A team of experimental and computational scientists led by Carnegie’s Tim Strobel and Venkata Bhadram have synthesized a long sought-after form of titanium nitride, Ti3N4, which has promising mechanical and optoelectronic properties. Standard titanium nitride (TiN), with a one-to-one ratio of titanium and nitrogen, exhibits a crystal structure resembling that of table salt—sodium chloride, or NaCl. It is a metal with abrasive properties and thus used for tool coatings and manufacturing of electrodes.

Seven years ago, a computer beat two human quizmasters on a "Jeopardy" challenge. Ever since, the tech industry has been training its machines to make them even better at amassing knowledge and answering questions. And it's worked, at least up to a point. Just don't expect artificial intelligence to spit out a literary analysis of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" any time soon. Research teams at Microsoft and Chinese tech company Alibaba reached what they described as a milestone earlier this month when their AI systems outperformed the estimated human score on a reading comprehension test.

Tech companies are racing to make quantum computers available to customers. A new scheme from researchers in Singapore and Japan could help customers establish trust in what they get if they buy time on such machines -- and protect companies from dishonest customers. Quantum computers have the potential to solve problems that are beyond the reach of even today's biggest supercomputers, in areas such as drug modelling and optimisation.

One of the enduring sci-fi moments of the big screen—R2-D2 beaming a 3-D image of Princess Leia into thin air in "Star Wars"—is closer to reality thanks to the smallest of screens: dust-like particles. Scientists have figured out how to manipulate nearly unseen specks in the air and use them to create 3-D images that are more realistic and clearer than holograms, according to a study in Wednesday's journal Nature . The study's lead author, Daniel Smalley, said the new technology is "printing something in space, just erasing it very quickly." In this case, scientists created a small butterfly appearing to dance above a finger and an image of a graduate student imitating Leia in the Star Wars scene.

Any modern phone call placed, voice recording captured, karaoke song belted or conversation amplified via hearing aid would not be possible without James West. West, now a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University, invented the electret microphone in the early 1960s. Today, West's invention accounts for 90 percent of all microphones, enabling a world of connectivity and vibrant sound. West will be inducted into the 2018 U.S. News STEM Leadership Hall of Fame at the U.S. News Workforce of Tomorrow conference in Washington on April 5.

One of the key principles in asset pricing — how we value everything from stocks and bonds to real estate — is that investments with high risk should, on average, have high returns. “If you take a lot of risk, you should expect to earn more for it,” said Scott Murray, professor of finance at George State University. “To go deeper, the theory says that systematic risk, or risk that is common to all investments” — also known as ‘beta’ — “is the kind of risk that investors should care about.”

Reanalysis of public genetic data using innovative computational methods has allowed the identification of new genetic markers associated with an increased risk to develop Type 2 Diabetes (T2D). The study, led by Barcelona Supercomputing Center and published today in Nature Communications, represents a new way of exploiting preexisting genetic data to obtain new and relevant discoveries for genetics and biomedicine, highlighting the importance of data sharing initiatives and policies in science.

Computer science as an undergraduate degree subject has seen a gentle spike in demand between the 2015/16 and 2016/17 academic years, according to the most recent Higher education student statistics survey. The subject saw a 4% increase in undergraduate enrollment numbers – the biggest percentage rise in all subjects. However, the absolute number – 1,175 – was below that for business and administrative studies, 2,395.

Jake Baskin has devoted his entire adult life to computer science education. For a few years, he taught computer science at a high school with Chicago Public Schools. More recently, he had been working at Code.org to expand access to and implement comprehensive computer science programs in over 100 school districts nationwide. Now, he’ll continue that work as the new executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), a decision announced Thursday.

When it comes to supercomputing, more is almost always better. More data and more compute – and more bandwidth to link the two – almost always result in a better set of models, whether they are descriptive or predictive. This has certainly been the case in weather forecasting, where the appetite for capacity to support more complex models of the atmosphere and the oceans and the integration of models running across different (and always increasing) resolutions never abates.

Data travels through thousands of miles of fiber optic cables underneath the world's oceans--via pulses of light. And according to experts, the data in these cables is at great risk of being intercepted. However, a newly designed frequency comb--recently developed by researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering might be an effective tool for data encryption.

How many times have you been in a meeting and this happens: Everyone has tapped into the enterprises’ analytics capabilities, parsing through numbers and forecasts, and they come to the meeting knowing exactly what they need to do to get better results. But then, when everyone compares notes, no one’s information matches up.

Today’s supercomputers are the most powerful calculating machines ever invented, capable of performing more than a thousand million million calculations every second. This gives scientists and engineers a powerful new tool to study the natural world – computer simulation. Discover how supercomputers are powering scientific breakthroughs This free online course will introduce you to what supercomputers are, how they are used and how we can exploit their full computational potential to make scientific breakthroughs.

Two security vulnerabilities in modern CPUs have recently been publicised, causing widespread concern in the computing industry. This is because the vulnerabilities are hardware-based and therefore have a potentially very broad impact which cannot be easily patched without consequences. Colloquially referred to as “Meltdown” and “Spectre,” these vulnerabilities refer to attacks that can allow malicious programs to steal data from the memory of other programs.

A team of researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has married artificial intelligence and high-performance computing to achieve a peak speed of 20 petaflops in the generation and training of deep learning networks on the laboratory’s Titan supercomputer.

Very few female and minority students pursue engineering and computer science degrees at Texas universities, according to an eye-opening Society of Women Engineers (SWE) report that analyzed the state’s community-college transfer students. In analyzing data from the Texas Education Research Center, SWE researchers found that less than 4 percent of female students chose engineering or computer science (ECS) majors compared to nearly 20 percent of men across two- and four-year institutions in the state. Evidence of a slight decrease in ECS major declarations among women comes despite more women than men enrolling in college each year.

Today’s supercomputers are the most powerful calculating machines ever invented, capable of performing more than a thousand million million calculations every second. This gives scientists and engineers a powerful new tool to study the natural world – computer simulation. Discover how supercomputers are powering scientific breakthroughs This free online course will introduce you to what supercomputers are, how they are used and how we can exploit their full computational potential to make scientific breakthroughs.

An electricity-conducting, environment-sensing, shape-changing machine the size of a human cell? Is that even possible? Cornell University physicists Paul McEuen and Itai Cohen not only say yes, but they've actually built the "muscle" for one. With postdoctoral researcher Marc Miskin at the helm, the team has made a robot exoskeleton that can rapidly change its shape upon sensing chemical or thermal changes in its environment.

Bitcoin may be the most famous cryptocurrency but, despite a dizzying rise, it's not the most lucrative one and far from alone in a universe that counts 1,400 rivals, and counting. Dozens of crypto units see the light of day every week, as baffled financial experts look on, and while none can match Bitcoin's $200-billion euro ($242 bilion) market capitalisation, several have left the media darling's profitability in the dust. In fact, bitcoin is not even in the top 10 of the crypto world's best performers.

Making news this month is a study by researchers the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Kyoto University in Japan, having built a neural network that not only reads but re-creates what is in your mind. Specifically, "The team has created a first-of-its-kind algorithm that can interpret and accurately reproduce images seen or imagined by a person," wrote Alexandru Micu in ZME Science.

Ten years ago, girls were so scarce in high school computer science classes that the number of female students taking Advanced Placement tests in that subject could be counted on one hand in nine states. In five others, there were none. Latino and African American students were also in short supply, a problem that has bedeviled educators for years and hindered efforts to diversify the high-tech workforce.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is joining the quest to develop quantum computers, devices that would exploit quantum mechanics to crack problems that overwhelm conventional computers. The initiative comes as Google and other companies race to build a quantum computer that can demonstrate “quantum supremacy” by beating classical computers ona test problem. But reaching that milestone will not mean practical uses are at hand, and the new $40 million DOE effort is intended to spur the development of useful quantum computing algorithms for its work in chemistry, materials science, nuclear physics, and particle physics.

When Lior Pachter came across one of the latest publications from the federally funded Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project, he couldn’t suppress his disappointment. In the paper, published last October, researchers from the GTEx consortium had analyzed RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data from more than 40 tissue types in the human body. The findings themselves were exciting, says Pachter, a computational biologist at Caltech. But a single line, tucked away in the methods section, left him feeling exasperated. The line read: “RNA-seq reads were aligned to the human genome . . . using TopHat (v1.4).”

Good, solid literacy instruction is the right of every student and the responsibility of all educators. School leaders recognize the need for literacy instruction to become a schoolwide priority—in all courses, not just English and the humanities.

Imagine an electricity-conducting, environment-sensing, shape-changing cell-sized machine, used for medical diagnosis. Impossible? Not according to new research that has harnessed the properties of graphene. The new concept comes from Cornell University researchers, who have devised a type of robot exoskeleton which can quickly change its shape as it senses chemical or thermal changes in the environment.