The interdisciplinary nexus of biology and engineering, known as synthetic biology, is growing at a rapid pace, opening new vistas that could scarcely be imagined a short time ago. In new research, Alex Green, a professor at ASU's Biodesign Institute, demonstrates how living cells can be induced to carry out computations in the manner of tiny robots or computers. The results of the new study have significant implications for intelligent drug design and smart drug delivery, green energy production, low-cost diagnostic technologies and even the development of futuristic nanomachines capable of hunting down cancer cells or switching off aberrant genes.

Turbulence, the violently unruly disturbance of plasma, can prevent plasma from growing hot enough to fuel fusion reactions. Long a puzzling concern of researchers has been the impact on turbulence of atoms recycled from the walls of tokamaks that confine the plasma. These atoms are neutral, meaning that they have no charge and are thus unaffected by the tokamak’s magnetic field or plasma turbulence, unlike the electrons and ions — or atomic nuclei — in the plasma. Yet, experiments have suggested that the neutral atoms may be significantly enhancing the edge plasma turbulence, hence the theoretical interest in their effects.

Eduard Porta-Pardo, a senior researcher in the Life Sciences Department at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), with the collaboration of a team of international scientists, has undertaken the first ever comparative analysis of sub-gene algorithms that mine the genetic information in cancer databases. These powerful data-sifting tools are helping untangle the complexity of cancer, and find previously unidentified mutations that are important in creating cancer cells.

Wordsworth found it in a host of daffodils; Nan Shepherd in the nooks of the Cairngorms. For Monet it popped up all over the place, from the windmills and canals of Amsterdam, to the sailing boats of Argenteuil. What lends a scene beauty has long been left to the poets and painters to define, but that may be about to change. In a new study, researchers trained a computer to tell scenic views from blots on the landscape. One day it could help with decisions over what land to protect, and how better to design new towns and cities, the scientists claim.

Modern medicine has brought us quite a bit of amazing things. I, for one, love not dying from infections, from polio or mumps. Not to mention not pooping myself to death when I have a glass of water. These are things that I think we can all agree are good. Even with that progress, though, many of humanity’s oldest diseases and disorders are pernicious, but DARPA (yeah, that one) has started looking into some brain-computer interfaces that might do the trick.

An update from the Wild Wild West of fake news technologies: A team of computer scientists have figured out how to make words come out of the mouth of former President Barack Obama — on video — by using artificial intelligence. If you've been on the Internet at any point in the last year, there's a good chance you've come across fake news articles. Soon we may see a wellspring of fake news videos. As a team out of the University of Washington explains in a new paper titled "Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio," they've made several fake videos of Obama.

The crux of being a successful software developer is the same as in every career: hard work is what will determine your success. With the myths and misconceptions however, many people begin doubting themselves when it comes to a career in software. The claim that the software industry demands that a programmer have a degree from a prestigious college or be a math genius to be successful are not as true as you would think. A college degree will certainly help if you wish to pursue a career in software development. When recruiters compare resumes for potential candidates, a CS degree will certainly set you apart. Although, there’s a lot more that a recruiter will see than just your qualification.

Autonomous robots can inspect nuclear power plants, clean up oil spills in the ocean, accompany fighter planes into combat and explore the surface of Mars. Yet for all their talents, robots still can't make a cup of tea. That's because tasks such as turning the stove on, fetching the kettle and finding the milk and sugar require perceptual abilities that, for most machines, are still a fantasy. Among them is the ability to make sense of 3-D objects. While it's relatively straightforward for robots to "see" objects with cameras and other sensors, interpreting what they see, from a single glimpse, is more difficult.

In order to store information in the conventional magnetic memories of electronic devices, the materials' small magnetic domains work by pointing up or down according to the magnetic fields. To generate these fields it is necessary to produce electric currents, but these currents heat up materials and a large amount of energy is spent cooling them. Practically 40% of the electrical energy going into computers (or "Big Data" servers) dissipates as heat. In 2007, French scientists observed that when the magnetic materials are put into ultra-thin layers and voltage is applied, the amount of current and energy needed to point the magnetic domains was reduced by 4%. However, this slight reduction was not significant enough to be applied to devices.

Female, black and Latino student participation in Advanced Placement computer science exams has more than doubled in the past year, helped by the introduction of an AP course designed to introduce principles, according to a new report. More than 19,700 female students took an AP computer science exam in 2017, a 135% increase from 2016 and a dramatic increase from the 2,600 female students that took the AP Computer Science exam 10 years ago, according to results released by non-profit Code.org Tuesday. Participation by black and Latino students increased by 170% since 2016, to more than 22,000. These gains are fastest growing among the population of students taking AP computer sciences, which doubled last year to more than 111,000, according to the report, which used AP College Board data.

As climate change accelerates, IBM is galvanizing the global science community with a massive infusion of computing resources, weather data, and cloud services to help researchers examine the effects of climate change, and explore strategies to mitigate its effects. IBM pledges to help direct the equivalent of up to $200 million for up to five climate-related projects judged to offer the greatest potential impact, and will then broadly share the experiments’ results. IBM is inviting members of the global science community to propose research projects that could benefit from World Community Grid, an IBM Citizenship initiative that provides researchers with enormous amounts of free computing power to conduct large-scale environmental and health-related investigations.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a bit of a history with genomics, to put it mildly. In 1977, microbiologist Carl Woese uprooted the tree of life, a concept dating back to the early 19th century that explored how organisms were related and evolved. Woese is credited with discovering the third domain that organisms could fall into—Archaea—consisting of single-celled organisms that are vastly different from bacteria, plants or animals. This discovery changed how researchers viewed biology, as Archaea was practically a new life form.

The Health Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Division of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego, has deployed its secure and compliant Cloud solution, Sherlock Cloud, in Amazon Web Services (AWS). This solution addresses the gap that currently exists in infrastructure level compliance offered by public cloud platforms with a comprehensive, managed compliance capability offered by Sherlock Cloud, thereby giving customers the option of buying services on premise (@SDSC) or in the Cloud (@AWS). The initial set of managed services focuses on meeting the NIST Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and HIPAA requirements.

Retail sales and truck driving are two of the most common jobs in America. They are also jobs that may eventually be automated. That's why David Delmar, executive director and founder of Resilient Coders, said, "Coding is the new blue-collar job." Accepting that reality, though, means that a lot has to change about how we educate kids. Yet, "For most states and school districts, the notion of computer science for every student is a relatively new and unexplored topic," according to Code.org.

Managing an IT department at the best of times can be a struggle, and managing a security team has its own special challenges. But whatever you do, don't put an engineer, even your best, in charge, unless their people management skills are as good as their infosec knowhow. “All my staff are basically volunteers,” Mike Murray, VP of intelligence for mobile security biz Lookout, told The Register this week. “The people are all so highly competent and completely in demand. I know any person on my team could have four jobs at the end of the day if they asked for it.”

On a hot and breezy June day in Austin, parents, friends, brothers and sisters navigated through main campus at The University of Texas at Austin and helped carry luggage for the new arrivals to their dorm rooms. Thirty-four high school students from mostly low-income Title I schools in Central Texas, some from as far away as Houston, said good-bye to their families. The students came for a different kind of summer camp, where for one week they became part of a science team that used computer programming and internet-connected technologies to solve a real-world problem.

The second annual Women in HPC luncheon was held in June 2017, during the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. The luncheon provides participants the opportunity to network with industry leaders and meet new contacts as well as brainstorm about ways to improve diversity and inclusivity for women within the HPC community. As keynote speaker Angelo Apa of Lenovo noted, “if this was an easy problem to solve we would have fixed it already, so we need to generate ideas. My request of you today is in exchange for lunch help us solve these problems.” Apa, technical sales and business development director at Lenovo Enterprise business group, shared the reality that between 18 and 30 percent of the workforce in the tech industry is female depending upon the country.

Over at ALCF, Joan Koka writes that researchers at the National Cancer Institute are using Argonne supercomputers to advance disease studies by enhancing our understanding of RNA, biological polymers that are fundamentally involved in health and disease. In collaboration with staff from the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), researchers have perfected a technique that accurately computes the 3-D structure of RNA sequences. This method, which relies on a computer program known as RS3D and Mira – the ninth fastest supercomputer in the world – gives researchers studying cancer and other diseases structural insights about relevant RNAs that can be used to advance computer-assisted drug design and development.

A meeting of Rochester's Girl Develop It chapter looks a lot like a group of freelancers working in a coffee shop. Heads bent over laptops, brows furrowed in concentration, the click-clacking of computer keys creating a sort of musical orchestration. According to the National Center for Women in Technology, women represent just 26 percent of professional computing occupations in the 2016 US workforce. Girl Develop It, a national, nonprofit organization, is trying to confront that statistic through affordable, judgement-free events and meet-ups for women interested in web and software development.

By 2021, job candidates who possess skills in data science and analytics — or DSA — will be more than twice as likely to be hired as those who don’t. That’s according to an April 2017 Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) report titled “Investing in America’s Data Science and Analytics Talent: The Case for Action.” Dr. Brandeis Marshall, an associate professor and chair of computer and information sciences at Spelman College. In addition, only about one out of every four university leaders can guarantee that their graduates will have DSA skills, the report states.

If this is the biology laboratory of the future, it doesn’t look so different from today’s. Scientists in white lab coats walk by with boxes of frozen tubes. The chemicals on the shelves—bottles of pure alcohol, bins of sugar, protein, and salts—are standard issue for growing microbes and manipulating their genes. You don’t even notice the robots until you hear them: They sound like crickets singing to each other amid the low roar of fans. The robots work for Zymergen, a biotechnology company that moved into this former electronics factory on the eastern shore of California’s San Francisco Bay in 2014. They spend their days carrying out experiments on microbes, searching for ways to increase the production of useful chemicals.

In the recent ISC17 conference in Frankfurt, Germany, the HPC community’s attention was inevitably focused on big supercomputers, new processors, and other technologies. Of course, there were a number of voices also calling for attention to the non-hardware aspects of HPC, especially software and people. However, most of those discussions centered on programmers, sysadmins, and researchers using HPC, as is customary in the HPC community.

We truly believe students in the Sarasota-Manatee area have the potential to become the region’s next technology leaders and we all need to work together to prepare them for this next important step. So how do we meet the ever-changing and growing demands of today’s students? The answer is by preparing teachers through dynamic academic programs at USF Sarasota-Manatee, which has taken on a key role to assist with the important and critical professional development of local teachers in computer science, or CS, and Information Technology, or IT, education.

Can a self-driving vehicle be moral, act like humans do, or act like humans expect humans to? Contrary to previous thinking, a ground-breaking new study has found for the first time that human morality can be modelled meaning that machine based moral decisions are, in principle, possible. The research, Virtual Reality experiments investigating human behavior and moral assessments, from The Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück, and published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, used immersive virtual reality to allow the authors to study human behavior in simulated road traffic scenarios.

The perpetual focus on hardware performance as a primary success metric in high-performance computing (HPC) often diverts attention from the role of people in the process of producing application output. But it is ultimately this output and the rate at which it can be delivered, in other words the productivity of HPC, which justifies the huge investments in this technology. However, the time needed to come up with a specific result or the “time to solution”, which it is often called, depends on many factors, including the speed and quality of software development. This is one of the solution steps where people play a major role.