The California Energy Commission (CEC) recently released a set of draft standards aimed at increasing the energy efficiency of desktop computers and monitors. The CEC estimates computers, monitors and signage displays account for 5 percent of the electricity used in the state; in some commercial buildings and offices, that rises to more than 10 percent. The CEC estimates its proposed standards could cut electricity bills by $340 million. The new rules particularly target the amount of energy desktop computers consume while they are idle. The commission wants to cut the amount of power desktops consume while idle by half starting in 2018.

President Obama welcomed young scientists and engineers from across the country to showcase their inventions, robots and discoveries at the 2015 White House Science Fair. Hosted by President Obama, the Fair features innovative projects, designs and experiments from students all across America. With students from a broad range of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competitions, this year’s Fair also included a specific focus on girls and women who are excelling in STEM and inspiring the next generation with their work. This year’s Fair – the 5th ever – featured dozens of innovative projects, designs, and experiments from students across America who are excelling in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

The Utah Senate gave preliminary approval Thursday to a bill that seeks to address what one lawmaker calls "a crisis in America." "We have a 1 million computer programmer shortage in this nation between now and 2020," said Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, "and AP computer science is only 0.7 percent of high school enrollment." SB107 creates a computer science initiative requiring the Utah STEM Action Center and the Utah State Board of Education to implement a repository of computer science instructional resources, provide professional development for teachers and select software curriculum to use in computer coding classes.

Los Alamos National Laboratory mechanical and thermal engineering researchers’ efforts to solve the complex problem of how ocean currents affect the infrastructure of floating oil rigs and their computational fluid dynamics (CFD) numerical simulations received recognition from ANSYS Inc., a company that provides computer-based engineering simulation capabilities.

This year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE) CISE made its first CAREER awards for research in computer science education. The awardees are Kristy Boyer, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, and Ben Shapiro, Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at Tufts University.

The Inspiring Fifty: Europe identifies and showcases the fifty most inspiring women in technology and business. Throughout 2014, Inspiring Fifty asked its extended network of professionals, journalists and social media followers to nominate those women serving as role models and standing as an inspiration to others. What came back was an amazing list of women from across the technology spectrum, including entrepreneurs, business leaders, academicians and policy makers.

In 2013, Alabama began to allow Computer Science Principles (CSP) and Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science to count as a math credit for students' graduation requirements. Previously, computer science had been viewed as an elective that did not contribute to graduation requirements, as is the case in about half of the school districts in the U.S. Now the computer science classes are filled with arts students, who focus on creative, writing, dance, music, theater and visual arts.

Merle E. Giles, director of Private Sector Programs and Economic Impact at NCSA, and Anwar Osseyran, director of the Dutch HPC and e-cience center SURFsara, are co-editors of a new book on the impact high-performance computing in industry. The book, Industrial Applications of High-Performance Computing: Best Global Practices, provides a global overview of high-performance computing (HPC) for industrial applications, along with a discussion of software challenges, business models, access models (e.g. cloud computing), public-private partnerships, simulation and modeling, visualization, big data analysis, and governmental and industrial influence.

Thirty-three U.S. states currently allow or have experimented with some type of online voting, says Lawrence Livermore Center for Applied Scientific Computing researcher David Jefferson. With email voting, the voter's ballot, identification, and legal affirmation are transmitted as attachments to an email message. Jefferson says all email voting systems are vulnerable to attack, and can be secretly manipulated in transit by any information technology person who controls relays, routers, or servers through which the email travels. Newer Internet voting architectures are Web-based systems somewhat like e-commerce transactions, but can still be vulnerable to malicious activity, including client-side malware and denial-of-service (DOS) attacks.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have captured the first real-time nanoscale images of lithium dendrite structures known to degrade lithium-ion batteries. The ORNL team’s electron microscopy could help researchers address long-standing issues related to battery performance and safety. Dendrites form when metallic lithium takes root on a battery’s anode and begins growing haphazardly. If the dendrites grow too large, they can puncture the divider between the electrodes and short-circuit the cell, resulting in catastrophic battery failure.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission released the details of the new broadband Internet regulations it approved last month. The rules were presented in a 313-page document that includes the rules, their legal justifications, and comments from the commissioners. Immediately upon the document's release, net neutrality advocates and broadband providers began examining it for insight. The new rules do many things beyond reclassifying broadband Internet as a telecommunications service. For example, the rules bar the creation of so-called fast lanes, but also exempt Internet service providers from the sort of price controls typically applied to other public utilities.

Texas Tech University professor Yong Chen has received a $1-million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to create a faster and improved method for supercomputing. Chen will lead a team of researchers to develop a new concept called "compute on data path" that seeks to achieve data-centric computing. The approach would assimilate and analyze more and different types of data used in scientific discovery and do so all at once. "This is more how an investigation to see whether a new concept is feasible and whether a change can be made to the current software stack to make it a more data-centric way to have significantly better productivity in scientific discovery," Chen says.

Inaccurate stereotypes depicting computer scientists and engineers as geeky, brilliant and socially awkward males are the key culprits in the underrepresentation of women in computer science and engineering. Broadening those stereotypes is important to attracting more girls to the two fields, according to a University of Washington study. Although women earn about 50 percent of undergraduate degrees in biological sciences, they obtain only 18 percent of computer science degrees.

A group of curious middle-school students at Feaster Middle STEAM Academy in Chula Vista recently was immersed into a world of creative engineering via Thinkabit Lab, an outgrowth of the University of California at San Diego’s K-16 Programs. A hands-on lab, Thinkabit adds an “A” for art to the traditional STEM curriculum of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Taught at Qualcomm's headquarters in Sorrento Valley, the coursework inspires students to be creative while they learn to grasp complex engineering concepts.

Researchers have built a full atomic model of the influenza envelope, comprised of more than 210 million atoms, using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the viral system on the Stampede supercomputer Xeon Phi co-processors. The viral particle is the largest atomic-resolution system that has ever been simulated and will allow researchers to gain unprecedented insights into the mechanisms of influenza virulence that will help to accelerate anti-viral therapeutics development.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) AnyScale Learning For All (ALFA) group investigates a wide range of big data challenges. ALFA focuses on working with raw data that comes directly from the source and then investigates the data with a variety of techniques, most of which involve scalable machine learning and evolutionary computing algorithms. "Machine learning is very useful for retrospectively looking back at the data to help you predict the future," says ALFA director Una-May O’Reilly. "Evolutionary computation can be used in the same way, and it's particularly well suited to large-scale problems with very high dimensions."

Researchers at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Arizona State University have built one of the three components of a ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET). The transistor promises to offer data storage that is quickly accessible and non-volatile. As part of the transistor that is open or closed, corresponding to the "0"s and "1"s in a computer's binary language, the gate would retain its state when no power is applied. Computing devices with memories built on FeFETs would be less vulnerable to losing information and would boot up very quickly when turned on.

Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), Moores Cancer Center and Department of Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego, have shown for the first time a pyramid hierarchical network of “coherent gene modules” that regulate glioblastoma genes, which are involved in a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. By identifying the most important gene modules responsible for cancer growth and proliferation, the study informs a strategy that could elucidate these modules at the top levels of their network and in turn be used to identify new drug therapies.

Civil rights activist Van Jones has created Yes We Code, an initiative that aims to teach 100,000 low-income kids programming skills. Yes We Code is helping dozens of organizations around the U.S. that are trying to address high-tech's racial and gender gap, from Black Girls Code to Hack the Hood. It connects those groups with the resources they need, according to Jones. Yes We Code wants to get communities to redirect young people's talents and to help the technology industry access that talent from new places, such as community colleges, coding boot camps, tribal colleges and historically black colleges and universities.

An IBM study on the future of automotive technologies found self-healing cars featuring social networking communications capabilities and connections to the Internet of Things are the wave of the future. IBM interviewed 175 executives at automotive manufacturers, suppliers and other businesses in 21 countries about what they expect the cars of 2025 to be able do. "By 2025, the industry will not only recreate our highly personalized and digitized lives inside our cars, but also give consumers a bigger role in defining that experience, whether as a driver or passenger," says IBM's Alexander Scheidt.

The latest version of Raspberry Pi is six times faster than its predecessor and delivers the same amount of power as a standard personal computer. The extremely low price point was the biggest challenge, says Raspberry Pi Foundation founder Eben Upton. The Foundation promotes credit card-sized Raspberry Pi computers as an affordable tool that children can use to learn programming. Upton says the other challenge was moving from a package-on-package system, in which the memory was part of the main system-on-chip, to a discrete system with a separate chip that could provide more memory but that required a more complex way of communicating with the rest of the computer.

They call it “the Lab-in-a-Box,” according to Nadir Weibel, a research scientist in the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department at the University of California, San Diego. Inside the box are assorted sensors and software designed to monitor a doctor’s office, particularly during consultations with patients. The goal is to analyze the physician’s behavior and better understand the dynamics of the interactions of the doctor with the electronic medical records and the patients in front of them. The eventual goal is to provide useful input on how to run the medical practice more efficiently.

When Andrew Ng trained Google’s army of computers to identify cat videos using artificial intelligence, he hit a few snags. Google’s worldwide network of data centers housed more computers than he needed for the job but harnessing all that power wasn’t easy. When a server broke down—an everyday occurrence when you’re using 1,000 machines at a time—it slowed down his calculations. According to Ng, this is one of the big unreported stories in the world of deep learning, the hottest trend these days in big data and artificial intelligence: it’s not necessarily suited to cloud computing—i.e. the techniques the Googles and the Amazons and the Facebooks typically use to run software across tens of thousands of machines.

The biases of elementary school teachers have a profound effect on whether or not girls pursue studies in math and science, suggests a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Beginning in 2002, NBER researchers began following three groups of Israeli students from sixth grade through the end of high school. Students were given two exams covering multiple subjects, one that was graded by their teachers and another one that was graded by outsiders who did not know the students. The researchers found girls outscored boys in math when graded by outsiders, but this was reversed when they were scored by their teachers, an effect that was not seen in other subjects such as English and Hebrew.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the University of California, San Diego, is providing data management, visualization and modeling resources and expertise to a two-month wintertime field campaign to study “atmospheric rivers” and particles of dust, smoke, sea spray and organic materials called aerosols along the western U.S. coast to better understand variability in the region’s water supply, flood and drought hazards, infrastructure requirements and optimal reservoir operations. The latest initiative, called the CalWater 2015 project, assembled a team of federal and state agencies plus academic research institutions collaborating in a tightly-coordinated effort involving ground-based observations, air and sea-borne measurements and advanced weather forecast models.