A federal grant of more than $919,000 from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration will fund one new course at the University of Illinois and support training for clinicians at area agencies in conducting early interventions with people who abuse substances. The training will be accomplished using a computer simulation called the Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment protocol, an early intervention often used in hospital emergency rooms and other public health settings to screen people for substance abuse problems. Viewers using the program, developed by the technology company Kognito, must select the correct clinical response based upon the information provided by an onscreen client.

The Jacobs School of Engineering and Division of Social Sciences at the UC San Diego have launched the Contextual Robotics Institute to develop safe and useful robotics systems. These robotics systems will function in the real world based on the contextual information they perceive, in real time. Elder care and assisted living, disaster response, medicine, transportation and environmental sensing are just some of the helpful applications that could emerge from tomorrow’s human-friendly robots. The institute will leverage UC San Diego’s research strengths in engineering, computer science and cognitive science and work collaboratively across the campus and the region to establish it as a leader in the research, development and production of human-friendly robotics systems.

Not too long ago, ACM and CSTA released a study that found computer science education was on the decline. Published in 2010, the report, titled "Running on Empty: The Failure to Teach K-12 Computer Science in the Digital Age," found that the number of high schools offering introductory computer science courses had declined 17% between 2005 and 2009. Universities and tech companies had begun to worry publicly about a growing gap between the number of jobs available and the number of people who might be ready to fill them. Today, the picture has started to change. At a time when computer skills are only becoming more important, many cities and states have taken on the problem by expanding their computer science offerings.

The Big Data Project (BDP) is an initiative undertaken by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to increase public availability of large volumes of environmental data collected and generated by the agency. As part of the Big Data Project, Unidata is working in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on a demonstration project to provide access to a more than twenty years of archivedNEXRAD Level II radar data — augmented continuously with new, real-time data — stored in Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) environment. In addition to assisting AWS with ingesting new data flowing from the NEXRAD sites, Unidata Program Center staff have set up a THREDDS Data Server in the AWS environment to provide services allowing community access to the stored data.

Google plans to deploy hundreds of Project Loon balloons in an effort to make fast internet more accessible to the citizens of Indonesia. The company will collaborate with Indonesian network operators for transmitting LTE-speed connections to around 100 million people in the region. To that end, Google has signed a memorandum of understanding with Indonesian telecom operators — Indosat, Telkomsel, and XL Axiata. The testing of Project Loon airborne base station technology across Indonesia will start next year. In comparison with many countries in Africa and other parts of Asia, Indonesia is somewhat ahead in internet connectivity, but it still ranks lowest across southeast Asia.

Candy Crush describes itself as the "sweetest game around" - but even so there's no guarantee that the $5.9 billion takeover of King.com won't leave both investors and players with a bitter taste. The big-budget, action-centric PC and console titles that Californian buyer Activision Blizzard is best known for are quite different to the more simple puzzle and role-playing mobile and web-based games its Stockholm and London-headquartered acquisition is skilled at making. Furthermore, the size of the acquisition dwarfs other mega-deals in an industry already prone to consolidation.

If you wanted to design a robot that could learn and develop like a human infant, to gain the skills and abilities of a human child, you would do well to talk to IU experimental psychologist Linda Smith — as roboticists around the world have done. Among the many questions you would need to answer are two that Smith addresses every day in the lab she has directed for 38 years and counting: What are the building blocks of human cognition? How does human intelligence take shape? For children who are slow to break into language, her answers have led to research on new treatments. And for roboticists, like Angelo Cangelosi at the University of Plymouth in England and Cynthia Breazeal at MIT, Smith’s answers have led to new strides in making the first developmental robots.

British aerospace giant BAE Systems is betting big on hypersonic travel -- something its potential new partner says could be a reality within two decades. BAE is planning to invest £20.6 million ($31.8 million) in a 20% stake of Reaction Engines, a UK-based engineering firm which has developed what it calls "breakthrough" aerospace engine technology, which could potentially be used for a new generation of reusable space vehicles and, as a commercial offshoot, could revolutionize air travel. Along with hypersonic air travel, Mark Thomas, Reaction Engines' managing director, told CNN's Richard Quest that a reusable space plane that takes off and lands like an aircraft is "one of the concepts that could be made possible by this engine."

For Google, smartphones, tablets, laptops and more may all soon answer to Android. The Mountain View, California, company is looking to bring its Android mobile software to laptop computers, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. As part of that push, Google may annex some parts of its Chrome OS software, which mainly powers its Chromebook laptops, with Android, its operating system for smartphones and tablets, according to the report. The search giant plans to release this newly unified software in 2017, the report says, with Google showing it off for the first time next year. Chrome OS will continue to be available to other companies, but Google will focus on extending Android to laptops, according to the report.

Numerical Algorithms Group announced plans to launch an impartial HPC technology intelligence and analysis subscription service. Developed in partnership with Red Oak Consulting, HPC Technology Intelligence Service will deliver technology insight and risk-reduction to help buyers and users make better decisions and optimize their investments. HPC promises real and significant benefits to those organizations that can exploit it effectively, but it can also be a confusing place – a plethora of technology options, continuous rapid change, ambiguous long terms trends, diverse business models, and disruptive technologies. To assist buyers in navigating this complexity, the service will deliver impartial intelligence and analysis on HPC technologies, backed by real experience and expertise.

Lack of adequate sleep can do more than just make you tired. It could short-circuit your system and interfere with a fundamental cellular process that drives physical growth, physiological adaptation, and even brain activity, according to a new UT study. Albrecht von Arnim, a molecular biologist based in the Department of Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology, studied plants but said the concepts may well translate to humans. His team examined how protein synthesis—the process that determines how organisms grow and how cells renew themselves—changes over the course of the daily day-night cycle. He also explored whether any such changes are controlled by the organism’s internal time keeper, the circadian clock.

Patients with glioblastoma, a type of malignant brain tumor, usually survive less than 15 months following diagnosis. Since there are no effective treatments for the deadly disease, University of California, San Diego researchers developed a new computational strategy to search for molecules that could be developed into glioblastoma drugs. In mouse models of human glioblastoma, one molecule they found shrank the average tumor size by half. The study was published by Oncotarget. The newly discovered molecule works against glioblastoma by wedging itself in the temporary interface between two proteins whose binding is essential for the tumor’s survival and growth.

Back in 2014, Firefly CEO Tom Markusic noticed a void in the space industry. Small satellites, which have many uses from telecommunications to scientific research, could not easily launch into space. To fill this niche, Markusic founded Firefly Space Systems, the Austin-based startup that aims to provide low-cost space launch capabilities for the small satellite market. While most space companies can take up to a decade to design and launch a new rocket, Firefly plans to do it in less than two years. From concept to execution, their first engine test in September took less than a year — nearly inconceivable for the space industry.

Designing alloys to withstand extreme environments is a fundamental challenge for materials scientists. Energy from radiation can create imperfections in alloys, so researchers in an Energy Frontier Research Center led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are investigating ways to design structural materials that develop fewer, smaller flaws under irradiation. The key, they report in the journal Nature Communications, is exploiting the complexity that is present when alloys are made with equal amounts of up to four different metallic elements. Radiation can harm spacecraft, nuclear power plants and high-energy accelerators.

Researchers at MIT are using XSEDE resources to study polymers, the chemical compounds used to make plastic, rubber, and more. Details of the project are contained in the paper “Tube Curvature Slows the Motion of Rod–Coil Block Copolymers through Activated Reptation.” Wang and Brad Olsen, project principal investigator and assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT, in collaboration with Alexei Likhtman, professor of mathematical physics at the University of Reading in the U.K., performed fundamental research on what are called rod–coil block copolymers, polymers with characteristics that make them good study models because not only are they are a class of organic electronics, they also have molecules that are part rigid and part flexible.

For years, getting into the business of renting out extra computing power through the cloud has been a bit like getting into the business of nuclear power. First, you have to spend a few hundred million dollars on ginormous hardware and the pricey software to run it. Next, you have to hire a team of Ph.D.s to make sure the equipment always runs pretty much perfectly, because one screw-up means a customer—probably a big corporate IT department—leaves forever. That formula is changing as cloud startups such as DigitalOcean and Backblaze begin to compete for customers with the likes of Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Google.

How do students and teachers learn math and computer science, and how can we ease the coming shortage of computer science teachers? Worcester Polytechnic Institute will partner with Brown University and Bootstrap to examine those questions. A team of computing education experts will study how students—and teachers—learn mathematics and computer science, and how those ways of learning can influence each other. The study, funded by a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $1.5 million, is of critical importance as middle schools and high schools across the country look to integrate computer science into their curricula, while at the same time grappling with a projected shortage of computer science.

Many fields of research are seeing changes in how that research is conducted thanks to advances in technology. Plant science is one of those, and NCSA is playing a role in two large projects. Historically, successful trait selection in plant breeding has involved manual measurement of individual plants. This requirement limits the number of plants that can be evaluated and the scope of properties that can be measured. A new grant from the Department of Energy will fund the development of a system to automate the measurement of plants using cameras and other sensors to facilitate the development of high-yielding strains of sorghum, a key bioenergy crop.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been in operation since 1990 and it still can amaze scientists and space fans alike. A team of astronomers has used the Hubble to make a fascinating discovery that links back to the early days of our universe: a collection of over 250 dwarf galaxies. Researchers date the galaxies to an estimated "only 600-900 million years after the big bang." That sounds like a long time to us, but it's a pittance on the scale of the universe's life span. NASA notes that it took over 12 billion years for the light from the galaxies to reach the Hubble. Scientists are using the Hubble data to peek into the early stages of the universe.

A United States District Court jury found that Apple's A7 processor infringes a patent held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the patent management arm of the University of Wisconsin - Madison. WARF alleged patent infringement and claimed damages of up to $862 million in a complaint filed early last year in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. District Judge William M. Conley rejected Apple's motion to limit damages in a separate ruling late last month. Apple has used the A7 processor in its iPhones, starting with the 5s model introduced two years ago, as well as in several iPads. The patent in question is U.S. Patent 5,781,752, better known as the "752 patent." It describes a method to speed up data processing through parallel processing.

When MIT phenoms Seth Lloyd and Angela Belcher put their heads together to create the perfect peanut butter cup, you know we are going to be there to take a bite. Lloyd, of quantum computer fame, realized that certain features of the kinds of viruses which Belcher builds are ideally dimensioned for trying increase the efficiency of photosynthetic energy transport via quantum effects. When he mentioned that to her, she said her lab was already making them. A short time later, the team had their prize: quantum viruses genetically engineered for optimal exciton transport. What are excitons you might ask? Technically speaking, they are neutral quasiparticles consisting of an electron and an electron hole bound by an electrostatic Coulomb force.

NCAR scientists have demonstrated how new types of satellite data could improve how agencies monitor and forecast air quality, both globally and by region. The scientists used computer simulations to test a method that combines analysis of chemistry-climate model output with the kind of data that could be obtained from a planned fleet of geostationary satellites, each of which would view a large area of Earth on a continuous basis from high orbit. The NCAR team reported their test of the system's potential in a paper co-authored with a NASA scientist that appears in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

Indiana University Bloomington celebrated a groundbreaking and announced the lead donor on a new building for the IU School of Informatics and Computing today. The $39.8 million, 124,000-square-foot building to accommodate the rapid growth of students, faculty and programs at the school is expected to complete construction in December 2017. Private donations will fund at least $10 million of the building’s construction, including $8 million from former IU student Fred Luddy, a member of the dean’s advisory council at the School of Informatics and Computing and founder of ServiceNow, a Silicon Valley-based company that delivers cloud-based, automated IT help desk services.

Scientists from IBM Research and Carnegie Mellon University today announced the first open platform designed to support the creation of smartphone apps that can enable the blind to better navigate their surroundings. The IBM and CMU researchers used the platform to create a pilot app, called NavCog, that draws on existing sensors and cognitive technologies to inform blind people on the CMU campus about their surroundings by “whispering” into their ears through earbuds or by creating vibrations on smartphones. The app analyzes signals from Bluetooth beacons located along walkways and from smartphone sensors to help enable users to move without human assistance, whether inside campus buildings or outdoors.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego this week formally launched "Comet," a new petascale supercomputer designed to transform scientific research by expanding computational access among a larger number of researchers and across a wider range of domains. The result of an NSF award valued at roughly $24 million, including hardware and operating funds, Comet is designed to meet the emerging requirements often referred to as the "long tail" of science--the idea that the large number of modest-sized computationally based research projects represent, in aggregate, a tremendous amount of research that can yield scientific advances and discovery.