Type Ia supernovae are famous for their consistency. Ironically, new observations suggest that their origins may not be uniform at all. Using a “roadmap” of theoretical calculations and supercomputer simulations, astronomers observed for the first time a flash of light caused by a supernova slamming into a nearby star, allowing them to determine the stellar system from which the supernova was born. This finding confirms one of two competing theories about the birth of Type Ia supernovae. But taken with other observations, the results imply that there could be two distinct populations of these objects. The details of these findings will appear in an advance online issue of Nature.

Researchers who normally use high-resolution satellite imagery to study glaciers are using their technology to help with disaster relief and longer-term stabilization planning efforts related to the recent earthquake in Nepal. Two research teams – one at Ohio State University and another at the University of Minnesota – are working quickly to employ Surface Extraction for TIN-based Searchspace Minimization (SETSM) software to produce high-resolution, 3-D digital surface maps for use in the Nepali relief effort.

One of the barriers to using graphene at a commercial scale could be overcome using a method demonstrated by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Graphene, a material stronger and stiffer than carbon fiber, has enormous commercial potential but has been impractical to employ on a large scale, with researchers limited to using small flakes of the material. Now, using chemical vapor deposition, a team led by ORNL’s Ivan Vlassiouk has fabricated polymer composites containing 2-inch-by-2-inch sheets of the one-atom thick hexagonally arranged carbon atoms. The findings, reported in the journal Applied Materials & Interfaces, could help usher in a new era in flexible electronics and change the way this reinforcing material is viewed and ultimately used.

Thanks in part to STEM education initiatives and the tech boom, coding in the classroom has become more ubiquitous. Computer programming tasks students to persistently work to solve problems by thinking logically. What’s more, learning how to code is a desired 21st century career skill. There are several digital games designed for kids as young as 5 that turn coding into a fun activity, such as Kodable and Scratch Jr. But some game designers are going further back to programming’s fundamentals by creating physical games that can’t be found in any app store. One tabletop game is Code Monkey Island. It features sequencing and looping statements printed on playable cards. In effect, the cards are the language; choosing correct conditional statements correctly can leads to victory.

A research team led by UC Berkeley engineers has developed a new smartphone microscope that uses video to automatically detect and quantify infection by parasitic worms in a drop of blood. This next generation of UC Berkeley’s CellScope technology could help revive efforts to eradicate debilitating filarial diseases in Africa by providing critical information to health providers in the field. The UC Berkeley engineers teamed up with Dr. Thomas Nutman from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and collaborators from Cameroon and France to develop the device. They conducted a pilot study in Cameroon, where health officials have been battling the parasitic worm diseases onchocerciasis (river blindness) and lymphatic filariasis.

Machine teaching is machine learning turned upside down: it is about finding the optimal (e.g. the smallest) training set. Solving the machine teaching problem in general can be intricate and is an open mathematical question, though for a large family of learners the resulting bi-level optimization problem can be approximated. Machine teaching can have an impact in education, where the “student” is really a human student, and the teacher certainly has a target model (i.e. the educational goal). If we are willing to assume a cognitive learning model of the student, we can use machine teaching to reverse-engineer the optimal training data — which will be the optimal, personalized lesson for that student.

While the human ability to write evolved from the ability to speak, writing and speaking are supported by entirely different parts of the brain, according to new research from Rice University, Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University. The research shows that it is possible for stroke victims who cannot speak a grammatically correct sentence to write it perfectly, and vice versa. “Modality and Morphology: What We Write May Not Be What We Say” is available online and will appear in an upcoming edition of the journal Psychological Science. The paper focuses on the relationship between written language (reading and spelling) and spoken language and whether or not written language depends on spoken language in literate adults.

For the first time since 2011, gaming giant Nintendo is a profitable company. In the company's financial report for the fiscal year that ended on March 31, 2015, Nintendo posted net sales of 550 billion yen (around U.S. $4.61 billion), which led to a welcome operating income of 24.8 billion yen (U.S. $207.8 million). Nintendo, which saw 75.4 percent of their sales come from outside Japan, attributed some of their financial success in the past year to the depreciation of the yen against the US dollar. The company also saw "robust" sales of their most popular games, including Mario Kart 8, Super Smash Bros. for both Wii U and 3DS, and Pokémon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire, all of which launched during the past financial year.

As part of Michigan State University’s Empower Extraordinary campaign, the College of Arts and Letters has received an in-kind gift valued at more than $100,000 from CAL alumnus Peter Stougaard, a former studio executive for DreamWorks and 20th Century Fox. The gift is in the form of 4,000 software licenses for an Apple app Stougaard developed called PopBoardz, whereby users can create, organize and present ideas in the form of video, images, websites or any file type all on one screen. Stougaard, now an entrepreneur, is providing the licenses to the College of Arts and Letters to use in its classrooms as a tool to help students collaborate and present effectively.

R, the free open-source software environment for statistical computing and graphics, brings out a crowd. In fact, so much so that a recent online and in-person tutorial on the subject broke training participation records for the event's organizers—the National Institute for Computational Sciences, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis. Approximately 800 people worldwide signed up for the four-hour, online and in-person tutorial on “Using R for HPC.” More than 420 logged in to watch online, and thirty of the participants were on site at the venue for the event.

New research has identified correlations between weather conditions and the occurrence of West Nile virus disease in the United States, raising the possibility of being able to better predict outbreaks. The study, by researchers with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, finds strong correlations across much of the country between an increased occurrence of West Nile virus disease and above average temperatures in the preceding year. The scientists also find that precipitation influences subsequent disease outbreaks, although the impacts vary by region.

Technology in common household humidifiers could enable the next wave of high-tech medical imaging and targeted medicine, thanks to a new method for making tiny silicone microspheres developed by chemists at the University of Illinois. Led by chemistry professor Kenneth Suslick, the researchers published their results in the journal Advanced Science. Microspheres, tiny spheres as small as a red blood cell, have shown promise as agents for targeted drug delivery to tissues, as contrast agents for medical imaging, and in industrial applications. One prime contender as a material for microspheres is silicone, the rubbery plastic found in everything from bathtub caulk to kitchenware to medical implants, but a method of making silicone into microspheres has eluded scientists.

Patients with traumatic brain injuries are not benefiting from recent advances in cognitive neuroscience research – and they should be, scientists report in a special issue of Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. Those who treat brain-injured patients rarely make use of new scientific discoveries about the workings of the brain. Instead, doctors, nurses and emergency personnel rely on a decades-old tool, the Glasgow coma scale, to categorize brain injuries as mild, moderate or severe.

Changes in rainfall patterns associated with climate change can be devastating to people living in Malawi, a small landlocked country in southeast Africa, leading to food crises, famines and loss of life. Two researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, Kerry Cook and Edward (Ned) Vizy, are dedicated to understanding how climate change and climate variability will impact Malawi and other regions throughout Africa. By running regional climate models, Cook and Vizy are examining Africa's diverse climate zones, ranging from the monsoon regions in West Africa and the Horn of Africa to the central tropics to the desert region in the north. Cook and Vizy's findings on how climate change will impact Malawi's agricultural growing season were recently published in the journal Climate Dynamics.

With more than 15 years spent studying ticks, Indiana University's Keith Clay has found southern Indiana to be an oasis free from Lyme disease, the condition most associated with these arachnids that are the second most common parasitic disease vector on Earth. He has also seen signs that this low-risk environment is changing, both in Indiana and in other regions of the United States. Clay has received support for his research on ticks from over $2.7 million in grants from the National Science Foundation-National Institutes of Health's Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases Program and others. Clay's lab has found relatively few pathogens in southern Indiana ticks that cause common tick-borne diseases compared to the Northeast and states like Wisconsin and Minnesota.

A new work based on 3-D supercomputer simulations of earthquake data has found hidden rock structures deep under East Asia. Researchers from China, Canada and the U.S. worked together to publish their results in March 2015 in the American Geophysical Union Journal of Geophysical Research, Solid Earth. The scientists used seismic data from 227 East Asia earthquakes during 2007-2011, which they used to image depths to about 900 kilometers, or about 560 miles below ground. The researchers say their line of work could potentially help find hidden hydrocarbon resources, and more broadly it could help explore the Earth under East Asia and the rest of the world.

Comet, a new petascale supercomputer designed to transform advanced scientific computing by expanding access and capacity among traditional as well as non-traditional research domains, has transitioned into an early operations phase at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego.Comet is the result of a National Science Foundation Award currently valued at $21.6 million including hardware and operating funds. The new cluster is capable of an overall peak performance of more than two petaflops, or two quadrillion operations per second.

The thought of a wildfire evokes images of firefighting crews, airplanes, and helicopters battling the blaze. But fire analysts and managers have other weapons in their arsenal to plan the attack before sending resources out. Among those are computer-model wildfire forecasts. For many years, Smith has been involved with teams strategizing to suppress some of the biggest wildfires across Texas and the nation, and so he’s familiar with the important questions that wildfire computer model forecasts can help answer: What do we need to do with our resources? How long will the battle take? What are the chances of success?

Jefferson Lab, in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University, has been developing a system for imaging in un-anesthetized, unrestrained mice. Basic research into human disease states and pharmaceutical development depend heavily on biomedical investigations involving animal models. But studies are limited by the necessity of using anesthetic and/or physical restraint during imaging. Jefferson Lab technology has been used in an awake animal study. Unique mouse brain studies of gamma-ray emitting molecules are now underway at JHU with this never before available technology.

One determined band of Los Angeles educators thinks it has an answer to encourage girls toward high tech careers: a girls-only public school that focuses on science, technology, engineering and math, designed to boost girls' flagging performance in those "STEM" subjects compared to their male peers. The Los Angeles Unified School District voted to approve the Girls Academic Leadership Academy. The proposal will now head to the California Board of Education, which must grant a waiver to open a single-gender school in a public district, but not everyone is a fan of the idea.

The Genome Institute at Washington University is one of 14 big-name cancer centers partnering with IBM to use the computing giant’s Watson artificial intelligence system to compare patients’ genetic data with databases of cancer genes and every scientific paper published about cancer genetics. What takes a team of experts hours or days can be accomplished in minutes by Watson. “I’m not aware of another platform that allows as much power right now nor have I seen one in development,” says Lukas Wartman, Assistant Director of cancer genomics at Washington University.

When astronomers try to simulate colliding giant black holes, they usually rely on simplified approximations to model the swirling disks of matter that surround and fuel these gravitational monsters. Researchers now report that, for the first time, they have simulated the collision of two supermassive black holes using a full-blown treatment of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, allowing a 3D portrayal of these disks of magnetized matter. The simulations more accurately describe the radiation that might be detected from such mergers. This includes electromagnetic radiation blasted into space and ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves.

There has been a rapid shift in the programming languages developers use most, according to an annual survey of developers by Stack Overflow. The poll found JavaScript has been the most popular programming language for the past two years. SQL led in 2013 but has fallen substantially, as have many of the C languages. The biggest growth in usage involved Node.js and AngularJS, Stack Overflow found. One reason the popularity of programming languages changes so fast is so many developers are self-taught, rather than the product of a four-year degree in computer science.

According to a study published online in the journal Nature, temblor frequency seems on the upswing in Central California because of groundwater depletion. As water tables drop, land subsides accordingly and the earth’s crust underlying the valley and its environs begins to rise. This pushes the surrounding coast range and Sierra Nevada skyward.This landscape-scale rebound relaxes the downward tension of the San Andreas Fault, likely increasing the risk of quakes.

Engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have developed a new family of methods to significantly increase the speed of time-resolved numerical simulations in computational grand challenge problems. Such problems often arise from the high-resolution approximation of the partial differential equations governing complex flows of fluids or plasmas. The breakthrough could be applied to simulations that include millions or billions of variables, including turbulence simulations. The small memory footprint of the new schemes developed at UC San Diego means that numerical problems of a given size will run much faster on a given computer and that even larger numerical problems may be considered.