Mission-based organizations, including those helping the recent wave of Syrian refugees, are using big data to improve their response efforts. Hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed into Europe in 2015 from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries. Some estimates put the number at nearly a million. The sheer volume of people overwhelmed European officials, who not only had to handle the volatile politics stemming from the crisis, but also had to find food, shelter and other necessities for the migrants. Sweden, like many of its European Union counterparts, was taking in refugees. The Swedish Migration Board, which usually sees 2,500 asylum seekers in an average month, was accepting 10,000 per week.

An Indian company has launched what is being billed as the world's cheapest smartphone. Ringing Bells said their Freedom 251 phone would cost just 251 rupees ($3.67), and there was huge demand in the first hours of sale. But skeptics have raised questions about the device and the company's price strategy. India is the world's second-largest mobile market and has one billion mobile phone subscribers. Freedom 251 is expected to target a market already dominated by low-cost handsets.

Recent research has explored this important question: In an era when women are increasingly prominent in medicine, law, and business, why are there so few female scientists and engineers? Compelling evidence suggests there are key environmental and social barriers, including stereotypes, gender bias, and the climate of science and engineering departments in colleges and universities — that continue to block women’s progress in STEM.

About 39,000 years ago a volcanic super‐eruption tossed a volume of ash and debris equivalent to eight Mt Everest’s into the air near Naples Italy. The resulting ash plumes and rain between southern Italy and Siberia were so intense that their effects slowed the advance of modern humans in Europe. It’s thought to have been the largest eruption in Europe in the past 200,00 years. Researchers from Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Istituto Nazionale de Geofísica e Vulcanología in Italy reported reconstructing the event – the Campanian Ignimbrite super‐eruption – with greater accuracy than ever before by running simulations on the MareNostrum supercomputer at BSC.

Researchers have shown how a bizarrely shaped black hole could cause Einstein's general theory of relativity, a foundation of modern physics, to break down. However, such an object could only exist in a universe with five or more dimensions. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London, have successfully simulated a black hole shaped like a very thin ring, which gives rise to a series of 'bulges' connected by strings that become thinner over time. These strings eventually become so thin that they pinch off into a series of miniature black holes, similar to how a thin stream of water from a tap breaks up into droplets.

When Cambrea Earley walked into her computer science C++ class on the first day of school this year, she wasn't surprised to find herself the only girl in a sea of boys. The same thing happened last year in her Visual Basic class. The year before, her freshman year, things were a little more promising: two of her female peers joined her for JAVA programming at Peters Township High School in Western Pennsylvania, which has a student population of about 1,500. Despite an even gender split in the student body overall, out of the 98 students enrolled in the high school's computer science courses, only 14 are female. This imbalance mirrors the situation nationwide. Last year, only 20 percent of U.S. high school students who took the AP Computer Science test were female.

This week across the nation, we celebrate National Engineers Week. Although we typically work behind the scenes, I would like to leverage this time to bring to light the amazing contributions engineers bring to society, as well as focus on the importance of continuing to fill the funnel of young people entering into this great vocation. There are many aspects of our everyday life which are made better by the influence engineers have on society. As a civil engineer, I take pride in being a key adviser in assisting communities in assessing, planning and implementing the right solutions which take into account the safety and health of its citizens. Civil engineering is only one of many different engineering fields making contributions to our lives.

With over 2 million visitors annually, Yellowstone remains one of the most popular nature destinations in the U.S. Spanning an area of almost 3,500 square miles, the park sits atop the Yellowstone Caldera. This caldera is the largest supervolcano in North America and is responsible for the park’s geothermal activity. Until last week, most geologists had explained this activity with the so-called mantle plume hypothesis. This elegant theory proposed an idealized situation where hot columns of mantle rock rose from the core-mantle boundary all the way to the surface, fueling the supervolcano and the geothermal geysers.

This is an election where extreme positions have become the norm, and the implications for science and technology may be huge. In some cases, the Republican and Democratic candidates have stated positions with clarity. But many of ideas are still vague, roughly sketched out and incomplete. These emerging proposals, the ones with the most impact on technology, deserve attention. The surviving candidates are certain to refine them in the months ahead. But here's a look at some tech implications of the 2016 contest.

Remember the memory crystals in the "Superman" movies? Well, something similar is already a reality here on Earth. Researchers in the U.K. have developed a way of storing digital data inside tiny structures contained in glass. The storage technology is so stable and safe that it can survive for billions of years, scientists at the University of Southampton said this week. That's a lot longer than your average computer hard drive. Sadly, the human inventions don't look like the glittering crystals that Superman uses to generate holograms of people from his home planet. Instead, they take the form of small glass discs that have already been used to store historic documents, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Bible.

According to a new market research report, "High Performance Computing Market by Components Type (Servers, Storage, Networking Devices, & Software), Services, Deployment Type, Server Price Band, Vertical, & Region - Global Forecast to 2020," the high performance computing market is estimated to grow from USD 28.08 billion in 2015 and projected to be of USD 36.62 billion by 2020, at a high compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.45% during the forecast period.

IT employment increased in every occupation and industry last year except oil and gas. Industry employment fell 4% to about 13,200 workers thanks to falling oil prices. That was the exception among all industries, including retail, health, finance and manufacturing. All of those saw IT employment gains. IT employment overall increased 3.1%, or by 152,000 jobs in 2015, according to a new analysis of government data by industry group CompTIA.

Water and electronics usually don't mix. But Microsoft thinks dumping computers in the ocean might be the wave of future. Microsoft just finished a three-month experiment operating an underwater data center. A server rack with the power of about 300 PCs was placed into a water-tight steel cylinder and lowered into the ocean off the coast of central California.The wacky experiment was launched because current data centers are woefully inefficient. They're built where energy and land are cheap (not close to where people actually live). And they waste so much energy cooling their massive computers. The ocean can solve those problems.

On a sultry evening last July, a tall, soft-spoken 17-year-old named David Stoner and nearly 600 other math whizzes from all over the world sat huddled in small groups around wicker bistro tables, talking in low voices and obsessively refreshing the browsers on their laptops. Stoner and five teammates were representing the United States in the 56th International Mathematical Olympiad. They figured they’d done pretty well over the two days of competition. God knows, they’d trained hard.

A drill down into the FY2017 budget released by the Obama administration on Tuesday brings to light important information about the United States’ exascale program. As we reported in earlier coverage of the budget announcement, this is the first time that real numbers have been proposed for the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) since it was announced by executive order on July 29, 2015.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have created the first robotically driven experimentation system to determine the effects of a large number of drugs on many proteins, reducing the number of necessary experiments by 70%. The model, presented in the journal eLife, uses an approach that could lead to accurate predictions of the interactions between novel drugs and their targets, helping reduce the cost of drug discovery.

In a building full of advanced photonics research, the laboratory of Jungsang Kim just might have the most complicated optical setups. After all, not many engineering challenges involve controlling the frequency of a laser to within a millionth of a percent.But building the world’s first quantum computer does. This is the next big goal for Kim, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University. And he’s not too far from achieving it.

I’m 17, and I’m the only girl in my computer science class. I’m pretty much the same as my classmates, only shorter. I expected a large majority of my classmates to be male, but being the only girl is slightly mind-blowing. I also study engineering, and am hugely outnumbered in that too. People think it’s unusual for me to study a subject that is associated with boys and leads to what is generally considered a man’s job. Stem subjects are still male dominated: nearly four out of five of those who took A-level physics in 2012 were male. And only about half of female Stem graduates go on to work in Stem roles. This may be due to lack of encouragement from parents, teachers or classmates, or down to the individual – they simply believe they are better suited to a different role.

Feeding the world’s population is a big challenge, and it’s about to get bigger. Right now, a little more than 7.3 billion people share the planet. Most nights, many go to bed hungry. By 2050, some scientists estimate, the world’s population may reach 9 billion. Earth’s changing climate will probably make feeding this far greater number a very daunting task. That was the conclusion of several scientists at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

By now you’ve likely heard that scientists reported detecting the long-sought gravitational waves; this is roughly a 100 years since their prediction by Einstein’s theory of general relativity and more than 20 years since first funding for the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) project to find them. You can safely assume the National Science Foundation, a prime funder of the LIGO, is feeling well rewarded (and relieved) for the $620 Million invested. It was a big risk/big reward project.

Computer code written by women has a higher approval rating than that written by men - but only if their gender is not identifiable, new research suggests. U.S. researchers analysed nearly 1.4 million users of the open source program-sharing service Github. They found that pull requests - or suggested code changes - made on the service by women were more likely to be accepted than those by men. The researchers, from the computer science departments at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and North Carolina State University, looked at around four million people who logged on to Github on a single day - April 1, 2015.

Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi expects that within 30 years, machines will be capable of doing almost any job that a human can. In anticipation, he is asking his colleagues to consider the societal implications. Can the global economy adapt to greater than 50 percent unemployment? Will those out of work be content to live a life of leisure? "We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task," Vardi said. "I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?"

In the basement of the Duane Physics and Astrophysics building at the University of Colorado Boulder, a science demonstration is going on, but it looks more like a vaudeville act. One by one, students balance precariously on a rotating platform. Then they are handed what looks like a spinning bicycle wheel, holding it by two handles that stick out from either side of what would be the hub of the wheel. When you flip the wheel over, like a pizza, your body starts rotating in the opposite direction. The principle at work is called angular momentum, explains Katie Dudley: "You can move or stop yourself by changing what you do to the wheel." Dudley is a blonde 20-year-old junior with glasses, an aerospace engineering major.

An innovative energy harvesting and storage technology developed by University of Wisconsin-Madison mechanical engineers could reduce our reliance on the batteries in our mobile devices, ensuring we have power for our devices no matter where we are. Tom Krupenkin, a professor of mechanical engineering at UW-Madison, and J. Ashley Taylor, a senior scientist in UW-Madison's Mechanical Engineering Department, described an energy-harvesting technology that's particularly well suited for capturing the energy of human motion to power mobile electronic devices. The technology could enable a footwear-embedded energy harvester that captures energy produced by humans during walking and stores it for later use.

While many of us promise our children that they can be whatever they want when they grow up, the numbers seem to tell a different story. The truth is that women hold around one in four of all STEM jobs despite making up half of the population. As a society, we too often claim — to our children, to our constituents, and to our employees — to want diversity, even as our biases and behaviors continue to create disparities. We have to change the culture if we want to change the numbers.