The Every Student Succeeds Act, signed into law by U.S. President Barack Obama recognizes computer science (CS) as important an academic subject as math and English, potentially introducing it into more classrooms across the country. The new law includes CS in the definition of well-rounded education subjects, putting it on the same level as other subjects when state and local policy makers decide how to distribute federal funds. "This week marks a watershed moment for computer science in U.S. schools," says Code.org founder Hadi Partovi. "In just two years, this field has been adopted by all the largest cities, almost 100 school districts. It's great to see the federal government finally recognize this field as a foundational academic subject."

Eindhoven University of Technology researchers have developed a tiny sensor powered by the radio waves it uses to communicate information, a development the researchers say could help advance the Internet of Things industry. The sensor is designed to measure temperature, but Eindhoven professor Peter Baltus says similar sensors could be developed to measure light, movement, and humidity. The sensor is two square millimeters in size and weighs 1.6 milligrams. The device has an antenna that captures energy from a wireless router, and stores the energy up to a certain threshold, at which point it can measure the temperature and send a signal to the router. Although the current model has a range of just 2.5 centimeters, it can be extended up to one meter, and possibly even five meters.

Belgium's University of Leuven has become a stage where privacy and surveillance advocates are fighting over digital encryption, which is researched at the school's prestigious Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography group (COSIC). The center is led by professor and privacy proponent Bart Preneel, who has drawn criticism from those who think his work at Leuven complicates law enforcement and government efforts to foil or trace criminals and terrorists. "Academics have to be aware of the need to act responsibly when their discoveries can lead to harm," argues former GCHQ director David Omand. Preneel counters he is not working against government agencies, but he emphasizes "citizens need to be able to do some things in secret legitimately."

A new high performance computing and cloud facility has been unveiled by scientists in London, named after Dr Rosalind Franklin, the unsung heroine of elucidating the double-helix structure of DNA. The new cloud HPC facility will allow the large-scale analysis of research data on an unprecedented scale – from sources as diverse as DNA samples to fitbits and health apps. The infrastructure will also allow researchers to analyze data more quickly, efficiently than was previously possible.

The black box sitting at the heart of NASA's Advanced Supercomputing facility in Silicon Valley isn't much to look at. The size of a garden shed, it's smaller than a conventional supercomputer, but inside something quite impressive is happening. The box is a D-Wave 2X quantum computer, one of the most advanced examples yet of a new type of computer based on quantum mechanics, which can theoretically be used to solve complex problems in seconds rather than years.

A team of scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Russian Academy of Sciences has proposed a two-dimensional metamaterial composed of silver elements that refracts light in an unusual way. The research has been published on November 18 in Optical Material Express. In the future, these structures may be used to develop compact optical devices, as well as to create an "invisibility cloak." The results of computer simulations carried out by the authors showed that it would be a high performance material for light with a wavelength from 400-500 nm (violet, blue and light blue).

Most who work in the high performance computing (HPC) industry agree; people problems are far more complicated than technical challenges. Diversity, or the lack thereof, is the HPC industry’s current grand challenge, and how best to encourage the participation of women in HPC was the theme for several SC15 sessions. While it’s well known that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are less diverse than humanities, business, social science, and other research arenas, computational science & engineering (CS&E) are the least diverse of all. As the long tail of data-intensive research engages more domains, the group portrait has begun to diversify.

70% of of Iran’s science and engineering students are women, and in a small, but promising community of startups, they’re being encouraged to play an even bigger role. The common myth about women in Iran is that they are seen, but not heard, that they’re not permitted to drive, that they are second-class citizens, and that entrepreneurship and positions of power are out of reach. These notions are wrong. For years, women in Iran have owned and managed businesses, many of them in male dominant industries like oil and gas, construction, mining, and now tech. And now, with such a high number graduating with degrees in science and engineering, there’s a push to get women more involved in Iran’s blossoming startup scene.

As high performance computing continues to work its way into the enterprise tech mainstream, a variety of myths and misconceptions conspire to slow the technology’s growth. Companies looking to take advantage of HPC to grow their business need to tell the difference between the real challenges facing high performance computing adoption and misinterpretations with little basis in reality. So is there any truth to some of the more popular HPC myths? With the industry analyst group IDC predicting the HPC market to grow to near $15 billion over the next three years, it’s important to have an accurate picture of the HPC landscape.

Coughs, fevers and green mucus can accompany an infection, but most of the time, doctors can only guess whether the culprit is bacterial or viral. A new study points out a way to identify the perp. An infection changes the behavior of the afflicted person’s genes, and that host response differs depending on whether bacteria or a virus is doing the damage, scientists report in the Dec. 15 Immunity. This virus-bacteria distinction could ultimately help doctors quickly figure out what ails a person, and whether antibiotics, antiviral drugs or just chicken soup and sleep is the best treatment.

Hannah Strobl likes animals and dreams of becoming a veterinarian, and recently, she was clicking through a specialized online STEM teaching tool at a snappy pace. “I like that it teaches you more about science, social studies and reading,” said the 12-year-old Ooltewah Middle School student about the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) training program called Learning Blade. State officials viewed Hannah and her classmates as they took part in a class at Ooltewah, hopeful that Learning Blade will help in the effort to make students more interested in growing science and engineering fields.

When ESA launched its fifth and sixth Galileo navigation satellites, things went wrong. Because of a fault in the upper stage, both spacecraft ended up in elongated elliptical orbits instead of circular ones, making them unusable for navigation. Corrections of their orbits restored their function as navigation satellites, but their orbits still remained highly elliptical. To the satellite navigation engineers, this was a nuisance requiring changes in the software and the technology. But for physicists, the eccentric orbits offered an unexpected opportunity. Researchers at both Sytèmes de Référence Temps Espace and ZARM convinced ESA to use the satellites to test more extensively an effect predicted by Einstein's general relativity.

ignalling processes in organisms are governed by specific extracellular and intracellular interactions and involve hundreds of different functionally highly versatile receptors situated in cell membranes. For scientists wishing to understand signalling processes the situation is made more complex by the receptors not only being unevenly distributed and often able to bind more than one ligand but also by the same type of receptor being able to bind a ligand strongly, weakly or not at all. New methods that allow precise quantifications of such complex interactions are urgently required.

There are different possible causes for famine and malnutrition—not all of which are easy to foresee. Drought and crop failure can often be predicted by monitoring the weather and measuring soil moisture. But other risk factors, such as socio-economic problems or violent conflicts, can endanger food security too. Scientists from TU Wien and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis have developed a way to monitor food security using a smartphone app, which combines weather and soil moisture data from satellites with crowd-sourced data on the vulnerability of the population.

Atomic-level imaging of catalysts by scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory could help manufacturers lower the cost and improve the performance of fuel cells. Fuel cells use platinum catalysts that enable the reactions that convert chemical energy into electricity. Alloying platinum with noble metals such as cobalt reduces the overall cost, but these alloyed catalysts can vary in performance. An ORNL team is said to have used scanning transmission electron microscopy to track atomic reconfigurations in individual platinum-cobalt nanoparticle catalysts as the particles were heated inside the microscope.

Just six months after coming online, Comet, the new petascale supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, is already blazing new paths of discovery, thanks in part to its role as a primary resource for an assortment of science gateways that provide scientists across many research domains with easy access to its computing power. Simply described, science gateways provide web browser access to applications and data used by specific research communities. Gateways make it possible to run the available applications on supercomputers such as Comet, so results come quickly, even with large data sets.

A group of researchers from the University of Sassari (Italy) and the University of Plymouth (UK) has developed a cognitive model, made up of two million interconnected artificial neurons, able to learn to communicate using human language starting from a state of "tabula rasa," only through communication with a human interlocutor. The model is called ANNABELL (Artificial Neural Network with Adaptive Behavior Exploited for Language Learning) and it is described in an article published in the international scientific journal PLOS ONE. This research sheds light on the neural processes that underlie the development of language.

A new study from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory explains the mechanism behind a technology that converts bio-based ethanol into hydrocarbon blend-stocks for use as fossil fuel alternatives. Scientists have experimented for decades with a class of catalysts known as zeolites that transform alcohols such as ethanol into higher-grade hydrocarbons. As ORNL researchers were developing a new type of zeolite-based conversion technology, they found the underlying reaction unfolds in a different manner than previously thought. The researchers’ analysis found that this energy-consuming intermediary step is not necessary for the conversion to happen.

Scientists have long been interested in studying how winds influence ocean waves. NCAR Senior Scientist Peter Sullivan wanted to examine the relationship in reverse: How do waves affect the atmosphere? The result is this striking 3D animation showing the influence of ocean waves on the air above. While strong winds from storms create waves on the ocean surface, those waves don’t just stop. They travel away from the storm, sometimes thousands of miles, to areas with lighter winds. There, in those new areas, the waves, which have become swells, influence the atmosphere. Understanding how this happens provides insight into global weather and climate patterns, as well as into major storms such as hurricanes, which draw energy from the ocean.

In the future, big data could help unlock the mysteries of fields ranging from the natural sciences to medicine, and Illinois has a new opportunity to take a leading role. To accelerate advancements in the rapidly emerging field of big data analysis, the National Science Foundation has given $5 million to establish four regional Big Data Hubs. Catalyzed by an initial award from the National Science Foundation called SEEDCorn, which stands for “Sustainable Enabling Environment for Data Collaboration,” its goal is to provide a “big data brain trust” that will allow researchers to better collect, mine, and analyze data, leading to greater efficiency and, ultimately, a higher quality of life.

Three hundred years ago, the Sun began to wake up. For 70 years—from about 1645 to 1715—the Sun had been eerily quiet, with very few sunspots erupting on its surface. This prolonged period of muted activity, known as the Maunder Minimum, is the most dramatic so-called "grand minimum" ever recorded by humans. Scientists think that grand minima of a similar scale occurred before the Maunder Minimum and that more are likely in the future. But their origins remain an enigma. Recently, however, scientists at NCAR's High Altitude Observatory—using a 3-D computer model of the same wild and swirling magnetic processes that are thought to be unfolding in the real Sun—may have uncovered an important clue.

Ford will be the first automaker to test its autonomous vehicles at Mcity, a full-scale simulated urban environment that was developed as part of the University of Michigan's Mobility Transformation Center. The site will allow Ford to test its autonomous vehicle fleet close to its Dearborn, Michigan, headquarters, taking advantage of the diverse roads and realistic neighborhoods Mcity offers. The Ford Fusion Hybrid Autonomous Research Vehicle, which includes driver-assist technology such as including front-facing cameras, radar, ultrasonic sensors and LiDAR systems, will undergo testing.

SpaceX and NASA announced that the propulsion system designed to safely abort the upcoming crewed Dragon capsule — dubbed SuperDraco — has been successfully fired 27 times and completed development testing. The SuperDraco thrusters are scaled up versions of the small Draco thruster used for maneuvering and docking control on the upper stages of the Falcon 9 rocket, the upcoming Falcon Heavy, and the Dragon spacecraft. SuperDraco provides roughly 200x more thrust than its little brother, and is designed for a variety of use-cases and capabilities. Each spacecraft will be fitted with eight SuperDraco thrusters, and each thruster provides roughly 1/9 the performance of a single Merlin 1D.

The National Science Foundation has announced funding for a ‘Big Data’ Innovation Hub for the Western United States intended to facilitate collaboration among the region’s technology sector and other organizations to address research challenges in areas such as precision medicine, natural resource utilization, hazard management, and metro regional development. The Western Hub is part of an NSF program that includes more than $5 million to establish regional hubs for data science innovation. The consortia are coordinated by top data scientists at Columbia University, Georgia Tech, the University of North Carolina, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California, San Diego, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington.

Cybersecurity is in the news and is newsworthy. One of the more common themes in cybersecurity is the dearth of qualified cybersecurity professionals and how the United States might address that lack in the education system. Several colleges and universities have begun to add cybersecurity programs, and credentialing bodies are developing certificates and credentials for those already in the workforce but perhaps lacking the proper skills and training. The ACM Education Policy Committee and the ACM Education Council have both entered into discussions about cybersecurity education.