Researchers from EPFL, together with other institutes, have developed a robotic eel that swims through contaminated water to find the source of the pollution. The sensor-equipped robot can be controlled remotely or move on its own. In tests carried out in a small section of Lake Geneva, the robot was able to generate maps of water conductivity and temperature. EPFL researchers are taking part in an ambitious project funded by the Swiss NanoTera Program to develop a swimming robot that can detect the source of water pollution.

The data captured by today's digital cameras is often treated as the raw material of a final image. Before uploading pictures to social networking sites, even casual cellphone photographers might spend a minute or two balancing color and tuning contrast, with one of the many popular image-processing programs now available. This week at Siggraph, the premier digital graphics conference, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Google are presenting a new system that can automatically retouch images in the style of a professional photographer.

If you don't have time to call your senator, stage a protest or partake in a rescue mission at a slaughterhouse, you can at least save some chickens on your phone. Thanks to the new animal rights app Paintball Hero, created by 17-year-old game developer Skylar Thomas, animal liberation is now as easy as click, swipe, win. An animal rights activist since early childhood, Thomas sought to start a conversation about animal abuse and mistreatment through gaming. He partnered with PETA2, the youth chapter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, to turn animal rights activism into a 3-D mobile app experience.

The past year has been tough for enterprise security teams. Attacks like Petya and NotPetya suggest that the impact scale is increasing dramatically. The recent leak of government-developed malware and hoarded vulnerabilities has given cybercriminals greater capabilities. IT is struggling to keep pace with the flow of important security software patches and updates, and the continued adoption of new technologies like the internet of things (IoT) creates new vulnerabilities to contend with.

Last week, Elon Musk dashed off 125 characters announcing a remarkably ambitious plan to send Amtrak to an early grave. “Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins,” he proclaimed in a tweet. Yet something about this particular moonshot seemed off.

Panelists at the Microsoft Policy Innovation Center event highlight that while there is generally a lack of qualified K-12 computer science teachers that need training. But, the overwhelming sentiment pointed in the direction of schools and decision-makers in the space to start being more strategic about their course offerings and how they target funding –– not just at the K-12 level, but across the entire spectrum of education. Understanding that courses at the K-12 and even early education level prepare students with the primary knowledge they need to pursue STEM fields in college and the workforce, it's critical that K-12 leaders don't wait around for qualified teachers to show up.

As you’ve probably noticed, science is going through an extremely tough time in America right now. When researchers aren’t bracing themselves for massive and historic funding cuts, scientists are being censored, bullied, and dismissed by the federal government – an administration that is shoring up the views of anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers. There are, however, plenty of pro-science lawmakers that aim to push back the tide. Take Representative Jacky Rosen, a Congresswoman from Nevada’s 3rd District: She’s just introduced a bill to the House that aims to get as many girls into computer science and coding as possible.

As a high school student, and even as an early undergraduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Max Collins was not sure what he wanted to do after graduation from college. This all changed as a result of his time spent as an NCSA Blue Waters intern and the time he spent working with Dr. Alan Craig, an NCSA researcher and leading expert in augmented and virtual reality. Collins, a psychology major graduate, now has a plan of action for the next phase of his education and his eventual professional pursuits. Collins was especially interested in technology, but more from a non-traditional point of view than a typical engineering student.

Nick Nystrom, senior director of research at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), has been appointed Interim Director of the center. Nystrom succeeds Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies, who have been co-directors of PSC since its founding in 1986. During the interim period, Nystrom will oversee PSC’s state-of-the-art research into high-performance computing, data analytics, science and communications, working closely with Levine and Roskies to ensure a smooth and seamless transition.

Supercomputing, by definition, is an esoteric, exotic, and relatively small slice of the overall IT landscape, but it is, also by definition, a vital driver of innovation within IT and in all of the segments of the market where simulation, modeling, and now machine learning are used to provide goods and services. As we have pointed out many times, the supercomputing business is not, however, one that is easy to participate in and generate a regular stream of revenues and predictable profits and it is most certainly one where the vendors and their customers have to, by necessity, take the long view. This is what it means to be on the bleeding edge.

Change was in the air at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2010, two years into the operation of the soon-to-be retired Ranger supercomputer of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Ranger represented a new class of cutting-edge computing systems designed specifically for getting more people — U.S. researchers from all fields of science and engineering — to use them. Ranger and a few other systems of the NSF-funded Teragrid cyberinfrastructure, such as Kraken at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at UT Knoxville, were going to come offline in the next few years.

Six proposals have been selected to participate in a new partnership between two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) user facilities through the “Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science” (FICUS) initiative. The expertise and capabilities available at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) – both at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) – will help researchers explore the wealth of genomic and metagenomic data generated worldwide through access to supercomputing resources and computational science experts to accelerate discoveries.

Researchers have taken an important step toward the long-sought goal of a quantum computer, which in theory should be capable of vastly faster computations than conventional computers, for certain kinds of problems. The new work shows that collections of ultracold molecules can retain the information stored in them, for hundreds of times longer than researchers have previously achieved in these materials.

Modern films and TV shows are filled with spectacular computer-generated sequences computed by rendering systems that simulate the flow of light in a three-dimensional scene and convert the information into a two-dimensional image. But computing the thousands of light rays (per frame) to achieve accurate color, shadows, reflectivity and other light-based characteristics is a labor-intensive, time-consuming and expensive undertaking. An alternative is to render the images using only a few light rays. That saves time and labor but results in inaccuracies that show up as objectionable "noise" in the final image.

The interdisciplinary nexus of biology and engineering, known as synthetic biology, is growing at a rapid pace, opening new vistas that could scarcely be imagined a short time ago. In new research, Alex Green, a professor at ASU's Biodesign Institute, demonstrates how living cells can be induced to carry out computations in the manner of tiny robots or computers. The results of the new study have significant implications for intelligent drug design and smart drug delivery, green energy production, low-cost diagnostic technologies and even the development of futuristic nanomachines capable of hunting down cancer cells or switching off aberrant genes.

Turbulence, the violently unruly disturbance of plasma, can prevent plasma from growing hot enough to fuel fusion reactions. Long a puzzling concern of researchers has been the impact on turbulence of atoms recycled from the walls of tokamaks that confine the plasma. These atoms are neutral, meaning that they have no charge and are thus unaffected by the tokamak’s magnetic field or plasma turbulence, unlike the electrons and ions — or atomic nuclei — in the plasma. Yet, experiments have suggested that the neutral atoms may be significantly enhancing the edge plasma turbulence, hence the theoretical interest in their effects.

Eduard Porta-Pardo, a senior researcher in the Life Sciences Department at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), with the collaboration of a team of international scientists, has undertaken the first ever comparative analysis of sub-gene algorithms that mine the genetic information in cancer databases. These powerful data-sifting tools are helping untangle the complexity of cancer, and find previously unidentified mutations that are important in creating cancer cells.

Wordsworth found it in a host of daffodils; Nan Shepherd in the nooks of the Cairngorms. For Monet it popped up all over the place, from the windmills and canals of Amsterdam, to the sailing boats of Argenteuil. What lends a scene beauty has long been left to the poets and painters to define, but that may be about to change. In a new study, researchers trained a computer to tell scenic views from blots on the landscape. One day it could help with decisions over what land to protect, and how better to design new towns and cities, the scientists claim.

Modern medicine has brought us quite a bit of amazing things. I, for one, love not dying from infections, from polio or mumps. Not to mention not pooping myself to death when I have a glass of water. These are things that I think we can all agree are good. Even with that progress, though, many of humanity’s oldest diseases and disorders are pernicious, but DARPA (yeah, that one) has started looking into some brain-computer interfaces that might do the trick.

An update from the Wild Wild West of fake news technologies: A team of computer scientists have figured out how to make words come out of the mouth of former President Barack Obama — on video — by using artificial intelligence. If you've been on the Internet at any point in the last year, there's a good chance you've come across fake news articles. Soon we may see a wellspring of fake news videos. As a team out of the University of Washington explains in a new paper titled "Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio," they've made several fake videos of Obama.

The crux of being a successful software developer is the same as in every career: hard work is what will determine your success. With the myths and misconceptions however, many people begin doubting themselves when it comes to a career in software. The claim that the software industry demands that a programmer have a degree from a prestigious college or be a math genius to be successful are not as true as you would think. A college degree will certainly help if you wish to pursue a career in software development. When recruiters compare resumes for potential candidates, a CS degree will certainly set you apart. Although, there’s a lot more that a recruiter will see than just your qualification.

Autonomous robots can inspect nuclear power plants, clean up oil spills in the ocean, accompany fighter planes into combat and explore the surface of Mars. Yet for all their talents, robots still can't make a cup of tea. That's because tasks such as turning the stove on, fetching the kettle and finding the milk and sugar require perceptual abilities that, for most machines, are still a fantasy. Among them is the ability to make sense of 3-D objects. While it's relatively straightforward for robots to "see" objects with cameras and other sensors, interpreting what they see, from a single glimpse, is more difficult.

In order to store information in the conventional magnetic memories of electronic devices, the materials' small magnetic domains work by pointing up or down according to the magnetic fields. To generate these fields it is necessary to produce electric currents, but these currents heat up materials and a large amount of energy is spent cooling them. Practically 40% of the electrical energy going into computers (or "Big Data" servers) dissipates as heat. In 2007, French scientists observed that when the magnetic materials are put into ultra-thin layers and voltage is applied, the amount of current and energy needed to point the magnetic domains was reduced by 4%. However, this slight reduction was not significant enough to be applied to devices.

Female, black and Latino student participation in Advanced Placement computer science exams has more than doubled in the past year, helped by the introduction of an AP course designed to introduce principles, according to a new report. More than 19,700 female students took an AP computer science exam in 2017, a 135% increase from 2016 and a dramatic increase from the 2,600 female students that took the AP Computer Science exam 10 years ago, according to results released by non-profit Code.org Tuesday. Participation by black and Latino students increased by 170% since 2016, to more than 22,000. These gains are fastest growing among the population of students taking AP computer sciences, which doubled last year to more than 111,000, according to the report, which used AP College Board data.

As climate change accelerates, IBM is galvanizing the global science community with a massive infusion of computing resources, weather data, and cloud services to help researchers examine the effects of climate change, and explore strategies to mitigate its effects. IBM pledges to help direct the equivalent of up to $200 million for up to five climate-related projects judged to offer the greatest potential impact, and will then broadly share the experiments’ results. IBM is inviting members of the global science community to propose research projects that could benefit from World Community Grid, an IBM Citizenship initiative that provides researchers with enormous amounts of free computing power to conduct large-scale environmental and health-related investigations.