When Illinois researchers set out to investigate a method to control how DNA moves through a tiny sequencing device, they did not know they were about to witness a display of molecular gymnastics. Fast, accurate and affordable DNA sequencing is the first step toward personalized medicine. Threading a DNA molecule through a tiny hole, called a nanopore, in a sheet of graphene allows researchers to read the DNA sequence; however, they have limited control over how fast the DNA moves through the pore.

European researchers have developed Poppy, an open source, 3D-printed, humanoid robot. The researchers hope to make Poppy part of vocational training in schools, giving students the opportunity to learn and experiment. "Very little has been done to explore the benefits of 3D printing and its interaction with computer science in classrooms," says European Research Council scientist Pierre-Yves Oudeyer. "With our Poppy platform, we are now offering schools and teachers a way to cultivate the creativity of students studying in areas such as mechanics, computer science, electronics, and 3D printing." Poppy's body was created using a 3D printer, and the robot's behavior is controlled by freely available software, which makes it easy for users to experiment with building personal robots.

Researchers from the Mayo Clinic are using Blue Waters, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, to decode the complicated language of genetic pathways in the brain. In doing so, they hope to provide insights into what genes and proteins are malfunctioning in the brain, causing amyloid beta plaques, tau protein tangles and brain atrophy due to neuronal cell loss--the telltale signs of Alzheimer's disease--and how these genes can be detected and addressed.

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and University of California, San Francisco – with support from a diverse team of collaborators including the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) – have launched an ambitious new project to determine how all of the components of a cancer cell interact. "We’re going to draw the complete wiring diagram of a cancer cell,” said Nevan Krogan, director of the UC San Francisco division of QB3, a quantitative biosciences research institute.

U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and U.S. Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-Ill.) along with U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) introduced bipartisan legislation that would jumpstart research into exascale supercomputing that is “critical to U.S. competitiveness and national security.” The ExaSCALE Computing Leadership Act of 2015 would create research partnerships between industry, universities and U.S. Department of Energy’s national labs to research and develop at least two exascale supercomputer architectures, with the goal of having a fully operational computer system that has reached “exascale” – a measure of speed that is beyond any other system in the world – by 2023.

Science, technology, engineering and math degrees have become incrementally more common for both men and women over the last decade, a new report shows. Driven by a growth in the "hard sciences" – such as computer science, engineering and physical and biological sciences – the prevalence of STEM degrees increased between 2004 and 2014 at the bachelor's, master's and doctoral levels, according to a report from the National Student Clearinghouse. At the same time, the proportion of students majoring in social sciences and psychology held steady or decreased in all categories.

Determined to help others living with Alzheimer's, Middle school girls at St. Catherine of Alexandria in the Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn put their heads together to conceive a facial recognition concept smartphone app for the annual Verizon Innovative App Challenge. Dubbed "Remember Me," the app would use facial recognition technology and a smartphone camera to help Alzheimer's patients recognize family, friends, caregivers and even pets -- sort of like a scrapbook. A single snap of the camera would pull up information like the subject's name, age, relationship to the patient -- and even previous photos of the patient and subject together.

Researchers at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology believe they have developed technology that will make Web searches more efficient. The new search engine is designed to show related keywords and topics to help those who do not know exactly what they are looking for or how to formulate a query to find it. The SciNet search engine features a topic radar to display the range of keywords and topics and how they are related to each other. The relevance is tied to its distance from the center point of the radar, with the most related being closest to the center. Users would indicate what information is most useful by moving the words around the keyword cloud.

Cornell University scientists have created a computational method to identify biologically significant DNA in the human genome. The method combines two techniques to pinpoint signals of selective pressure in DNA--one that looks for divergence and another that looks for mutations in DNA between individual humans. The new method clusters functionally similar markers in the genome into groups and subsequently estimates the probability of whether a group is contributing to the fitness of the species based on associated patterns of divergence and genomic polymorphisms. Researchers generated a fitness consequence (fitCons) score that predicts which genetic material might be under selective pressure and therefore biologically significant.

In testimony before the U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee's Research and Technology Subcommittee on Tuesday, Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Assistant Director Jim Kurose said sustained basic research investment is necessary for countering growing cyberthreats. He also stressed the need for behavioral researchers' participation in this effort, since effective solutions must be social-technical in nature. In addition, Kurose said there must be closer communication between federal agencies, especially the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, and industry in order to get the most up-to-date information on ever-changing threats and best practices.

The Sinclair ZX81 computer game 1K ZX Chess is no longer the smallest-sized chess computer program, as French coder Olivier Poudade has created BootChess, which is only 487 bytes in size, and the code can run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux computers. David Horne's 1K ZX Chess contained 672 bytes of code and had held the record for 33 years. Poudade, who says creating something smaller seemed impossible at first, achieved his goal by making BootChess even more basic than its 1982 predecessor. The board and pieces are represented by text alone, with P representing pawns, Q used for the queens, and full stops put in the place of empty squares.

Women of color in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields face a double jeopardy, according to University of California Hastings professor Joan Williams. Her new study reveals 100 percent of women of color said they have experienced gender bias, compared with 93 percent of white women. However, women of color also report encountering ethnic and racial stereotyping. Williams, who has studied gender for more than two decades, interviewed 60 women of color and surveyed 557 women, both white and of color. Women of color reported instances of being mistaken as janitors, as well as conflicts over asserting and expressing themselves.

A new computational technique developed at The University of Texas at Austin has enabled an international consortium to produce an avian tree of life that points to the origins of various bird species. A graduate student at the university is a leading author on papers describing the new technique and sharing the consortium's findings about bird evolution in the journal Science. The results of the four-year effort — which relied in part on supercomputers at the university's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) — shed light on the timing of a "big bang" in bird evolution, rearrange evolutionary relationships between some bird species and provide new insights on the origins of song pattern recognition in birds, as well as a host of other avian traits.

PSC’s Public Health Applications Group, working as part of the HERMES Logistics Modeling Team with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Engineering and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, have helped the Republic of Benin in West Africa understand and control the details related to vaccine supply of the rotavirus immunization. In a May paper in the journal Vaccine, they used their HERMES computer model to show how the Benin Ministry of Health could improve their ability to supply vaccines to their population, possibly saving $500,000 dollars through the year 2017 and adding a rotavirus vaccine in the bargain.

The collection and analysis of big data will be the prime focus of the new Alan Turing Institute for Data Science, located at the British Library in London's new Knowledge Quarter. The center is named after the pioneering mathematician credited as the father of modern computing science, who also played a crucial role in the cracking of the Enigma code that accelerated the end of World War II. Among the 35 academic, cultural, research, scientific, and media organizations participating in the Knowledge Quarter revitalization project are the British Library, Google, Camden Council, the British Museum, University College London, the Francis Crick Institute, and the Royal College of Physicians.

The Australian Research Council has awarded a team of University of New South Wales (UNSW) researchers a $322,800 grant to conduct experiments on boosting the security of wearable technology. The researchers aim to develop technology that can be incorporated into wearable fitness devices to make them secure enough to feed their data into mainstream health systems. In addition, the wearable technology could enable doctors to remotely monitor the health of patients in their homes and provide greater detail about a patient's health to improve diagnosis. The grant is expected to produce ultra-lightweight algorithms and mechanisms that execute in wearable devices to safeguard the integrity of the data, according to Sanjay Jha, director of UNSW's Cyber Security and Privacy Laboratory.

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, will soon be taking shape at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego. Comet will be capable of an overall peak performance of two petaflops, or two quadrillion operations per second. Comet will join SDSC’s Gordon supercomputer as another key resource within the NSF’s XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) program, which comprises the most advanced collection of integrated digital resources and services in the world.

Hack Reactor, a San Francisco-based programming boot camp, has launched Code.7370, a program in which inmates at San Quentin State Prison will learn the basics of computer coding. Code.7370 is one of a growing number of initiatives designed to address the challenge of helping former inmates become successful members of society. At the end of the course, inmates present their ideas in five-minute pitches to dozens of Silicon Valley investors and executives. Code.7370, believed to be the first of its kind in the U.S., was developed by Chris Redlitz and Beverley Parenti, who have been teaching entrepreneurship to inmates through a nonprofit program called the Last Mile.

U.S. women working in science, technology engineering, and math (STEM) fields are 45 percent more likely than men to leave the industry over the next year, according to a recent Center for Talent Innovation survey. Although 80 percent of the women surveyed say they love their work, many still report barriers to advancing their careers. "Women entering STEM fields have a much shorter runway for career takeoff than women entering other industries," the report says. Surveyed women describe the "lab-coat culture" of science that encourages long hours, the "hard-hat culture" of engineering, and the frat-like "geek workplace culture" of technology, all of which discourage women from advancing or even joining in the first place.

Qatar Computing Research Institute researchers Haewoon Kwak and Jisun An analyzed news agendas in different world regions to see how the coverage reflects actual international events. They developed a cartogram by forming a database of 195,000 disasters occurring in 2013 and 2014, as reported by more than 10,000 news outlets. Kwak and An noted the countries in which each outlet was based and counted stories from other parts of the world. They then created a map showing where the news was from. They found that South Asians consumed more news about disasters in that region than North Americans, and Latin Americans consumed significantly more news from Argentina than Europe. However, the cartogram also revealed that people everywhere consumed large amounts of news from Egypt and Syria.

Researchers at the Universities of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) and Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) are developing a curriculum that will enable students to learn the science behind "wearable technology." The three-year project will include inquiry-based activities to about 900 students in grades 4-6. Students will receive kits featuring conductive thread, light-emitting diodes, sensors, and other components found in high-tech clothing. The students also will work with microcontrollers that can be programmed to direct the devices. "It's hard to name an industry that isn't impacted by technology today and so the earlier that we can introduce students to the different ways technology is used, the more options they will have available to them when they go to college," says UNO researcher Neal Grandgenett.

The Object-oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) track of the ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity recently honored University of Massachusetts at Amherst doctoral student Emma Tosch with its Best Paper award. The recognition came for her work on a first-of-its-kind software system designed to improve the accuracy and trustworthiness of surveys. A free and publicly available tool, "Surveyman" can identify problems in any survey from the design stage and onward. Tosch says the tool guides users through steps to create a spreadsheet that will become a new survey, addressing key areas that can lead to bias in a survey, such as question order and word variation.

A recent Nominet report found that increasing the number of women working in the United Kingdom's information technology (IT) sector could generate an extra 2.6 billion British pounds a year for the economy. Women currently make up less than 20 percent of the IT workforce, and based on current trends, the IT gender gap is set to widen over the coming years. The report, which polled IT decision makers in UK-based businesses, found that 76 percent believe they lack suitably skilled staff in IT, and of these, 58 percent say this negatively affects productivity levels, estimating on average that productivity levels are 33 percent lower as a result. The imbalance remains at the university level, with women accounting for just 19 percent of students taking computer science degrees.

Interior designers strive to make everyday spaces effective for the kinds of activities they support. Those who can incorporate the way people experience a given space gain an edge in mapping design to experience. IU Professor Jon Racek worked with AVL staff to incorporate the Oculus Rift virtual reality system into the design toolset for his class 3D Modeling and Design for Digital Fabrication (N201). Students designed 3D sculptures to be physically realized through a CNC router fabrication process. In so doing, they experienced the power of virtual reality as a design tool for its ability to convey real-world scale and natural human perception.

The launch of the Women in High Performance Computing (WiHPC) network will include talks on the obstacles facing women in HPC and how to broaden participation. The launch will provide an opportunity for women working in HPC to network with other women and to shape the future of the new WiHPC network. The day will conclude with a discussion on how the network can encourage women to consider and maintain a career in HPC and a wine reception. You can follow @women_in_hpc on Twitter or just sign up to join at http://www.womeninhpc.org.uk/get-involved.