A conference last week convened participants in the U.S. National Science Foundation's Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) and US Ignite projects to highlight initiatives for accelerating the proliferation of next-generation Internet technology to spur scientific discoveries, economic development, education and public health. Among the themes of the conference was the role of government and public funding in technological advancement, which tends to be downplayed with private money flooding into tech firms and startups.

Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey have released the first in a series of dark matter maps of the cosmos. These maps, created with one of the world's most powerful digital cameras, are the largest contiguous maps created at this level of detail and will improve our understanding of dark matter's role in the formation of galaxies. Analysis of the clumpiness of the dark matter in the maps will also allow scientists to probe the nature of the mysterious dark energy, believed to be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. The new maps were released today at the April meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Sun undergoes a type of seasonal variability, with its activity waxing and waning over the course of nearly two years, according to a new study by a team of researchers led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). This behavior affects the peaks and valleys in the approximately 11-year solar cycle, sometimes amplifying and sometimes weakening the solar storms that can buffet Earth’s atmosphere.

Just how fast is possible is an open question when it comes to quantum computers, but physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have narrowed the theoretical limits for where that "speed limit" is. The research implies that quantum processors will work more slowly than some research has suggested. The work offers a better description of how quickly information can travel within a system built of quantum particles such as a group of individual atoms.

University of California, San Diego (UCSD) researchers have developed implicit/explicit (IMEX) time-marching schemes that can speed up time-resolved numerical simulations in computational grand challenge problems. Computational grand challenge problems often arise from the high-resolution approximation of the partial differential equations governing complex flows of fluids or plasmas. The researchers say their breakthrough will enable numerical problems of a given size to run much faster on a given computer.

The next generation of cyberattacks will be more sophisticated, more difficult to detect and more capable of wreaking untold damage on the nation's computer systems. So the U.S. Department of Defense has given a $3 million grant to a team of computer scientists from the University of Utah and University of California, Irvine, to develop software that can hunt down a new kind of vulnerability that is nearly impossible to find with today's technology. The team is tasked with creating an analyzer that can thwart so-called algorithmic attacks that target the set of rules or calculations that a computer must follow to solve a problem.

U.S. Department of Energy Under Secretary for Science and Energy Lynn Orr announced two new High Performance Computing (HPC) awards that continue to advance U.S. leadership in developing exascale computing. The announcement was made alongside leaders from Argonne National Laboratory and industry partners at Chicago’s tech start-up hub, 1871. Under the joint Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore (CORAL) initiative, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced a $200 million investment to deliver a next-generation supercomputer, known as Aurora, to the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). When commissioned in 2018, this supercomputer will be open to all scientific users – drawing America’s top researchers to Argonne National Laboratory.

NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer will be used by three research teams to gain new understanding of the deadly Ebola virus, thanks to allocations provided through the National Science Foundation’s Rapid Response Research program. Klaus Schulten, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will perform molecular dynamics simulations on Blue Waters in an effort to find new antibody-like agents that will signal the presence of Ebola in an infected person. If identified, these agents could then be used to perform rapid, accurate, inexpensive tests to detect Ebola in a person’s saliva, even before they begin to show symptoms.

In parallel computing, we have been designing, describing, implementing and using parallel loops almost since the beginning. The advantage of parallel loops is that the parallelism scales up with the data set size or loop trip count. So, what exactly is a parallel loop? A sequential loop has a loop body and some kind of loop control: the program typically executes the loop body once, then the control code will determine whether to loop back to the top of the loop body and execute it again. Similarly, a parallel loop has a loop body and some control.

Female leaders at the University of Wisconsin (UW) are looking for ways to address the inequalities that remain for women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Organizations such as the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) support undergraduate women in their professional endeavors on campus and after graduation. "I think women are doing a lot better in schools now because we have these organizations, so I think our generation is more inclusive, but I think there are still areas in the workplace that need to be worked on for inclusion," says SWE member Catherine Groh.

For the first time, scientists recreated the biological function of substrate transportation across the cell membranes by computationally designing a transporter protein. The designed protein, dubbed Rocker, was shown to transport ions across the membrane, a process crucial to cell and organism survival in various functions, such as nutrient intake, efflux of waste or drug and cell signaling, for instance, between nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.

David Hill, a researcher at Oregon State University, is focused on the hydrology and hydrodynamics in coastal areas, which represent the boundary between terrestrial and marine environments. His research on future levels of flooding in Tillamook Bay was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in January 2015. "This particular project is a blending of our interests in estuarine and coastal hydrodynamics and our interests in climate change," Hill said. "We're interested in getting a good quantitative understanding of the extreme water levels we can expect from coastal flooding."

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researcher Jane Margolis has helped write high school curriculum, "Exploring Computer Science (ECS)," which aims to expose students to a wide range of topics, including HTML website design, data analysis, robotics and programming through Scratch. The new curriculum will be paired with a professional development course for teachers, who will learn inquiry-based teaching methods along with the content itself. ECS has received the backing of Code.org and has been adopted by districts in Los Angeles, Spokane, Chicago and New York City, among others.

Sixty-six teens are taking part in the My Brother's Keeper Hackathon, a group coding competition spearheaded by Qeyno Labs CEO Kalimah Priforce. Priforce notes this hackathon is different because it caters to African-American teens, rather than mostly white and Asian men. He says hackathons can collapse the walls that have isolated high-potential kids with too few opportunities. "Why not put Dr. King, Amelia Earhart and Steve Jobs in one room and see what is it they can do," Priforce says.

Remo Rohs is looking for some deep connections: He’s integrating genomics and structural biology to uncover some significant insights into how proteins recognize DNA. While genomics deciphers DNA by studying the sequences of base pairs that encode genetic information, structural biology explores the impact of the actual 3-D structure of DNA. Rohs, however, aims to unite the two fields into something new — and hopefully more useful.

The Network Modeling Center (NMC), a group of researchers within the Center for Transportation Research (CTR) at The University of Texas at Austin, is using advanced transportation models to help transportation agencies understand, compare and evaluate alternative solutions and development strategies. However, the complex impact of alternative solutions on everyday traffic is not easy to predict. "The goals of our group are two-fold," Natalia Ruiz-Juri, assistant director of the Network Modeling Center said. "The first is to advance the network models used to evaluate how changes in infrastructure, travel demand, and traffic control impact transportation in the region, and the second is using these models to support planners in decision making."

A full century after Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity proclaimed that gravitational waves cause ripples in space-time, humanity may finally have the tools to detect these waves. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $14.5 million to the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) consortium over five years to create and operate a Physics Frontiers Center (PFC). The NANOGrav PFC seeks to detect low-frequency gravitational waves, which are elusive swells in the fabric of spacetime that arise from cosmic events involving extremely large masses. In Einstein’s Theory of Gravity, these events produce distortions that can be measured with radio telescopes.

The idea that computer science should become a core aspect of K-12 education is gaining significant political currency around the country, but current state-level initiatives have been fairly weak. Many initiatives, such as one in Washington state, seek to have computer science count toward math and science graduation requirements. Meanwhile, Arkansas took the lead in pushing computer science in schools last month when it passed a comprehensive law requiring all public and charter schools in the state to offer computer science courses. The initiative was a key element of Gov. Asa Hutchinson's run for office last fall. Hutchinson says he views the effort as a way of boosting the Arkansas economy.

One of life's strongest bonds has been discovered by a science team researching biofuels with the help of supercomputers. Their find could boost efforts to develop catalysts for biofuel production from non-food waste plants. Renowned computational biologist Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign led the analysis and modeling of the bond, which behaves like a Chinese Finger Trap puzzle. "What's new is that we looked at the system very specifically, with the tools of single molecule force spectroscopy and molecular dynamics, computing it for the first time," Schulten said.

Liz Bacon, the outgoing president of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, says a key piece of her legacy at BCS will be a network of women in the science, technology, engineering and math fields she established at the Institute to encourage more women to pursue careers in those fields. Bacon says despite numerous efforts to boost women's participation in information technology (IT), their representation in the field continues to slip. "The challenge is that we have lots of computing initiatives but the number of women is declining. What we're doing is obviously not working, so we need to look at why," Bacon says. "The aim of the network is to share best practices, gather data, find role models and find out how we can help."

Data science is not entirely new to Washington, D.C.—nor is DJ Patil, who was recently named as the U.S.’s first chief data scientist. Pres. Barack Obama’s administration launched Data.gov nearly six years ago and required all agencies to publish at least three “high-value” data sets to the publicly accessible Web site. Now it is Patil’s job, at least in part, to ensure that the government continues to release data in a variety of areas while ensuring that the information is not misused.

According to national data, just 50 percent of science and engineering doctoral recipients who were born overseas end up staying in the U.S. to pursue their post-graduation careers. A recent survey by the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara of 166 international graduate students found the limitations of U.S. immigration policy and H-1B work visas are among the biggest challenges for foreign students interested in pursuing U.S. careers. The study also examined how several professional, social and personal factors influenced the decisions of foreign students.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and General Electric have received a $540,000 America Makes award to develop open source algorithms designed to improve the additive manufacturing of metal parts. The project aims to develop and demonstrate algorithms that will enable selective laser melting (SLM) to produce metal parts that are high quality and durable. There currently is no effective approach to SLM that reduces problems associated with the method, such as surface roughness, residual stress, porosity, and micro cracking, and without careful optimization of the process these issues can cause parts to fail.

To determine if on-demand cab service Uber is less expensive than conventional taxis, University of Cambridge researcher Cecilia Mascolo compared Uber's prices with those of New York City's Yellow Taxis. The team made a 2014 Freedom of Information Act request for the data associated with New York City Yellow Taxi journeys during 2013, which covered hundreds of millions of trips and comprised 50 GB of data, and included the location of every pick-up and drop-off, as well as the fare paid for each journey. Mascolo's team took the coordinates of each journey made in a Yellow Taxi in 2013 and then asked Uber how much it would charge for the same journey using the least-expensive version of the service.

Women make up less than 20 percent of the information security workforce, and many women leave the industry before advancing their careers, according to a Ponemon Institute study. "We are not innovating as quickly as we need to be because there aren't enough women in this field," says Intel Security chief privacy officer Michelle Dennedy. Although there are several efforts to support women in cybersecurity and encourage more female computer science students to pursue the field, achieving gender diversity will require the entire industry to talk differently about security. Cybersecurity parlance often mirrors the language of combat, but the field also relies on understanding human emotion, which tends to come more naturally to women.