science wire

A tabletop system where users can come together and view shared content will be unveiled today [Tuesday 9 October].

Computer-generated images can be a little more realistic - and a lot cheaper to make - with a rendering program created by a Cornell graduate student.

  C.S. Chang, who heads the Center for Edge Physics Simulation at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, poses by a high-performance computer cluster at the laboratory.

The Sequedex team was originally tasked with investigating DNA analysis on the Laboratory's Roadrunner supercomputer, but quickly realized that improvements in the algorithm made having so much hardware unnecessary.

The speed boost that a powerful computer processor can provide seems great, but the electric bill can be a real shocker. Not unlike choosing between a Ford Mustang and a Toyota Prius, faster processors require more energy to run, making them more expensive for their users. While speed versus power consumption is an ever-present tradeoff in designing computer processors, Nam Sung Kim is optimizing processors in a way that delivers both speed and energy efficiency and, for example, could save billions of dollars in electrical costs for data centers.

Sussex scientists help build computer model of honey bee brain University of Sussex scientists are working with partners at the University of Sheffield to produce the first accurate computer models o

Yale computer scientist Daniel A. Spielman has been named a 2012 MacArthur Fellow, an honor popularly known as the "genius" grant.

Scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex are embarking on an ambitious project to produce the first accurate computer models of a honey bee brain in a bid to advance our understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and how animals think. The team will build models of the systems in the brain that govern a honey bee's vision and sense of smell.

2012 IEEE SciVis Winner: "Key Moments of the Evolution of the Polarization Domains in Barium Titanate.

Cornell computer scientists have proposed an innovative wireless design that could greatly reduce the cost and power consumption of massive cloud computing data centers, while improving performance.

: Carnegie Mellon's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab Participates In Brain Imaging Data Exchange To Advance Autism Research-Carnegie Mellon News - Carnegie Mellon University More than 1,100 Autism and Cont

A team of young investigators uncovered the messages behind works of art in the Fitzwilliam Museum, learnt the secrets behind QR Codes, and found out how to carry out software upgrades on Mars during the first Realise project Taster Day of 2012-13.

Someday, virtual reality may be so well done that you won't be able to tell it's just computer animation. To make that happen we'll have to hear it as well as see it, from dramatic noises like the sound of a breaking glass to subtle details like the rustling of clothing as characters move. Cornell researchers who specialize in creating sound for computer animation are adding the sounds of cloth to their repertoire.

The University of Sydney and Qantas have entered into a four-year partnership to develop a flight planning system that will help the airline fly optimised routes, reduce fuel consumption and improve operational effectiveness.

A prototype sensor array that can be worn on the chest automatically maps the wearer's environment, recognizing movement between floors.

Imagine a mobile device that visually displays a street map and whose screen physically mutates to show the hilly terrain and buildings.

The California Institute for Tele and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego has become the inaugural test site for a new approach to cooling computer servers - a technology that could improve energy efficiency and enable higher-performance computing.

Venkat Chandrasekaran, an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences, arrived at Caltech in early September.

How can knowledge be spread rapidly across large populations using social media? To explore this question, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are launching a new website today (Tuesday, Sept. 18) that allows visitors to spread the word quickly about important issues. The key is a novel "influence score” that quantifies the role each participant plays and illustrates each user's social graph through a unique visualization.

Posted under: Engineering , Health and Medicine , News Releases , Research , Science , Technology People suffering from asthma or other chronic lung problems are typically only able to get a measure of their lung function at the doctor's office a few times a year by blowing into a specialized piece of equipment.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego is seeking innovative applications for the next round of user allocations on its data-intensive Gordon supercomputer, which went into operation earlier this year.

The Columbia Engineering methodology enables carbon footprinting and hotspot analysis across thousands of products simultaneously. Shown here are examples of carbon intensities (i.e. total GHG by weight; broken down to stages of the supply chain) for individual products as well as rollup views of brands and countries.

Connections in networks optimize trade-offs between popularity and similarity. New nodes in growing networks tend to connect not only to popular existing nodes, but also to similar nodes that may be not so popular. Courtesy of Justin Cheng, Bradley Huffaker , and Dmitri Krioukov, CAIDA and San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego .

Mass Obs to store messages marking 90 years of BBC radio Messages marking 90 years of BBC radio - to be curated by singer Damon Albarn into a worldwide transmission - will be preserved at the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex.

Wanmin Wu is a postdoctoral researcher in the Calit2 Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at UC San Diego A researcher now at the University of California, San Diego, Wanmin Wu, wrote the outstanding Ph.D.

An international team led by University of Toronto physicists has developed a simple new technique to induce high-temperature superconductivity in a semiconductor for the first time - using Scotch Tape. The method paves the way for new devices that could be used in quantum computing and to improve energy efficiency.

] This image is from a video showing the ground motions of a simulated Magnitude 8.0 earthquake along the San Andreas Fault through some densely populated areas.

AUSTIN, Texas — The University of Texas at Austin has been selected to receive an $18.5 million grant over the next five years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create and lead a nanosystems engineering research center.

Robo sprint king Usain Volt and marathon specialist The Mobot will be demonstrating their athletic prowess at a special exhibition of university research on Plymouth Hoe.

Reception and service at central level for international students after arrival at KTH. For Master's students For Exchange students At the KTH Symposium, the director of the U.S. Nat

By Richard North 6 September 2012 A team of medical specialists from the University is visiting South America this month, looking to link with researchers and clinicians who are working on non-communicable diseases (NCDs).

Reception and service at central level for international students after arrival at KTH.

A new system that automatically streamlines database access patterns can make large Web applications up to three times as fast.

CARTHE Media: Julie Hollenbeck 206/321-0509 jhollenbeck [a] rsmas.miami (p) edu Cray XE6M Supercomputer Vital to Hydrocarbon Research in the Gulf of Mexico in the Wake of the Deepwater Horizon

Researchers from The Australian National University have taken a quantum leap towards developing the next-generation super-fast networks needed to drive future computing. Mr Seiji Armstrong, a PhD researcher from the Department of Quantum Science in the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, has led a team which has developed a technique that allows for quantum information to travel at higher bandwidth using a beam of light and the phenomenon called entanglement.

The UK's Software Sustainability Institute is on the lookout for a team of researchers to take part in its new Fellows programme to develop a better understanding of the way that software is used in research.

Computer graphics researchers at Cornell and Harvard have created software that will translate a graphic image of a character from a movie or video game, or even something you've created yourself, into a posable plastic model manufactured by a 3-D printer. Eventually this capability might be built into games and other software, the researchers said.

A new resource launched today by the University of Cambridge will help researchers seek out and access high-value equipment across five universities. " In today's climate of cut-backs and austerity measures, opportunities to increase efficiency and reduce costs are sought after. With this in mind, a new resource launched today by the University of Cambridge aims to improve research management by making greater use of existing equipment and facilities, and by sharing these between universities wherever possible.

A new system for crowdsourcing database operations spares the user from worrying about the computational details but improves cost effectiveness. Crowdsourcing is a technique for farming out labor-intensive tasks over the Internet by splitting them into small chunks that dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people complete at their desks for a few cents each.

Ian Foster will serve a third term as director of the Computation Institute , continuing his mission to advance the study and application of computation across the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, University officials announced.

Typesafe, a company created just a year ago at EPFL and headquartered in the Science Park, has raised $14 million to commercialize a new programming language called Scala.

Researchers from UCL are analysing a serious game called TARGET to see if it could help workers develop skills such as negotiating and trust-building in the workplace. Serious games are video games designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. A collaborative project between 17 partners, including UCL, TARGET aims to use the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) environment provided by the game to support the development of workers.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's magazine, Technology Review , has named Assistant Professor Joyce Poon one of the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35.

Bang. Clatter. Tinkle. Jingle. When solid objects collide in the real world we hear a sharp impact sound, sometimes followed by a ringing aftershock.

To put clothes on their characters, computer graphic artists usually simulate cloth by creating a thin sheet, then adding some sort of texture. But that doesn't work for cable-knit sweaters. To make the image realistic, the computer has to simulate the surface right down to the intricate intertwining of yarn.

Landslides kill ten times more people across the world than was previously thought, according to research by Durham University, UK.

Money laundering and other suspicious behaviours will become more detectable with the refinement of a 2D graphic visualisation tool currently under development at the University of Sydney's Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies.