Over the course of nearly two decades, NASA’s Terra satellite has exceeded many of its expectations from the time of its launch. Blue Waters professor at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Larry Di Girolamo, who was in his first year of graduate school studying atmospheric sciences when Terra was conceived, has literally watched the Earth change before his very eyes with Terra.

Open Source helped to provide promising ground for digital transformation. Not too long ago open source transformed software and now it is having an impact in larger areas of business. However, it is important to note that this generation dates back much further than the Big Data revolution that is being promoted today.

Libratus, an artificial intelligence that defeated four top professional poker players in no-limit Texas Hold'em earlier this year, uses a three-pronged approach to master a game with more decision points than atoms in the universe, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University report.

While philanthropist Melinda Gates spends much of her time working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on ways to resolve and prevent global health crises, she has also brought attention to the lack of women and minorities in the industry where she started her professional career: technology.

A study led by physicists at Swansea University in Wales, carried out by an international team of researchers and published in the journal Physical Review X shows that ion-trap technologies available today are suitable for building large-scale quantum computers. The scientists introduce trapped-ion quantum error correction protocols that detect and correct processing errors.

Before scientists can effectively capture and deploy fusion energy, they must learn to predict major disruptions that can halt fusion reactions and damage the walls of doughnut-shaped fusion devices called tokamaks. Timely prediction of disruptions, the sudden loss of control of the hot, charged plasma that fuels the reactions, will be vital to triggering steps to avoid or mitigate such large-scale events.

Off the top of your head, how many languages can you name? Ten? Twenty? More? It is estimated there are more than 7,000 languages worldwide. For those involved in disaster relief efforts, the breadth and variety of that number can be overwhelming, especially when addressing areas with low resources. William Schuler, Ph.D., a linguistics professor at The Ohio State University, is part of a project called Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI), an initiative through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The algorithm is having a cultural moment. Originally a math and computer science term, algorithms are now used to account for everything from military drone strikes and financial market forecasts to Google search results. "People outside of computer science and math have come to describe these and other phenomena as 'algorithmic,' ascribing complex matters to a single, somehow magical entity that has developed a life of its own," says Malte Ziewitz, assistant professor of science and technology studies and a Mills Family Faculty Fellow.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, we most often hear about the flashiest of consumer applications – such as robots or autonomous driving vehicles. But AI also has the potential to deliver practical benefits for businesses, including driving higher profit margins, improving performance rates, enhancing the customer experience, and more. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that businesses are investing big in the technology; according to McKinsey, companies invested $26B to $39B in AI in 2016.

Look above the traffic light at a busy intersection in your city and you will probably see a camera. These devices may have been installed to monitor traffic conditions and provide visuals in the case of a collision. But can they do more? Can they help planners optimize traffic flow or identify sites that are most likely to have accidents? And can they do so without requiring individuals to slog through hours of footage?

More than 210 million core hours on two of the most powerful supercomputers in the nation have been won by two teams led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). The highly competitive awards from the DOE Office of Science’s INCITE (Innovative and Novel Impact on Computational Theory and Experiment) program will accelerate the development of nuclear fusion as a clean and abundant source of energy for generating electricity and will advance understanding of the high-energy-density (HED) plasmas found in stars and other astrophysical objects.

Over at LBNL, Kathy Kincade writes that cosmologists are using supercomputers to study how heavy metals expelled from exploding supernovae helped the first stars in the universe regulate subsequent star formation. In their respective efforts to understand the universe and all it comprises, there is a telling gap between what cosmologists and astrophysicists study and how they study it: scale. Cosmologists typically focus on the large-scale properties of the universe as a whole, such as galaxies and intergalactic medium; while astrophysicists are more interested in testing physical theories of small- to medium-sized objects, such as stars, supernovae and interstellar medium.

Milestone on the path to the quantum computer: Scientists of the University of Konstanz, Princeton University, and the University of Maryland develop a stable quantum gate for two-quantum bit systems made of silicon. The quantum gate is able to perform all necessary basic operations of the quantum computer. The electron spin of individual electrons in silicon is used as the basic storage unit ("quantum bits").

The video games industry is usually seen as a bro-ey, male-dominated one. But US games giant Bethesda – which is behind popular titles like Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, DOOM and Wolfenstein – wants this to change. It has donated US $100,000 to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) Foundation which provides scholarships to women and minority communities to study computer science or games production, “to do our part to support the next generation of game developers”.

Exams regulator Ofqual plans to pull this chunk of the qualification from the overall marks as it has been seen by thousands of people. Ofqual said the non-exam assessment may have been leaked by teachers as well as students who had completed the task. The breach affects two year groups. The first will sit the exam in summer 2018. Last year 70,000 students were entered for computer science GCSE. A quick internet search reveals numerous posts about the the non-exam assessment, with questions and potential answers.

Ann Marie Fred was 10 years old when her father brought home a used Commodore 64 computer—a vestige of the 80s—from work. Fred, the girl who stayed after school to play Oregon Trail on the Apple computers, jumped at the chance to take advantage of her family’s new computer. In addition to the Commodore 64, Fred’s father brought home a monthly computer programming magazine with simple programs that played songs or changed the colors of pixels on the screen. Fred said her first experience with programming was copying the programs from the magazine and modifying them to see what would happen. This was the first foray into tech for Fred, who now works for IBM.

Transport proteins called efflux pumps, and their role in creating drug-resistance in bacteria, could lead to improving effectiveness of drugs against life-threatening diseases and perhaps even bring defunct antibiotics back to prominence. Some life-threatening infections do not respond to antibiotics because efflux pumps inside a particular type of infectious microbe called Gram-negative bacteria flush out antibiotics before the drugs can work. One type of efflux pump, which until recently had only been studied in parts, was recently modeled in its entirety and simulated using supercomputers at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Carnegie Mellon University engineers and cognitive neuroscientists have demonstrated that a new high-density EEG can capture the brain's neural activity at a higher spatial resolution than ever before. This next generation brain-interface technology is the first non-invasive, high-resolution system of its kind, providing higher density and coverage than any existing system. It has the potential to revolutionize future clinical and neuroscience research as well as brain-computer interfaces.

The Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) announced today a new partnership with Raytheon, an innovator in the cybersecurity space, to further the organization’s objective to encourage young women to develop skills in science, technology, engineering, and math, aka STEM. The pair is teaming up to launch the GSUSA’s first national computer science program and coding challenge for girls in middle and high school. According to the official release, “the program aims to prepare girls in grades 6-12 to pursue computer science careers in fields such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, robotics, and data science.”

There will soon be nothing that cannot be produced with 3D printing. However, the materials used for this process are still "dead matter" such as plastics or metals. A group of ETH researchers led by Professor André Studart, Head of the Laboratory for Complex Materials, has now introduced a new 3D printing platform that works using living matter. The researchers developed a bacteria-containing ink that makes it possible to print mini biochemical factories with certain properties, depending on which species of bacteria the scientists put in the ink.

Harvard researchers have developed a specialized quantum computer, known as a quantum simulator, which could be used to shed new light on a host of complex quantum processes, from the connection between quantum mechanics and material properties to investigating new phases of matter and solving complex real-world optimization problems.

At today’s Computer Science Education Week kickoff, the theme was women in coding. In the U.S., just 18 percent of computer science college graduates are women. Hence why tech leaders like Microsoft’s Peggy Johnson, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki took to the stage at the College of San Mateo to discuss the importance of getting young girls involved in technology.

Like many adults, Benjamin Kelly didn’t initially get the global Minecraft phenomenon, which has seen millions upon millions of kids investing endless hours exploring and creating within a blocky virtual world. Eventually he came around. “I consider myself a late adopter,” says Kelly, who teaches technology at Caledonia Regional High School in New Brunswick. “But the students’ passion for the game was unyielding. I adopted Minecraft mainly because of that.”

Hyperconverged infrastructure is a relatively small but fast-growing part of the datacenter market, driving in large part by enterprises looking to simplify and streamline their environments as they tackle increasingly complex workloads. Like converged infrastructure, hyperconverged offerings are modular in nature, converging compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management software into a tightly integrated single solution that drives greater datacenter densities, smaller footprints, rapid deployment and lower costs.

"It was a perfect recipe," said Dr. Seid Koric, Technical Director for Economic and Societal Impact at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Research Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois. Koric, this year's winner of the Top Supercomputing Achievement award in the annual HPCwire Editors' Choice Awards, teamed up with NCSA Faculty Fellow and PI, Professor Ange-Therese Akono, geopolymers expert Professor Waltraud "Trudy" Kriven and NCSA research scientist Dr. Erman Guleryuz. Their goal is to understand the impact of nanoporosity on stiffness and strength of geopolymers via molecular dynamics and finite element modeling.