Does picking a college major guarantee a certain salary after graduation? Not necessarily. But jobs site Indeed just released a study that analyzed more than 80 million resumes to identify popular majors among U.S. college grads and subsequent average salaries for those students. The company, which is quickly growing its Seattle outpost, looked at the most popular majors and then the types of roles students with those degrees tend to land after graduating.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem devised a method enabling computers to mine databases of patents, inventions and research papers, identifying ideas that can be repurposed to solve new problems or create new products. Specifically, they developed a way for computers to find analogies—comparisons between sometimes disparate methods and problems that highlight underlying similarities. As anyone who enjoyed watching TV's MacGyver disarm a missile with a paperclip or staunch a sulfuric acid leak with a chocolate bar could tell you, analogies can provide critical insights and inspiration for problem solving.

Computer science is a world where women are disproportionately represented. This leads to a gender bias in the way our technology is innovated in the workforce. Technology and computers permeate through many aspects of society and provide the foundation for most modern innovation, but according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, women are significantly underrepresented in the creation of technology. That’s a problem.

A team of scientists from Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), The University of Manchester, Aarhus University and Newcastle University, have developed a way of producing 3D data to show the cardiac conduction system -- the special cells that enable our hearts to beat -- in unprecedented detail. The findings were published in Scientific Reports.

CSRA Inc. announced it has installed a second increment to the Biowulf supercomputing cluster at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Center for Information Technology. Biowulf is designed to process a large number of simultaneous computations that are typical in genomics, image processing, statistical analysis, and other biomedical research areas. “We are proud to report the next stage of supercomputing power for Biowulf at NIH,” said Vice President Kamal Narang, head of CSRA’s Federal Health Group. “CSRA’s world-renowned HPC experts partnered with NIH to make this advancement possible.

It has been argued that the ability of humans to recognize social signals is crucial to mastering social intelligence - but can robots learn to read human social cues and adapt or correct their own behavior accordingly? In a recent study, researchers examined how people react to robots that exhibit faulty behavior compared to perfectly performing robots. The results, published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, show that the participants took a significantly stronger liking to the faulty robot than the robot that interacted flawlessly.

The Internet Engineering Task Force is being asked to formally adopt its informal philosophy that when it comes to new standards and protocols, end users' needs must come first. The "best current practice" drawn up by Internet Architecture Board member Mark Nottingham – currently in its fifth draft – states simply that its purpose is to ensure that "Internet Standards consider end users as their highest-priority concern." That may seem like an obvious statement but in recent years, corporate influence on internet organizations has grown and many proposed standards at the Internet Engineering Task Force have been dragged into fights that have more to do with company interests – or fears – than end users.

The Computational Science Initiative (CSI) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory will be leading the 2017 New York Scientific Data Summit, to be held from Aug. 7 through 9 at NYU’s Kimmel Center for University Life. Jointly organized by Brookhaven Lab, NYU, and Stony Brook University, the annual conference will bring together data experts, scientists, application developers, and end users from national labs, universities, technology companies, utilities, and federal and state governments to share ideas for unlocking insights from scientific big data.

Now that scientists can detect the wiggly distortions in space-time created by the merger of massive black holes, they are setting their sights on the dynamics and aftermath of other cosmic duos that unify in catastrophic collisions. Working with an international team, scientists at Berkeley Lab have developed new computer models to explore what happens when a black hole joins with a neutron star – the superdense remnant of an exploded star. The simulations, carried out in part at NERSC, are intended to help detectors home in on the gravitational-wave signals. Telescopes, too, can search for the brilliant bursts of gamma-rays and the glow of the radioactive matter that these exotic events can spew into surrounding space.

Specialists expect nothing less than a technological revolution from quantum computers, which they hope will soon allow them to solve problems that are currently too complex for classical supercomputers. Commonly discussed areas of application include data encryption and decryption, as well as special problems in the fields of physics, quantum chemistry and materials research. But when it comes to concrete questions that only quantum computers can answer, experts have remained relatively vague.

Educators in Iowa City and Solon say having the right tools to boost computer science lessons will be key as a new law comes into play. The new Iowa law, which took effect July 1, encourages teachers to increase computer science lessons in elementary, middle and high schools and comes with a professional development fund to help teachers prepare.

Researchers from EPFL, together with other institutes, have developed a robotic eel that swims through contaminated water to find the source of the pollution. The sensor-equipped robot can be controlled remotely or move on its own. In tests carried out in a small section of Lake Geneva, the robot was able to generate maps of water conductivity and temperature. EPFL researchers are taking part in an ambitious project funded by the Swiss NanoTera Program to develop a swimming robot that can detect the source of water pollution.

The data captured by today's digital cameras is often treated as the raw material of a final image. Before uploading pictures to social networking sites, even casual cellphone photographers might spend a minute or two balancing color and tuning contrast, with one of the many popular image-processing programs now available. This week at Siggraph, the premier digital graphics conference, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Google are presenting a new system that can automatically retouch images in the style of a professional photographer.

If you don't have time to call your senator, stage a protest or partake in a rescue mission at a slaughterhouse, you can at least save some chickens on your phone. Thanks to the new animal rights app Paintball Hero, created by 17-year-old game developer Skylar Thomas, animal liberation is now as easy as click, swipe, win. An animal rights activist since early childhood, Thomas sought to start a conversation about animal abuse and mistreatment through gaming. He partnered with PETA2, the youth chapter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, to turn animal rights activism into a 3-D mobile app experience.

The past year has been tough for enterprise security teams. Attacks like Petya and NotPetya suggest that the impact scale is increasing dramatically. The recent leak of government-developed malware and hoarded vulnerabilities has given cybercriminals greater capabilities. IT is struggling to keep pace with the flow of important security software patches and updates, and the continued adoption of new technologies like the internet of things (IoT) creates new vulnerabilities to contend with.

Last week, Elon Musk dashed off 125 characters announcing a remarkably ambitious plan to send Amtrak to an early grave. “Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins,” he proclaimed in a tweet. Yet something about this particular moonshot seemed off.

Panelists at the Microsoft Policy Innovation Center event highlight that while there is generally a lack of qualified K-12 computer science teachers that need training. But, the overwhelming sentiment pointed in the direction of schools and decision-makers in the space to start being more strategic about their course offerings and how they target funding –– not just at the K-12 level, but across the entire spectrum of education. Understanding that courses at the K-12 and even early education level prepare students with the primary knowledge they need to pursue STEM fields in college and the workforce, it's critical that K-12 leaders don't wait around for qualified teachers to show up.

As you’ve probably noticed, science is going through an extremely tough time in America right now. When researchers aren’t bracing themselves for massive and historic funding cuts, scientists are being censored, bullied, and dismissed by the federal government – an administration that is shoring up the views of anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers. There are, however, plenty of pro-science lawmakers that aim to push back the tide. Take Representative Jacky Rosen, a Congresswoman from Nevada’s 3rd District: She’s just introduced a bill to the House that aims to get as many girls into computer science and coding as possible.

As a high school student, and even as an early undergraduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Max Collins was not sure what he wanted to do after graduation from college. This all changed as a result of his time spent as an NCSA Blue Waters intern and the time he spent working with Dr. Alan Craig, an NCSA researcher and leading expert in augmented and virtual reality. Collins, a psychology major graduate, now has a plan of action for the next phase of his education and his eventual professional pursuits. Collins was especially interested in technology, but more from a non-traditional point of view than a typical engineering student.

Nick Nystrom, senior director of research at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), has been appointed Interim Director of the center. Nystrom succeeds Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies, who have been co-directors of PSC since its founding in 1986. During the interim period, Nystrom will oversee PSC’s state-of-the-art research into high-performance computing, data analytics, science and communications, working closely with Levine and Roskies to ensure a smooth and seamless transition.

Supercomputing, by definition, is an esoteric, exotic, and relatively small slice of the overall IT landscape, but it is, also by definition, a vital driver of innovation within IT and in all of the segments of the market where simulation, modeling, and now machine learning are used to provide goods and services. As we have pointed out many times, the supercomputing business is not, however, one that is easy to participate in and generate a regular stream of revenues and predictable profits and it is most certainly one where the vendors and their customers have to, by necessity, take the long view. This is what it means to be on the bleeding edge.

Change was in the air at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2010, two years into the operation of the soon-to-be retired Ranger supercomputer of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Ranger represented a new class of cutting-edge computing systems designed specifically for getting more people — U.S. researchers from all fields of science and engineering — to use them. Ranger and a few other systems of the NSF-funded Teragrid cyberinfrastructure, such as Kraken at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at UT Knoxville, were going to come offline in the next few years.

Six proposals have been selected to participate in a new partnership between two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) user facilities through the “Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science” (FICUS) initiative. The expertise and capabilities available at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) – both at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) – will help researchers explore the wealth of genomic and metagenomic data generated worldwide through access to supercomputing resources and computational science experts to accelerate discoveries.

Researchers have taken an important step toward the long-sought goal of a quantum computer, which in theory should be capable of vastly faster computations than conventional computers, for certain kinds of problems. The new work shows that collections of ultracold molecules can retain the information stored in them, for hundreds of times longer than researchers have previously achieved in these materials.

Modern films and TV shows are filled with spectacular computer-generated sequences computed by rendering systems that simulate the flow of light in a three-dimensional scene and convert the information into a two-dimensional image. But computing the thousands of light rays (per frame) to achieve accurate color, shadows, reflectivity and other light-based characteristics is a labor-intensive, time-consuming and expensive undertaking. An alternative is to render the images using only a few light rays. That saves time and labor but results in inaccuracies that show up as objectionable "noise" in the final image.