Walk around any city neighborhood and chances are it looks nothing like it did 20 years ago. Thanks to growing urbanization, cities globally are rapidly expanding and accounting for more of our world’s population, gross domestic product and greenhouse gases. Adapting a city to keep up with evolving needs is one of the greatest daily challenges that city planners, designers and managers face. They must consider how proposed changes will affect systems and processes such as our power grid, green spaces and public health facilities. They also need to understand how these systems and processes will influence each other.

China is developing and building the Tianhe-3, the world's first exascale supercomputer, a leading scientist said. When completed it will be capable of a quintillion (a billion, billion; or 1 followed by 18 zeros) calculations per second. It will be 10 times faster the current world leader, China's Sunway TaihuLight, and will "become an important platform for national scientific development and industrial reforms", Mr Meng Xiangfei, head of the applications department of the National Supercomputer Centre, told reporters on the sidelines of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

A group of researchers from the UK and the US have used machine learning techniques to successfully predict earthquakes. Although their work was performed in a laboratory setting, the experiment closely mimics real-life conditions, and the results could be used to predict the timing of a real earthquake.

China’s push to take over global technology leadership is relentless. It wants to lead in computing, semiconductors, research and development, and clean energy. It is accelerating science investment as the U.S. retreats.

Our knowledge of the cells that make up the human body, and how they vary from person to person, or throughout development and in health or disease, is still very limited. This week, a year after project planning began, more than 130 biologists, computational scientists, technologists and clinicians are reconvening in Rehovot, Israel, to kick the Human Cell Atlas initiative1 into full gear. This international collaboration between hundreds of scientists from dozens of universities and institutes aims to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells as a basis for research, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment.

Researchers from Caltech and the University of Southern California (USC) report the first application of quantum computing to a physics problem. By employing quantum-compatible machine learning techniques, they developed a method of extracting a rare Higgs boson signal from copious noise data. Higgs is the particle that was predicted to imbue elementary particles with mass and was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. The new quantum machine learning method is found to perform well even with small datasets, unlike the standard counterparts.

A bipartisan idea is a rare creature in Washington these days, but there is one issue that brings the parties together: the need to expand computer science education in America’s schools. President Obama proposed spending an additional $4 billion, and President Trump released a more modest proposal. But despite these efforts, schools are still waiting for additional funding. That’s a shame because computer science skills hold the keys to economic opportunity for students.

A team of researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has received a three-year, $400,000 award from the National Science Foundation to create autonomous snake-like robots that can navigate more naturally and easily through the rubble, confined spaces, and rough terrain left in the aftermath of a disaster and send images and information to search-and-rescue teams.

Almost half of tech workers in the US, like Hollywood stars, live in constant fear that age will end their careers, according to a new poll. Job website Indeed.com surveyed more than 1,000 employed tech workers and found that 43 per cent of respondents expressed concern about losing their job due to age. And 18 per cent said they worried about this "all the time." The survey falls short of a revelation. Rather, it's a reaffirmation of an issue that has troubled tech employees for years and has prompted lawsuits such as the one brought by Robert Heath against Google in 2015, since joined by at least 269 aggrieved elders.

The CSforAll Consortium announced commitments from over 170 organizations this week to develop and support computer science programming and train teachers, the latest in a series of recent efforts to promote STEM education and computing.

Until now, searching for genes related to memory capacity has been comparable to seeking out the proverbial “needle in a haystack”. Scientists at the University of Basel made use of the CSCS supercomputer “Piz Daint” to discover interrelationships in the human genome that might simplify the search for “memory molecules” and eventually lead to more effective medical treatment for people with diseases that are accompanied by memory disturbance.

In this video from the SC17 HPC Connects series, Dimitris Menemenlis from NASA JPL/Caltech describes how scientists are working hand in hand with visualization experts to bring exquisitely detailed views of Earth’s oceans into sharper focus than ever before.

Dubai is aggressively turning itself into a "Future City," putting self-flying taxis in the skies and a facial recognition system in its airport. The Dubai police department's latest ride is now adding another sci-fi transportation staple: the hoverbike. The Dubai police, which already has luxury patrol cars, self-driving pursuit drones, and a robot officer, just announced it will soon have officers buzzing around on hoverbikes, which look like an early version of the speeder bikes used by the scout troopers on Endor in Return of the Jedi.

"Although the 3D scanning technology has made significant progress in recent years, it is still a challenge to capture the geometry and shape of a real object digitally and automatically," explains Mario Fritz, who leads the group "Scalable Learning and Perception" at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. According to Fritz, depth sensors, such as those of the Microsoft Kinect, are very powerful, but unfortunately they do not work equally well on all materials, which leads to noisy data or even missing measurements. "The resulting flawed or even incomplete 3D geometries then pose a real problem for a range of applications, for example in virtual or augmented reality, working together with robots, or 3D printing," explains Mario Fritz.

Tag International Development partners with Microsoft Philanthropies in trainings aimed at unlocking employability prospects for underserved youthsan State, Myanmar. Twenty-Two youths selected to become Microsoft Ambassadors participated in two computer literacy and skills training sessions hosted by Tag International Development in partnership with Microsoft Philanthropies as part of Project E3: Education, Employment, and Entrepreneurship. The project is aimed at unlocking employability prospects for underserved rural youths in southern Shan State, Myanmar.

The computer that stunned humanity by beating the best mortal players at a strategy board game requiring "intuition" has become even smarter, its makers said Wednesday. Even more startling, the updated version of AlphaGo is entirely self-taught—a major step towards the rise of machines that achieve superhuman abilities "with no human input", they reported in the science journal Nature. Dubbed AlphaGo Zero, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) system learnt by itself, within days, to master the ancient Chinese board game known as "Go"—said to be the most complex two-person challenge ever invented.

Ever wonder which of the world's colleges are best at teaching computer science? Thanks to a recent report from Times Higher Education (THE)—a UK-based publication focused on universities the world over—we may have an answer to that question, in an analysis based on performance in the categories of Citations (research influence), Industry Income (knowledge transfer), International Outlook (staff, students and research), Research (volume, income and reputation), and Teaching (the learning environment).

For the first time ever, using mass spectrometry, researchers have successfully read several bytes of data recorded on a molecular scale using synthetic polymers. Their work sets a new benchmark for the amount of data -- stored as a sequence of molecular units (monomers) -- that may be read using this routine method. It also sets the stage for data storage on a scale 100 times smaller than that of current hard drives.

Astrophysicist Chris Fryer was enjoying an evening with friends on August 25, 2017, when he got the news of a gravitational-wave detection by LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. The event appeared to be a merger of two neutron stars -- a specialty for the Los Alamos National Laboratory team of astrophysicists that Fryer leads.

Most robots stick out in nature like a sore thumbdrive. Now, scientists have found a new way to help them blend in—by changing not only the color, but also the texture of their skin. Inspired by cephalopods—squid, octopus, and cuttlefish—which use ring-shaped muscles to squeeze small bumps on their skin into large bulges that mimic rocks and algae, researchers created similar reversible protrusions with sheets of stretchy silicone.

The European declaration on high-performance computing (HPC) has been signed in Sofia by Bulgarian Minister of Education and Science, Krasimir Valchev, in the presence of Commissioner Gabriel. Bulgaria is the tenth Member State who is joining the European effort to build the next generation of computing and data infrastructures.

JetBlue passengers flying from Boston to Aruba can now present a new kind of boarding pass, one impossible to misplace: their faces. In lieu of handing over a paper ticket or summoning up a smartphone version, beach-bound commuters simply walk up to the gate and pause in front of a camera. After snapping a head shot, the camera relays the image to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

A new Irish study exposes as a myth the long-held notion that boys are better at computer science than girls. They are just as good as the males, and can be even better, according to research from Maynooth University. And girls are also less likely than boys to drop out of their course although, at the early stages, they suffer from a lack of self-belief about their abilities. On the other hand, boys tend to be more confident from the beginning about their abilities and their future exam performance. But, crucially, end-of-first-year exam results show no difference between the genders - and, at the very least, the girls perform equally well.

“The Infamous Paul Hilfinger” frequently receives UCBMFET recognition for the overwhelming difficulty of his computer science projects. This last week, as a CS 61B student at UC Berkeley, I have had the privilege of being “Hil-fingered” by a project requiring students to build their own SQL database.

A research collaboration between Osaka University and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology for the first time used scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) to create images of atomically flat side-surfaces of 3D silicon crystals. This work helps semiconductor manufacturers continue to innovate while producing smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient computer chips for computers and smartphones.