New Zealand's kiwi may be one of the world's oddest birds – flightless, nocturnal, an enigmatic dirt digger with nostrils at the end of its long bill. But the national symbol also has a lot to tell the world about evolution during the most recent ice age. According to research published in the prestigious U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team led by Jason Weir, biological sciences professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, today's kiwi are much newer birds – genetically speaking – than previously thought.

There's no human instinct more basic than speech, and yet, for many people, talking can be taxing. Unfortunately, many behaviorally-based voice disorders are not well understood. In particular, patients with muscle tension dysphonia often experience deteriorating voice quality and vocal fatigue ("tired voice") in the absence of any clear vocal cord damage or other medical problems, which makes the condition both hard to diagnose and hard to treat. But a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Massachusetts General Hospital believes that better understanding of conditions like MTD is possible through machine learning.

Seven women who work in IT departments at research institutions around the country have been chosen to help build and operate SCinet, the very high capacity SC conference network, under the “Women in IT Networking at SC” program. Now in its second year, WINS is a collaboration between the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network and the Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research. Although women have been members of SCinet since the earliest days, but WINS was launched to further expand the diversity of the SCinet volunteer staff and provide professional development opportunities to highly qualified women in the field of networking.

As water becomes a more precious and scarce commodity, effective use and conservation require that researchers test different water management strategies. It’s a complex problem that involves conservation, groundwater and seawater desalination and water reuse, as well as the uncertainty about future climate change and development patterns. Managing the flow of the Colorado River, which winds almost 1,500 miles through seven states and some of the most arid land in the country, has been a big job for the past century. Like many other U.S. waterways, the Colorado River is under increasing pressure from a growing throng of consumers.

The recent floods in Louisiana have reminded the nation of the devastation these disasters can cause, resulting in more than a dozen deaths and damaging more than 40,000 homes. With support from the National Science Foundation, David Maidment and his team created a water model prototype for the science community for research purposes. That prototype helped establish the National Water Model, which now delivers forecast information, data, decision-support services and guidance to essential emergency services staff and water management personnel.

The National Science Foundation announced a $110 million, five-year award to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and 18 partner institutions to continue, and expand, the activities undertaken through the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, a cornerstone of the nation's cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. XSEDE accelerates open scientific discovery by enhancing the productivity and capability of researchers, engineers, and students, and broadening their participation in science and engineering.

From climate-change predictions to models of the expanding universe, simulations help scientists understand complex physical phenomena. But simulations aren’t easy to deploy. Computational models comprise millions of lines of code and rely on many separate software packages. For the largest codes, configuring and linking these packages can require weeks of full-time effort. Recently, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory team deployed a multiphysics code with 47 libraries on Trinity, the Cray XC30 supercomputer being assembled at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A code that would have taken six weeks to deploy on a new machine required just a day and a half during an early-access period on part of Trinity.

Galaxies are complex—many physical processes operate simultaneously, and over a huge range of scales in space and time. As a result, accurately modeling the formation and evolution of galaxies over the lifetime of the universe presents tremendous technical challenges. In this talk I will describe some of the important unanswered questions regarding galaxy formation, discuss in general terms how we simulate the formation of galaxies on a computer, and present simulations that the Enzo collaboration has recently done.

Microsoft today pushed out in a blog post for users of its consumer services new resources to reduce hate speech. Users will now be able to communicate directly with the company to report hate speech, and petition for reinstating content via new online forms. Most people are familiar with efforts by social networks like Twitter and Facebook to ensure safety within their respective online communities. Just last week, Twitter announced the suspension of an additional 235,000 accounts for promoting terrorism.

Often described as the blueprint of life, DNA contains the instructions for making every living thing from a human to a house fly. But in recent decades, some researchers have been putting the letters of the genetic code to a different use: making tiny nanoscale computers. In a new study, a Duke University team led by professor John Reif created strands of synthetic DNA that, when mixed together in a test tube in the right concentrations, form an analog circuit that can add, subtract and multiply as they form and break bonds.

In the beginning, it was just about getting rid of the keys to his office. American biohacker Amal Graafstra, 40, decided in 2005 that he wanted to be done with such archaic technology "from like 700 BC." He looked at iris scanning and fingerprint reading as solutions for opening his office door, but decided those options were expensive and unreliable. Inspired by the way pets are commonly tagged, he settled on a safe radio-frequency identification (RFID) implant. "I used to say that if I was beaten up and naked in the back alley, I still want to get into my door."

Ultrasound imaging is used around the world to help visualize developing babies and diagnose disease. Sound waves bounce off the tissues, revealing their different densities and shapes. The next step in ultrasound technology is to image not just anatomy, but specific cells and molecules deeper in the body, such as those associated with tumors or bacteria in our gut. A new study from Caltech outlines how protein engineering techniques might help achieve this milestone. The researchers engineered protein-shelled nanostructures called gas vesicles—which reflect sound waves—to exhibit new properties useful for ultrasound technologies.

A team of Harvard University researchers with expertise in 3D printing, mechanical engineering, and microfluidics has demonstrated the first autonomous, untethered, entirely soft robot. This small, 3D-printed robot -- nicknamed the octobot -- could pave the way for a new generation of completely soft, autonomous machines.

Expansion of a new Advanced Placement computer science course aimed at drawing young women and minorities into high-tech fields is being hampered by a nationwide shortage of teachers qualified to teach it. Only a fifth of California high schools, about 260, will be offering the course in the 2016-17 school year. The new course – AP Computer Science Principles – is being offered for the first time this month after seven years as a pilot program in 45 schools across the country. It is a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s Computer Science for All initiative with a goal of offering the new course in as many high schools as possible, starting in the current school year.

Looking for an artificial intelligence that can write all your email messages so you don’t have to? Too bad. That dream is still years away. But in the meantime, a startup called Boomerang wants to take you at least part of the way there. Boomerang makes a plug-in for Gmail and Outlook that lets you hit the “snooze button” on certain messages. They’ll disappear from your inbox but then reappear at later time. But today, the company added a new twist to this plug-in: a new AI-powered tool called “Respondable.” Respondable analyzes your messages as you write them, predicts how likely they are to get a response, and then suggests ways you can improve them.

A future of soft robots that wash your dishes or smart T-shirts that power your cell phone may depend on the development of stretchy power sources. But traditional batteries are thick and rigid — not ideal properties for materials that would be used in tiny malleable devices. In a step toward wearable electronics, a team of researchers has produced a stretchy micro-supercapacitor using ribbons of graphene.

Researchers at the University of Oxford have achieved a quantum logic gate with record-breaking 99.9% precision, reaching the benchmark required theoretically to build a quantum computer. Quantum computers, which function according to the laws of quantum physics, have the potential to dwarf the processing power of today’s computers, able to process huge amounts of information all at once.

Contrary to a prevailing theory, coral larvae could not survive the five-thousand-kilometer trip across the Pacific Ocean to replenish endangered corals in the eastern Pacific, according to new research. Researchers used a supercomputer to simulate billions of coral larvae traveling on ocean currents over a 14.5-year period. The simulations showed that even during extreme environmental events that speed ocean currents, like the 1997-1998 El Niño, coral larvae could not survive long enough to make the trip from coral reefs in the western and central Pacific to help corals in the east recover from environmental damage.

Six graduate students recently concluded the DOD High Performance Computing Internship Program, or HIP, at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. “The intern’s summer projects were highly relevant and critical to our mission,” said Dr. Luis Bravo, Vehicle Technology Directorate. “They really took the lead in creating complex models that push the boundaries of engine combustion and turbomachinery sciences and have exploited the use of DOD’s Supercomputing platforms.” The annual HIP program funds interns to enhance computational skills and experience in order to support the DOD’s future warfighter needs.

The universe is full of mysteries. Mysteries that cannot be solved by observation alone, but researchers can examine them using modelling. However, this requires enormous processing power and is very expensive. Now researchers from Astrophysics and Planetary Science at the Niels Bohr Institute have just been granted 91 million CPU hours on European supercomputers for three major research projects. "Astrophysics and Planetary Science is entering a busy, but exciting time," says Klaus Galsgaard.

Knowledge of the soybean in the U.S. has come a long way since its humble start, namely as seeds smuggled by ship from China in the 1700s. A sanction back then from emperor Qianlong prevented trade outside of Canton. Undeterred, a former seaman with the East India Trading Company named Samuel Bowen first brought soybeans to Savannah, Georgia, in 1765. Today, an ambitious project called Soybean Knowledge Base developed at the University of Missouri-Columbia aims to find and share comprehensive knowledge from within the soybean, its genetic and genomic data, all publicly available and achieved through the use of high-performance computing.

Knowing how to code is the wave of the future. Being able to code helps you to break down problems procedurally and think of new ideas in terms of processes. If you see something in the world that’s inefficient, a knowledge of code allows you to come up with concrete solutions. Learning to code is empowering for kids because it gives them a platform to actively take on the challenges they want to solve. More and more innovations across multiple industries are being brought to fruition using code.

We are officially in the midst of the scorching summer months, and the great vacation migration to points all over the world has begun. While preparations and packing for these trips can be mind-numbing, many of the unknowns that keep mom and dad up the night before are being safeguarded by an unsuspected ally: high-performance computing (HPC) systems. An incredible shift is underway in the HPC market. HPC and the big data phenomenon have converged, moving HPC out of its comfort zone of research institutions and oil and gas companies, and into industries like travel, automotive, and financial.

High-performance computing (HPC) has become increasingly more popular and important in the world of engineering. But defining what HPC is and figuring out how it can be deployed to aid designers can be tricky. And, honestly, it shouldn’t be that way. In this article, I’m going to present a clear definition of what HPC is, how it can be effectively used in engineering and what kind of HPC solutions are on the market today.

These orderly patterns of dark blue dots indicate where individual chlorine atoms are missing from an otherwise regular grid of atoms. Scientists manipulated these vacancies to create a supersmall data storage device. The locations of vacancies encode bits of information in the device, which Sander Otte of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and colleagues describe in Nature Nanotechnology. The team arranged and imaged the vacancies using a scanning tunneling microscope. The storage system, which can hold a kilobyte of data, must be cooled to a chilly −196° Celsius to work.