Francisco Olivera, associate professor of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University, is evaluating the impact of hurricanes and coastal flooding on the Gulf Coast. His group's assessment of the damage caused by current and future hurricane storm surges has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, the Journal of the American Water Resources Association, Climatic Change, and Ocean and Coastal Management. These studies represented the first of their kind to explore how the coastlines would change from rising seas.

KIBO is a toy with a purpose, to increase the supply of people who are genuinely computer-literate—for, despite what they may think about themselves, most so-called digital natives of the internet generation are not. They are, it is true, whizzes at operating the devices technologists have thrown at them, but few have much idea what is going on under the bonnet. Many parents and teachers want to change this, by encouraging children to learn how to program at the same time as they are learning how to read and write, and add and subtract.

This summer, visitors to the Museum of Science in Boston will be able to explore the science and technology behind some of the most successful animated films of all time, with the world premiere of The Science Behind Pixar. This interactive 10,000-square-foot exhibition showcases science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) concepts used by the artists and computer scientists who help bring Pixar’s award-winning films to the big screen. Created by the Museum of Science and Pixar Animation Studios, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the exhibit features more than 40 interactive elements demonstrating science and computational thinking that enables the creativity and artistry of Pixar’s storytellers.

Nowadays, two of the best-known women in computer science might just be characters on a TV show. On AMC's 1980s-set drama "Halt and Catch Fire," friends Cameron and Donna run an upstart computer company called Mutiny. One might assume that in the early 1980s, women in computer science were a rarity, but that's not true. "In the '80s, there were more women getting degrees in computer technology than there are now, which is mind-blowing," Kerry Bishe (Donna) said on the set of the show. A National Science Foundation study from 2014 shows a precipitous drop in women choosing to study computer science over the past 30 years. Nearly 40% of computer science majors in 1984 were female. Now, it's 18%.

Researchers at University College London have developed a model that predicts the price fluctuation of fine wines using artificial intelligence. Their study is being published in the Journal of Wine Economics. The new model uses complex machine-learning methods and has been shown to outperform other simpler processes. By determining which data is most important in predicting wine prices, the new approach predicts prices with greater accuracy on the Liv-ex 100 index.

Intel will invest $5 million at Georgia Tech over the next five years to boost the number of woman and minorities in computer science and engineering. “It is a national imperative that the U.S. continue to enhance the engagement of students of all backgrounds in STEM fields to create a more robust economy,” said Gary May, dean and Southern Company Chair in the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech. “The higher education and private sectors must combine forces to achieve the impact that is necessary.”

The executive order by President Barack Obama creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) is not only powerful acknowledgment of the vital role HPC plays in modern society but is also indicative of government’s mounting worry that failure to coordinate and nourish HPC development on a broader scale would put the nation at risk. Not surprisingly, early reaction from the HPC community has been largely positive.

Although many computing pioneers were women, modern computer science is dominated by men, and unfortunately, the number of women studying computer science has plunged even as other technical and professional fields are seeing an influx of women. Longitudinal studies on the declining percentage of women in IT reveal some common factors. The Athena 2.0 project reports that women in mid-level IT positions experience several influences that contribute to them leaving the profession. In many cases, there’s a hostile “macho”-style culture in the IT workplace that can marginalize women.

Criminals operating under the cover of darkness had better watch out. Computer scientists have developed a technology that can recognize a person’s face and identify them in poor lighting and even total darkness. It uses a "deep neural network system" that works a little like the human brain to analyse infrared images and match them with ordinary photos.Computer scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, developed the new facial recognition technique that reads a person’s thermal signature.

Intel and Micron this week unveiled a new type of memory they plan to mass produce that is purportedly 1,000 times faster than NAND flash and has 1,000 times the endurance. One thousand times the endurance would be about one million erase-write cycles, meaning the new memory would last pretty much forever. By comparison, today's NAND flash lasts for between 3,000 and 10,000 erase-write cycles. With wear-leveling and error correction software, those cycles can be improved upon, but still don't get anywhere near 100,000 cycles.

A team of researchers from Berkeley Lab and Columbia University has passed a major milestone in molecular electronics with the creation of the world’s highest-performance single-molecule diode. Working at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility, the team used a combination of gold electrodes and an ionic solution to create a single-molecule diode that outperforms the best of its predecessors by a factor of 50.

Advancements in high performance computing (HPC) have begun to influence the way defense intelligence is gathered, stored and processed. Analysts who attempt to predict the changing landscape of the battlefield are overwhelmed by larger amounts of data due to increased numbers of sensors and a more sophisticated adversary. In addition, the information they receive is constantly changing, making it harder to anticipate what’s coming next. Technological advancements in hardware and software products allow analysts to process larger amounts of data rapidly, allowing them time to apply human judgment and experience to intelligence problems.

The lack of interest in high performance computing shown by small and medium sized companies book-ended this year’s European supercomputing conference, ISC High Performance, held in Frankfurt last week. In the keynote address that opened the event, the conference was told that Europe is failing to persuade enough small and medium companies to take advantage of high performance computing (HPC) and engineering simulation, even though HPC and computer-aided engineering (CAE) are essential tools in modern industry.

Right now, thanks to the shortage in STEM talent, working in tech is an employee’s market – there are way more jobs than there are degrees. Code.org predicted there would be 1 million more jobs than computer science students by 2020. Of course, Silicon Valley companies put significant resources toward luring hires with perks like nap pods, dry cleaning services and covering egg freezing costs for female employees. Successes among A-list hires shed light on a new priority for young tech workers – making a positive difference in the world through their job. For this generation, it is less about money and perks and more about the impact that they are making.

DNA is often referred to as “the blueprint of life.” But it’s more than just a blueprint—it’s also a kind of operations manual for the workings of the cell, telling it what proteins to manufacture and when. Aaron Dinner, professor in chemistry, and his graduate student Herman Gudjonson are trying to read that manual, as part of the Dinner group’s research into bioinformatics—the application of statistics to biological research. To carry out their research, Dinner and Gudjonson turned to Midway, the Research Computing Center’s supercomputing cluster. The interdependent probabilities and statistical analyses demanded by this project called for high-performance computing.

The gender gap among British university students has widened in courses including software engineering, information systems and combined computer science courses. It appears that fewer women are studying computer science at UK universities than five years ago, according to UCAS figures. Overall, the prevalence of new courses (like gaming and graphics) to meet the growing demand for technology skills has steadily increased over the last five years.Yet the ratio of women accepting a place on a computer science-related course in comparison to men has decreased every year. In 2010, 14% of computer science students were female. Despite initiatives to get more women into STEM subjects, by 2014 the amount of female computer science students had dropped to 13%.

The "friendly" bacteria inside our digestive systems are being given an upgrade, which may one day allow them to be programmed to detect and ultimately treat diseases such as colon cancer and immune disorders. In a paper published in the journal Cell Systems, researchers at MIT unveil a series of sensors, memory switches, and circuits that can be encoded in the common human gut bacterium Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron. These basic computing elements will allow the bacteria to sense, memorize, and respond to signals in the gut, with future applications that might include the early detection and treatment of inflammatory bowel disease or colon cancer.

In a UC-Santa Cruz research lab dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of computer games, two graduate students have combined linguistics and computational theory to create a new multidimensional library of 12,000 computer games.The web-based tools, GameNet and GameSage, offer novel ways to discover similar types of games. It is a step toward sorting decades of game culture that has yet to be successfully categorized and archived. The pair used natural language processing, the intersection between computer science and linguistics, to sort through 12,000 Wikipedia game entries.

Argonne scientists used Mira to identify and improve a new mechanism for eliminating friction, which fed into the development of a hybrid material that exhibited superlubricity at the macroscale for the first time. Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) researchers helped enable the groundbreaking simulations by overcoming a performance bottleneck that doubled the speed of the team's code.

A biomedical breakthrough, published in the journal Nature, reveals never-before-seen details of the human body's cellular switchboard that regulates sensory and hormonal responses. The work is based on an X-ray laser experiment at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The much-anticipated discovery, a decade in the making, could have broad impacts on development of more highly targeted and effective drugs with fewer side effects to treat conditions including high blood pressure, diabetes, depression and even some types of cancer.

Amy Wibowo knew, even as a kid, that computer science was a magical intersection of math, science and pictures. “As the teacher introduced a new concept, I would make cartoons about it,” she said; the visual elements of math theory sparked inspiration for her. “Textbooks are so dry,” she mourned; why didn’t anyone create textbooks with comics? “That would be so much juicier,” she thought, and resolved to make it happen someday. That day has come. The first issue of her BubbleSort Zines series hit mailboxes last week. Pitched at early-high-school-aged girls, it aims to spark the same passion for code that Wibowo remembers so fondly, and which has served her so well.

Realizing the dearth of access to computer science offerings in high school, the National Science Foundation, together with the College Board, convened a group of teachers and academics to craft a new course called “AP Computer Science Principles.” The primary goal of this new course, to be offered in fall 2016, is to increase student access to computer science, computing and STEM through a more multidisciplinary approach than the current AP course, which is focused primarily on programming with Java.

Can an algorithm pass for an author? Can a robot rock the house? A series of contests at Dartmouth College is about to find out. Dartmouth is seeking artificial intelligence algorithms that create "human-quality" short stories, sonnets and dance music sets that will be pitted against human-produced literature, poetry and music selections. The judges won't know which is which. The goal is to determine whether people can distinguish between the two, and whether they might even prefer the computer-generated creativity.

DNA naturally folds itself into cross-shaped structures called cruciforms that jut out along the sprawling length of its double helix. DNA cruciforms are abundant; scientists estimate as many as 500,000 cruciform-forming sequences may exist on average in a normal human genome. Supercomputers have now helped scientists find a surprising link between cross-shaped (or cruciform) pieces of DNA and human cancer, according to a study.

An open-source software project to extend the capacity of computational mathematics and interactive computing environments has received €7.6 million in EU funding. The OpenDreamKit project, funded by the EU’s Framework 2020 program, will make all associated code, data and research available for free on the internet as open-source software that other researchers can use. The project will develop software for mathematical tools, such as GAP and SageMath, which can be used by researchers to run computer models and crunch vast quantities of data – using computers to manipulate and solve equations.