Every day our bodies come under a barrage of toxic agents – cigarette smoke, the sun, free radicals and other carcinogenic substances – that create damaging lesions in our DNA that can initiate cancer and other human diseases. Fortunately, nature has provided living organisms with repair processes to seek out and remove such dangerous lesions; repair allows the DNA to be restored to its original base sequence so it can carry out its fundamental jobs: to be replicated and to be copied into a sister molecule, RNA, for the manufacture of proteins and other tasks.

Computer Science students are constantly getting into trouble for lifting entire blocks of code from the Internet. Yesterday, the New York Times published a fascinating piece about academic dishonesty in the computer science field, which it says is rampant. Here’s some eye-catching figures. At UC Berkley, 100 out of a cohort of 700 computer science students were discovered to have used code that wasn’t entirely their own. At Brown University, almost half of all academic honor code violations involve CompSci students. Is the problem that Computer Science students are just bad, unethical, dishonest people? Or is the issue that the way people write software in an academic setting is completely at odds with how programmers work in the real world.

The care, feeding and sustained growth of the HPC industry increasingly is in the hands of the commercial market sector – in particular, it’s the hyperscale companies and their embrace of AI and deep learning – that will drive healthy and stable, if not spectacular, expansion of the market through 2021 and beyond. Those are some of the top-line findings announced today by Addison Snell, CEO of HPC industry watcher Intersect 360 Research at the ISC conference in Frankfurt.

On June 19, the K computer took first place for the second consecutive time in the HPCG benchmark, a new index developed to create a more realistic view of supercomputer performance compared to the commonly used LINPACK benchmark. This success, which surpasses the second place achieved in 2014 and 2015, was made possible by subsequent improvements of the performance of the system and applications.

The flight decks of aviation-capable vessels like aircraft carriers bustle with noise and danger -- screaming jets, snapping steel cables and powerful tractors and forklifts. Planning and orchestrating this high-octane dance requires precision and accuracy from those responsible for directing deck traffic. To make the jobs of aircraft handlers easier, the Office of Naval Research's (ONR) TechSolutions program has sponsored the development of the Deployable Ship Integration Multitouch System -- DSIMS, for short.

Ordinarily, light particles — photons — don’t interact. If two photons collide in a vacuum, they simply pass through each other. An efficient way to make photons interact could open new prospects for both classical optics and quantum computing, an experimental technology that promises large speedups on some types of calculations. In recent years, physicists have enabled photon-photon interactions using atoms of rare elements cooled to very low temperatures. But in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters, MIT researchers describe a new technique for enabling photon-photon interactions at room temperature, using a silicon crystal with distinctive patterns etched into it. In physics jargon, the crystal introduces “nonlinearities” into the transmission of an optical signal.

Basic economics suggests that if college students see booming demand for specific skills, a stampede to major in such lucrative fields should ensue. For years, tech companies, banks, and even traditional industrial companies have been hiring programmers, software developers, and computer scientists as fast as they can find them. Since 2010, there has been a 59 percent leap in jobs for software application developers—and a 15 percent jump in pay, to an average $102,300 last year—according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Accounts of tech engineers earning more than pro athletes keep making headlines. So why aren’t more U.S. college students majoring in computer science?

A wireless, battery-less pacemaker that can be implanted directly into a patient's heart is being introduced by researchers from Rice University and their colleagues at the Texas Heart Institute (THI). The pacemaker designed by the Rice lab of electrical and computer engineering professor Aydin Babakhani harvests energy wirelessly from radio frequency radiation transmitted by an external battery pack. In the prototype presented at IMS, the wireless power transmitter can be up to few centimeters away.

In the last week, we have seen the best and worst of computer technology. In China, Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence program took on and beat the world champion of the complex game of Go, reducing him to tears. Nineteen-year-old Ke Jie described the AI computer as "perfect, flawless, without any emotions". But in airports in the UK and elsewhere last weekend tears were also being shed over computers. In this case, though, the primary emotions were frustration and rage over the chaos caused when British Airways' IT system collapsed, leaving thousands of passengers going nowhere and their baggage stuck they knew not where. What is striking about both these cases is how difficult human beings found it to explain exactly what was happening inside the brains of the computers.

If everyone used electricity at a constant rate, generating power would be simple. But spikes in use lead to under-utilized power and ultimately increased costs. Scientists used PSC’s Bridges and former Greenfield systems to understand the economic and engineering challenges of “behind the meter” battery storage.

An Australian-Chinese research team has created the world's thinnest hologram, paving the way towards the integration of 3D holography into everyday electronics like smart phones, computers and TVs. Interactive 3D holograms are a staple of science fiction -- from Star Wars to Avatar -- but the challenge for scientists trying to turn them into reality is developing holograms that are thin enough to work with modern electronics.

A new window in astronomy has been firmly opened with a third detection of gravitational waves. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory(LIGO) has made yet another detection of ripples in space and time, demonstrating that the detection of gravitational waves may soon become commonplace. As was the case with the first two detections, the waves were generated when two black holes collided to form a larger black hole. The newfound black hole, formed by the merger, has a mass about 49 times that of our sun. This fills in a gap between the masses of the two merged black holes detected previously by LIGO, with solar masses of 62 (first detection) and 21 (second detection).

A month into the academic year, Ashok Kumar Tyagi, principal of the evening shift at Sangam Vihar’s C Block Government Boys Senior Secondary School, had a problem. His physics teacher for Class 12 had retired and he didn’t have the money to pay his chemistry teacher. “Our chemistry teacher is teaching without a salary,” said Tyagi, one afternoon in his office this May. “But he knows the system — stoicism in adversity.”

Most of us regard self-driving cars, voice assistants, and other artificially intelligent technologies as revolutionary. For the next generation, however, these wonders will have always existed. AI for them will be more than a tool; in many cases, AI will be their co-worker and a ubiquitous part of their lives. If the next generation is to use AI and big data effectively – if they’re to understand their inherent limitations, and build even better platforms and intelligent systems — we need to prepare them now. That will mean some adjustments in elementary education and some major, long-overdue upgrades in computer science instruction at the secondary level.

Our world has been dramatically changed with the advances and investments in technology through various tools, applications and systems developed over the past several decades. This holds true in our personal lives as well as our working environments. For example, our nation annually spends billions on technology for education with many questioning the return on investment. Some would say the current K-12 education system is woefully deficient when it comes to preparing graduates with the necessary skills to enter the workforce, particularly technology skills.

The body has a natural way of fighting cancer – it's called the immune system, and it is tuned to defend our cells against outside infections and internal disorder. But occasionally, it needs a helping hand. Immunotherapy fights cancer by supercharging the immune system's natural defenses or contributing additional immune elements that can help the body kill cancer cells.

Climate change may keep you awake – and not just metaphorically. Nights that are warmer than normal can harm human sleep, researchers show in a new paper, with the poor and elderly most affected. According to their findings, if climate change is not addressed, temperatures in 2050 could cost people in the United States millions of additional nights of insufficient sleep per year. By 2099, the figure could rise by several hundred million more nights of lost sleep annually.

Stroke patients who learned to use their minds to open and close a device fitted over their paralyzed hands gained some control over their hands, according to a new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. By mentally controlling the device with the help of a brain-computer interface, participants trained the uninjured parts of their brains to take over functions previously performed by injured areas of the brain, the researchers said.

Like many developers about to attend their first major developer conference, Amanda Southworth is looking forward to the week-long event. Besides Monday's keynote, when Apple will unveil the next version of iOS, MacOS and maybe even some new hardware, there will be deep dives into new developer tools and countless networking opportunities. That's enough for any developer to get excited about, but Southworth is not like most other developers.

Thomas Zacharia, who built Oak Ridge National Laboratory into a global supercomputing power, has been selected as the laboratory’s next director by UT-Battelle, the partnership that operates ORNL for the U.S. Department of Energy. “Thomas has a compelling vision for the future of ORNL that is directly aligned with the U.S. Department of Energy’s strategic priorities,” said Joe DiPietro, chair of the UT-Battelle Board of Governors and president of the University of Tennessee.

Rice University computer scientists have adapted a widely used technique for rapid data lookup to slash the amount of computation—and thus energy and time—required for deep learning, a computationally intense form of machine learning. "This applies to any deep-learning architecture, and the technique scales sublinearly, which means that the larger the deep neural network to which this is applied, the more the savings in computations there will be," said lead researcher Anshumali Shrivastava, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice.

President Trump’s proposed $4.1 trillion FY 2018 budget is good for U.S. exascale computing development, but grim for the rest of science and technology spending. As a total crosscut of the DOE Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration, exascale-focused activities receive $508 million, a full 77 percent boost over FY17 enacted levels. The hike puts the U.S. on track to stand up an exascale capable machine by 2021.

Just as Intel, the king of CPUs and the very bloodstream of computing announced that it is ending its Intel Development Forum (IDF) annual event, this week in San Jose, NVIDIA, the king of GPUs and the fuel of Artificial Intelligence is holding its biggest GPU Technology Conference (GTC) annual event yet. Coincidence? Nope. With something north of 95 per cent market share in laptops, desktops, and servers, Intel-the-company is far from even looking weak.

Mathematical and algorithmic developments along these lines are necessary for enabling the detailed study of complex hydrocarbon molecules that are relevant in engine combustion. Existing methods to approximate potential energy functions at the quantum scale need too much computer power and are thus limited to small molecules. Sandia researchers say their technique will speed up quantum mechanical computations and improve predictions made by theoretical chemistry models. Given the computational speedup, these methods can potentially be applied to bigger molecules.

It’s no secret that women are underrepresented in the tech industry, making up about one-quarter of the workforce. And women are less likely to pursue advanced high school coursework or college majors that lead to careers in the high-paying, high-demand tech sector. As a result, policymakers and pundits often focus their attention on the most obvious pain points; developing high school programs and pathway programs designed to drum up interest in STEM subjects that graduates can pursue in college.