A report released last week by the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) — “Enabling the SMART Wind Power Plant of the Future Through Science-Based Innovation“– asserts that supercomputing-led scientific advances could cut the unsubsidized cost of wind energy in half by the year 2030. With science and computing driving plant-level innovations, wind could supply the United States with 20 percent of its energy needs by 2030 and nearly half of its total energy needs by 2050, according to the authors.

Houston is home to over two million people, some 30,000 of which will be left homeless in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. It’s also home to multiple major research institutions, many of which took heavy hits from the storm. Houston scientists study everything from cardiovascular disease to the movements of the planets, and after checking in on family and friends, some also checked in on their labs—where water-damaged equipment, floods, and power outages mean losing ground on critical experiments, or losing them entirely.

Computer science is the highest paying field of study in the United States, with a median total compensation of $92,300, according to LinkedIn’s new 2017 U.S. State of Salary Report. The report is based on salary data from over two million LinkedIn members. Close to half of the highest paid fields are STEM-based. Tech positions also ranked among the highest-paying entry and mid-level jobs. Ranked fifth was user experience designer at a median total compensation of $72,000. Associate Software Engineer wasn’t far behind with $65,000.

The world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), began running at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in 2009. The LHC spends most of its time studying the puzzles of high-energy physics. But for one month a year, it, like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, studies the nuclear physics of the early universe by colliding heavy, charged nuclei (ions). As first demonstrated at RHIC, tiny samples of the quark–gluon plasma (QGP), the matter that permeated the entire universe in its infancy, are produced in high-energy, heavy-ion collisions.

For a large institution playing at the leadership-class supercomputing level, NASA tends to do things a little differently than its national lab and academic peers. One of the most striking differences between how the space agency views its supercomputing future can be found at the facilities level. Instead of building massive brick and mortar datacenters within a new or existing complex, NASA has taken the modular route, beginning with its Electra supercomputer and in the near future, with a 30 Megawatt-capable new modular installation that can house about a million compute cores.

If you are looking for signs that technical education is being transformed, and that girls are now more eager to study subjects such as computing, then my advice is to avoid the latest GCSE results. I have written before about fears that the revolution in computing education has stalled. Now the GCSEs, coupled with the recent A-level results, provide more evidence for those concerns.

Antennas just got a whole lot smaller. Tiny chips that communicate via radio waves are a tenth to a hundredth the length of current state-of-the-art compact antennas. At only a couple hundred micrometers across — comparable to the thickness of a piece of paper — these next-gen antennas can relay the same types of signals as those used by TVs, cell phones and radios, researchers report in Nature Communications.

Forget the Turing test. Computing pioneer Alan Turing's most pertinent thoughts on machine intelligence come from a neglected paragraph of the same paper that first proposed his famous test for whether a computer could be considered as smart as a human. "The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.

Filtering information for search engines, acting as an opponent during a board game or recognizing images: Artificial intelligence has far outpaced human intelligence in certain tasks. Researchers are showing how ideas from computer science could revolutionize brain research. They illustrate how a self-learning algorithm decodes human brain signals that were measured by an electroencephalogram (EEG).

Much of Google’s algorithm development occurs in groups scattered throughout New York City. Google launched a single website – NYC Algorithms and Optimization Team page – to provide a deeper view into all of the NYC-based groups work. The NYC Algorithms and Optimization Team comprises multiple overlapping research groups working on large-scale graph mining, large-scale optimization and market algorithms among other areas. Not surprisingly the work is in support of Google products and a wide variety of general challenges such as optimizing infrastructure and protecting privacy.

Today the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $17.7 million in funding for 12 Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) projects, which will bring together the statistics, mathematics and theoretical computer science communities to develop the foundations of data science. Conducted at 14 institutions in 11 states, these projects will promote long-term research and training activities in data science that transcend disciplinary boundaries.

As smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and other smart devices become more prevalent in our lives, computer scientists have raised concerns that these network-enabled devices, if not properly secured, could be co-opted to steal data or invade user privacy. Now researchers at the University of Washington have demonstrated how it is possible to transform a smart device into a surveillance tool that can collect information about the body position and movements of the user, as well as other people in the device's immediate vicinity.

In 2017, the idea that biological differences drive social inequality is considered fairly offensive. For the incurious, the taboo around this argument makes it exciting. But unlike people, not all ideas are created equally, and they should not be treated with same amount of seriousness — especially when those ideas ignore both a broad scientific debate that’s gone on for years and clear evidence that women in tech are excluded more than in other industries.

If you hit the annual Illinois State Fair in Springfield this weekend, you'll see the usual attractions: livestock exhibits, a ferris wheel, puffy funnel cakes. You might also be surprised to find a small booth for one of the largest technology companies in the world. Google has long invested in projects to get kids interested in technology. Now, Google.org is giving the 4-H club a $1.5 million grant to help teach its 6 million members across the country about computer science.

A new computing technology called "organismoids" mimics some aspects of human thought by learning how to forget unimportant memories while retaining more vital ones. "The human brain is capable of continuous lifelong learning," said Kaushik Roy, Purdue University's Edward G. Tiedemann Jr. Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "And it does this partially by forgetting some information that is not critical. I learn slowly, but I keep forgetting other things along the way, so there is a graceful degradation in my accuracy of detecting things that are old. What we are trying to do is mimic that behavior of the brain to a certain extent, to create computers that not only learn new information but that also learn what to forget."

The more things change, the more they stay the same. While exascale supercomputers mark a next step in performance capability, at the broader architectural level, the innovations that go into such machines will be the result of incremental improvements to the same components that have existed on HPC systems for several years. In large-scale supercomputing, many performance trends have jacked up capability and capacity—but the bottlenecks have not changed since the dawn of computing as we know it.

University uses model from closely observed master’s in computer science on undergraduates for first time, finds notable success and sees path to shaving a year or more off in-person instruction. Georgia Institute of Technology's online, MOOC-inspired master's degree in computer science has many educators watching closely. This spring, the university tried a similar approach for undergraduates and found it so successful that it's continuing along a path to shave off up to a year and a half of in-person instruction for students pursuing a bachelor's degree.

Today, banks are increasingly using software to decide who will get a loan, courts to judge who should be denied bail, and hospitals to choose treatments for patients. These uses of software make it critical that the software does not discriminate against groups or individuals, say computer science researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Professor Alexandra Meliou in the College of Information and Computer Sciences says, “The increased role of software and the potential impact it has on people’s lives makes software fairness a critical property."

Science is fascinating to many, but sentences that are full of expert-level terms and description can scare away even the most passionate readers. Can scientists learn to talk about their research without using too many technical terms? One of the obstacles to avoiding jargon is that scientists suffer from "the curse of knowledge" – they simply do not remember not knowing what they now know as experts.

In what reads like science fiction becoming reality, researchers at the University of Washington have been able to successfully infect a computer with malware coded into a strand of DNA. In order to see if a computer could be compromised in that way, the team included a known security vulnerability in a DNA-processing program before creating a synthetic DNA strand with the malicious code embedded. A computer then analyzed the “infected” strand, and as a result of the malware in the DNA, the researchers were able to remotely exploit the computer. The results were published in a recent paper.

I’m a lecturer in computer science at Stanford. I’ve taught at least four different programming languages, including assembly. I’ve had a single-digit employee number in a startup. Yes, I’m a woman in tech. I have known, worked for, and taught countless men who could have written the now-infamous Google “manifesto” — or who are on some level persuaded by it. Given these facts, I’d like to treat it — and them — with some degree of charity and try to explain why it generated so much outrage.

The U.S. War on Cancer, certainly a worthy cause, is a collection of programs stretching back more than 40 years and abiding under many banners. The latest is the Cancer Moonshot, launched in 2016 by then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, and passed as part of the 21st Century Cures Act. Over the years, computational technology has become an increasingly important component in all of these cancer-fighting programs, hand-in-glove with dramatic advances in understanding cancer biology and a profusion of new experimental technologies – DNA sequencing is just one.

On August 14, SpaceX intends to launch one of its Dragon Spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center to the International Space Station. Part of the payload will be include an HPE supercomputer. This supercomputer, called the Spaceborne Computer, is part of a year-long experiment conducted by HPE and NASA to run a high performance commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) computer system in space, which has never been done before. The goal is for the system to operate seamlessly in the harsh conditions of space for one year – roughly the amount of time it will take to travel to Mars.

A Google engineer who got fired over a controversial memo that criticized the company's diversity policies said that there might be biological reasons there are fewer women engineers. But top computer science schools have proven that a few cultural changes can increase the number of women in the field. In 2006, only about 10 percent of computer science majors at Harvey Mudd College were women. That's pretty low since Harvey Mudd is a school for students who are interested in science, math and technology. Then, Maria Klawe began her tenure as president of the college.

Imagine a world without Google and you will see your life immediately coming to a standstill. That is the power of Google — a tiny fraction of the products powered by the science behind computers, saving the users a great amount of their precious time. Indisputably, computer science has affected the entire human race in such a way that there is no point of going back. In order to survive, one has to be on a par with the continuously unfolding trends of time. So, it is becoming mandatory for everyone to receive quality computer education irrespective of what field they have chosen to pursue.