Harvesting oil, mitigating subsurface contamination, and sequestering carbon emissions share a common thread—they deal with multiphase flows, or situations where materials are flowing close together in different states (solids, liquids, or gases) or when the flow is comprised of materials that have a common state with a different chemical makeup that prevents mixing (oil and water). A research team led by Virginia Tech’s James McClure is using computational resources at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to improve computational models for subsurface multiphase flow calculations. The team can essentially take 3-D micro-CT imagery of geologic systems and put them in motion.

Corals can genetically adapt to warmer waters from climate change, scientists say in a study that relied on bioinformatic analysis with supercomputers. Reef-building corals can withstand a small degree of warming. This study with polyps of staghorn coral Acropora millepora across the Great Barrier Reef in Australia found the first evidence that coral pass heat-tolerant genes to their offspring, which can possibly allow a reef to beat the heat. Coral reefs around the world face a race against time. Globally, average temperatures of the surface sea waters where most corals live are rising. The symbiotic algae called zooxanthellae that give coral their dark color convert sunlight to food.

Michigan State University is teaming up with the University of Michigan, Wayne State University, Indiana University and Van Andel Research Institute to implement a high-speed infrastructure that will allow scientists to access and share their research across the region with unprecedented ease. This new Multi-Institutional Open Storage Research InfraStructure (MI-OSiRIS) initiative was launched through a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation and will enable researchers to collaborate their efforts in making new discoveries. MI-OSiRIS will break new ground in data storage and networking by utilizing advanced data storage software and hardware to open up new frequencies on the existing high-speed network.

University of Wisconsin researchers have created a map that shows the paths taken by the long-distance fiber-optic cables that carry Internet data across the continental U.S. Until now, the exact routes of those cables, which belong to major telecommunications companies, have been unavailable to the public, despite their importance to the public infrastructure. "Our intention is to help improve security by improving knowledge," says UW professor Paul Barford. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is making the map and the data behind it available through the Predict project, which offers data relevant to Internet security available to government, private, and public researchers.

Microsoft is investing $75 million over a three-year period to help make computer science more mainstream in schools. Microsoft plans to give $75 million to nonprofits that can spread computer science education throughout the world, CEO Satya Nadella said on Wednesday during Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The investment is part of the company’s YouthSpark initiative to promote computer science education it originally launched back in 2012. Microsoft will divvy out the money over a three-year period to select programs, including the company’s Technology Education and Literacy in Schools program, in which technology workers partner up with high schools to teach computer science to their students.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab last month hosted an event examining the current and future state of science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. The "Scaling STEM" event was hosted by MIT president L. Rafael Reif and Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-MA) and focused on how the use of technology can improve access to quality STEM education, including demonstrations of new learning tools and outreach efforts, as well as presentations by leading education experts and panel discussions. Sanjay Sarma, dean of digital learning at MIT, discussed how MIT had identified a need to extend its education efforts to students of all ages and levels and how that need informs the desire for scalable research methods.

The European Union is funding a new initiative designed to develop effective software for emerging parallel computer platforms. Researchers at the University of St. Andrews will investigate how to make data-intensive applications run on highly parallel heterogeneous computing architectures. Improving the performance of data processing has the potential to significantly lower costs and energy consumption. The 3.5-million-euro initiative is part of the RePhrase project, which is tackling issues related to data management for parallel processing, including structuring data to make it efficient to access and to process; placement, migration, and replication of data to enable fast parallel access; and ensuring data consistency.

The White House Council on Women and Girls has asked Arizona State University professor Kimberly A. Scott to lead the National Academic STEM Collaborative, an initiative that aims to create and share proven projects and highlight best practices that are happening at high schools and colleges. The collaborative will consist of nine universities and nine non-profit groups. The new consortium will serve as a "central unit" where proven ideas can be shared and made accessible with the goal of using a new research-based strategy to increase the number of underrepresented groups in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

Advocates for arts education support Mayor Bill de Blasio's proposal to expand access to computer science in city schools. Surprised? You shouldn't be. Learning to code flexes many of the same creative and problem-solving muscles as participating in the visual and performing arts. In the arts and in computer science students often start with a blank slate and build something from nothing. The tools may be different, but the process of exploration, experimentation and critical reflection is the same. Fluency with technology is essential to many applied forms of 21st century art-making: music composition and production, graphic design and architecture, filmmaking, and animation.

Swetha Prabakaran dreamed of becoming a physician, using the power of medicine to heal the sick and to are for the ailing. She studied biology in middle school, but the course of her life changed during her freshman year at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Virginia. She took an introductory class on computer science and learned about programming, becoming fascinated with coding and the intricacies of how to teach computers to make life easier for people. “I learned I could help people in the same way with computers and not just a stethoscope,” said Swetha, 15, a junior from Ashburn, Virginia. Earlier this month, Swetha was honored at the White House as one of 11 young women named “champions of change,” for her work as the founder of Everybody Code Now!

More and more school districts are requiring their schools to offer computer science classes, but according to computer science educators, certification requirements to teach the subject are often vague or ineffectual, which could prove problematic as more schools face the need to hire more such teachers. Mark Nelson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association, said that most states don't even offer specific certification or licensing to be able to teach computer science. Some of those states have added computer science to teaching licenses they already provide that are necessary to teach related fields, such as math or science, he said.

Nor-Tech recently engineered a game-changing low-cost supercomputer configuration that reduces the HPC purchase cost by 2/3 to 3/4 (about $20,000 less for an 8 GPU server). The solution is a good fit for nearly all but not all organizations. For over a decade, the technology community has been aware that consumer grade GPUs perform as well, and in some cases better than commercial grade GPUs at a price that is anywhere from 2/3 to 3/4 less. The main sticking point has been the traditional supercomputer chassis configuration, which only accommodates the significantly more expensive commercial grade GPUs. This puts GPU supercomputers out of the price range of most organizations—including some research institutions that need extraordinary processing power, but have budget constraints.

Researchers, engineers, and robots from 21 countries are competing in the euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge, a contest designed to assess how well the participants' cooperative robot systems perform realistic tasks as part of a simulated emergency-response operation. After three practice and preparation days, there will be separate trials in land, sea, and air, as well as challenges involving operation in two of those domains to evaluate collaborative behaviors. The final days of the contest will pit aerial, marine, and land robots against each other in a Grand Challenge event. Among the participating robots are two humanoid models, which will demonstrate search and rescue in disaster-response situations.

Mateo Valero, a professor in the Computer Architecture Department at UPC in Barcelona, has been named the recipient of the 2015 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award. Professor Valero, Director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center at the National Center of Supercomputing in Spain, was selected as the recipient for the award “in recognition of seminal contributions to vector, out-of-order, multithreaded and VLIW architectures.” The award is one of the IEEE Computer Society’s highest awards, and is presented in recognition of innovative contributions to high-performance computing systems that best exemplify the creative spirit demonstrated by Seymour Cray. The award consists of a crystal memento, a certificate, and a US$10,000 honorarium.

Nearly 80 percent of diabetics will develop retinal damage within a decade due to diabetic retinopathy, a condition in which damage to the blood vessels supplying the retina impair vision. The condition can cause blindness if not detected and treated early and the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) believes artificial intelligence (AI) technology could help make detection easier by automating the screening process. Lacking any AI expertise of its own, the organization turned to Kaggle, a website that helps organize competitions for statisticians and data scientists. CHCF provided $100,000 in prize money and uploaded thousands of retinal images, featuring both diseased and healthy retinas, to enable the website's members to develop an algorithm that could detect the disease.

The iPlant Collaborative, a cyberinfrastructure project that gives researchers access to advanced computing, recently polled biologists across the country and found that 95% are working with large datasets. However, nearly two-thirds of researchers had little to no experience in bioinformatics, and only one-third said their institutions had adequate computational resources. To address this clear need, Dave Micklos, Director of the DNA Learning Center partnered with iPlant to develop a program that exposes undergraduate faculty to computational biology. The three-year, National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project, RNA-Seq for the Next Generation, arms faculty with the tools needed to teach bioinformatics to students.

Argonne National Laboratory researchers are launching a new simulation project from the Virtual Engine Research Institute and Fuels Initiative that will harness 60 million computer core hours to enable more effective engine simulations. The research will be conducted on MIRA, which currently is the fifth-fastest supercomputer in the world. "This has the potential to be pioneering work because we haven't seen anyone really trying to understand these boundary conditions, model parameters and uncertainties at this level of detail," says Subtend Som, the project's principal investigator and mechanical engineer at Argonne's Center for Transportation Research. The research will focus on investigating how multiple variables interact simultaneously to impact the functioning of an engine.

A new breakthrough battery — one that has significantly higher energy, lasts longer, and is cheaper and safer — will likely be impossible without a new material discovery. And a new material discovery could take years, if not decades, since trial and error has been the best available approach. But Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientist Kristin Persson says she can take some of the guesswork out of the discovery process with her Electrolyte Genome. Think of it as a Google-like database of molecules. A battery scientist looking for a new electrolyte would specify the desired parameters and properties, and the Electrolyte Genome would return a short list of promising candidate molecules, dramatically speeding up the discovery timeline.

SGI, a global leader in high-performance solutions for compute, data analytics, and data management, announced that through the use of advanced genetic algorithms processed on a SGI supercomputer, scientists at the Linding Lab within the Biotech Research & Innovation Centre, University of Copenhagen, have discovered how genetic diseases such as cancer systematically attack the networks controlling human cells. By developing advanced algorithms to integrate data from quantitative mass-spectrometry and next generation sequencing of tumor samples, the UCPH researchers have been able to uncover cancer related changes to phospho-signaling networks at a global scale. The studies are some of the early results of the strategic collaboration between SGI and the Linding Lab at UCPH.

With technology skills becoming as important as readin’, ritin’ and ’rithmetic in today's digital world, many parents want to ensure that their children develop the right skills for the future. But many don’t know where to begin and how to make learning tech skills fun for their kids. A new online course, “Server design 1,” is using one of the most popular video games ever – Minecraft, which has more than 100 million registered users and has been a hit among younger players – to teach code to children between 8 and 14. The course teaches kids how to create a Minecraft world that they develop and design themselves using Java code.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers say they have built a three-dimensional (3D) printer capable of building objects with 10 photopolymer materials at once. The researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory say they built the MultiFab 3D printer using off-the-shelf components that cost less than $7,000. By comparison, current industrial multimaterial 3D printers can handle up to three materials at once and cost as much as $250,000. The MultiFab 3D printer mixes together microscopic droplets of photopolymers that it extrudes through inkjet printheads similar to those used in office printers.

Wearable devices or smartphone applications could help identify college students who are at risk of catching the flu, according to researchers at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The team used a mobile app to track the interactions of students, then developed a model that enabled them to predict the spread of influenza from one person to the next. For 10 weeks during the 2013 flu season, students used Android smartphones with built-in software, iEpi, which used Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and global-positioning systems technology to monitor where they went and who they came in contact with from moment to moment. The students also recorded their symptoms every week online. The model determined how likely each student was to spread or contract the flu on a given day.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University have detailed a new technique of cheating in massive open online courses (MOOCs), and they recommend prevention tactics. They note the method is enabled by specific elements in MOOC design, such as the ability to set up multiple accounts for free. The technique is dubbed copying answers using multiple existences online (CAMEO), which involves creating multiple accounts, including a master account that will ultimately be certified, while the others are used to "harvest" the right answers to assessment questions for the primary account.

CodeNow, a nonprofit focused on teaching underrepresented, diverse high school students how to code is launching #CodeHow, an online video tutorial series designed specifically for teens and accessible for free on YouTube. #CodeHow is a series of short concept videos, 3 to 6 minutes in duration, that feature young CodeNow alumni explaining important programming and computer science concepts and ideas — for example, variables, arrays, if/else statements, and other introductory fundamentals. Each of the videos includes the most important aspects students should understand about a concept.

Participation rates for Advanced Placement science exams—specifically physics and computer science—have risen sharply over the last year, according to data released by the College Board. The number of students taking the physics test doubled between 2014 and 2015. The College Board, the nonprofit that administers the AP program, said that represents the largest annual growth in any AP course in history. "These numbers for the AP Physics course blew my socks off and gave me hope for the country," David Coleman, the president of the College Board, said in a webinar earlier this month.