System Laboratory in the ANU Research School of Engineering. "We will also be able to use arrays of micro lenses to mimic the compound eyes of insects."

Studying both long term climate changes and shorter term weather forecasting is very demanding computationally, typically requiring high end HPC systems. Typically these days these would be large distributed memory clusters, made up of thousands of nodes and hundreds of thousands of cores, running MPI with Fortran and C. You will find these systems scattered around the globe in large operational weather centers – a few located in the US, three or four in Europe and a half dozen in Japan and Asia. Most countries use the data generated by these centers to prepare their regional forecasts.

These are exciting times for HPC. High-performance computing and its cousin high-productivity computing are expanding such that the previous definitions of HPC as a moving performance target or as the purview of modeling and simulation are breaking down. The democratization of HPC has spurred a lot of focus on the impact that HPC-hatched technologies are having on business computing, but HPC “proper” is also in the midst of a transformation.

In a breakthrough for energy-efficient computing, engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown for the first time that magnetic chips can operate with the lowest fundamental level of energy dissipation possible under the laws of thermodynamics. The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, mean that dramatic reductions in power consumption are possible—as much as one-millionth the amount of energy per operation used by transistors in modern computers. This is critical for mobile devices, which demand powerful processors that can run for a day or more on small, lightweight batteries.

There is a long-running joke in high performance computing that for any question that can be asked, the answer is probably going to be “it depends.” This maxim persists because there is an incredible amount of diversity of hardware, software, middleware, applications, and other factors that make coming up with a universally true statement about any tuning or optimization impossible. This same sentiment might also be applied in warehouse scale datacenters, although the number of parameters and complexity for most homogenous workloads might not come close to HPC datacenters running multiple or complex applications.

I've never been the type of guy to ride a motorcycle. I'm more of the play-it-safe type. Plus, I don't own a black leather jacket. Now, I'm shedding my good-boy image for an electric bike called Bolt. It looks, feels and acts like a motorcycle with one big difference: It's not. The Bolt has pedals and can limit its speed to 20 miles per hour, so most states consider it an "electric bicycle." That means you don't need a license, registration or insurance, plus you don't need to fill it up with any gas. Since it's an e-bike, you can ride it in the bike lane, and you don't need to look -- or pay -- for a parking spot.

An ocean-going drone will be helping to spot illegal fishing in the world's largest, continuous marine reserve. The UK said it would establish the 834,000-sq-km (322,000-sq-mile) zone around the Pitcairn Islands in the Pacific. Data gathered by the drone will be beamed back to a satellite watch room to help prosecute unauthorized trawling. The drone will patrol areas in the reserve designated as no-fishing zones. The drone, made by US firm Liquid Robotics, will be directed by staff at the satellite watch room which is monitoring fishing vessels. The craft is equipped with a camera that can take snaps of fishing vessels that are in restricted areas, and satellite technology that can pinpoint their location.

An amputee was able to feel smoothness and roughness in real-time with an artificial fingertip that was surgically connected to nerves in his upper arm. Moreover, the nerves of non-amputees can also be stimulated to feel roughness, without the need of surgery, meaning that prosthetic touch for amputees can now be developed and safely tested on intact individuals.

Remember that Samsung Turkey video of a whole town learning sign language to surprise a young deaf man from Istanbul? It’s okay to admit that you got a little bit teary-eyed while watching that video. We’ve often been impressed with stories of people learning sign language to communicate with a person in their community. But a new technology developed by researchers at Texas A&M are now giving the deaf a voice. The device uses a system of sensors that recognizes the motion of hand gestures and EMG signals coming from the muscles in the wrist to translate sign language into words.

A Kansas State University engineering team is developing a technology collection that can make a big difference in the lives of children with developmental disabilities. The team's projects so far have addressed around-the-clock technology: bed-based sensors to track child breathing and heart rates; wearable sensors to track child behaviors; and designs that can improve the quality of life for paraeducators who work with these children. Now the team has received a three-year $400,000 National Science Foundation grant to expand these ideas and better establish a link between nighttime wellness and daytime learning and behavior.

The United States faces a global competitiveness crisis that, if not addressed, will put our nation at a strategic disadvantage for decades to come. In just a few years, there will be 1.8 million jobs unfilled in our nation because we don’t have enough individuals trained with the necessary technical skills to fill them. President Obama’s budget proposal, which includes $4 billion for computer science education, is a welcome step, but, candidly, we need a national strategy to solve the fundamental challenge. Today, only one in 10 schools across the U.S. offers programming classes. This must change.

Researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany have prepared a list of ethical concerns that might arise with the use of virtual reality (VR) by researchers and the general public. Along with this list, Dr. Michael Madary and Professor Thomas Metzinger have produced concrete recommendations for minimizing the risks. According to Madary and Metzinger in their article in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, additional focused research is urgently needed. They are especially concerned about the possibility of unanticipated consequences for the psychological states and self-images of users who are able to inhabit a virtual environment almost as if it is the real world.

The clash between Apple and the FBI over whether the company should provide access to encrypted data on a locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers highlights debates about privacy and data security which have raged for decades. Cryptography was once controlled by the state and deployed only for military and diplomatic ends. But in the 1970s, cryptographer Whitfield Diffie devised a system which took encryption keys away from the state and marked the start of the so-called "Crypto Wars".

Using nanotechnology, proteins and a chemical that powers cells in everything from trees to people, researchers have built a biological supercomputer. The supercomputer, which is the size of a book, uses much less energy, so it runs cooler and more efficiently, according to scientists at McGill University, where the lead researchers on the project work. "We've managed to create a very complex network in a very small area," said Dan Nicolau Sr., chairman of the Department of Bioengineering at McGill. "This started as a back-of-an-envelope idea, after too much rum I think, with drawings of what looked like small worms exploring mazes."

Imagine a health care robot that could display the patient's temperature and pulse, and even reacts to a patient's mood. It sounds futuristic, but a team of Cornell graduate students -- led by Rob Shepherd, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering -- has developed an electroluminescent "skin" that stretches to more than six times its original size while still emitting light. The discovery could lead to significant advances in health care, transportation, electronic communication and other areas.