science wire

SARINA TALIP takes a journey into the not so distant future, where artificial intelligence makes life less of a chore and computers can recognise objects.

New algorithms allow an autonomous robotic plane to dodge obstacles in a subterranean parking garage, without the use of GPS.

Earthworms creep along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching muscles along the length of their bodies, inching forward with each wave of contractions.

An international team of researchers led by computer scientist Pavel Pevzner, from the University of California, San Diego, have developed a new algorithm to sequence organisms' genomes from a single cell faster and more accurately.

SDSC, NIF to Provide Expertise and Computational Resources on XSEDE The University of California, at San Diego and Yale University have been awarded a collaborative grant by the National Science Foun

Anyone who has tried to build a piece of furniture from scratch knows the frustration of painstakingly cutting pieces of wood, only to discover that they won't fit together because the cutting was not quite accurate enough.

Scientific: David Schlegel, 510-495-2595, djschlegel [a] lbl (p) gov ; Stephen Bailey, 510-495-2604, stephenbailey [a] lbl (p) gov The Third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) has issued Data Release 9 (DR9), the first public release of data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS).

Visual Data Mining of Google Street View Identifies Cities' Distinctive Details : Byron Spice / 412-268-9068 / bspice [a] cs.cmu (p) edu PITTSBURGH—Paris is one of those cities that has a look all its own, something that goes beyond landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame.

ARL:UT's outdoor test tank built to Naval shipyard specifications. The tank is one of ARL:UT's many specialized facilities that provide engineering, integration, testing, and prototyping for research projects.

Alison Duthie joins King's as Director of Programming, King's Cultural Institute.

A new programming language for image-processing algorithms yields code that's much shorter and clearer - but also faster. Image-processing software is a hot commodity: Just look at Instagram, a company built around image processing that Facebook is trying to buy for a billion dollars. Image processing is also going mobile, as more and more people are sending cellphone photos directly to the Web, without transferring them to a computer first.

Hundreds of millions of daily posts on the social networking service Twitter are providing a new window into bullying — a tough nut to crack for researchers.

Using powerful mathematical techniques from information theory, linear systems theory, convex optimization, and functional analysis, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego resolved a 40-year-old open problem in the field of communication. Professor Young-Han Kim tackled the problem in a paper titled, "Feedback capacity of stationary Gaussian channels," which has now received the 2012 Information Theory Paper Award, one of the highest honors in the field of communication theory, awarded each year by the IEEE Information Theory Society.

Can tablets teach children basic math and reading skills' As a professor who studies technology integration in K-12 schools, I can say the answer is yes but with some critical caveats.

Some strands of the World Wide Web are getting a little tattered. When it comes to delivering data to users, the Web still works brilliantly.

Tool developed at Harvard turns animated characters into fully articulated action figures : Caroline Perry , (617) 496-1351 G.I. Joe may have finally met his match.

Miron Livny is pictured near an enclosed bank of distributed computing equipment in the Computer Sciences and Statistics building.

The French company Parrot, world leader in wireless peripherals for mobile phones and already in the market for consumer drones, acquired for 5 million Swiss Francs a majority share in senseFly, a start-up from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL.

Yale computer scientist Daniel Spielman has been named to the inaugural class of Simons Investigators, providing him and Yale's Department of Computer Science with $660,000 over five years for curiosity-driven research.

A group of designers and developers are investigating, through a hands-on workshop, how the emerging field of UltraHaptics might be used in a creative context in the future.

Three exceptional young UCLA scientists were honored by President Obama Monday with Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) — the highest honor bestowed by the U&p

University of California, Berkeley, theoretical astrophysicist Eliot Quataert received an email out of the blue a few weeks ago offering him $100,000 a year for five to 10 years to pursue whatever research he wants. After checking whether the email was a spoof, he accepted. Offers from the Simons Foundation went out to 21 mathematicians, theoretical physicists and theoretical computer scientists across the country, and the first group of Simons Investigators was announced today (Tuesday, July 24) in a paid ad in The New York Times.

Ed Babakanian, CIO, UC San Diego Health Sciences, leads a multidisciplinary team dedicated to advancing health care technology.

A new £3.25m Centre of Excellence for High Performance Computing is bringing together the best academic expertise in the N8 Research Partnership.

Perhaps Hal from "2001: A Space Odyssey" may not have been wrong when he said: "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." Machines - even Apple's Siri - cannot yet completely understand our natural language, a Cornell researcher says. For the second installment of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions lecture series, Cornell's Lillian Lee, professor of computer science, drew 225 faculty, students and guests to Kennedy Hall's Call Auditorium July 18.

The new COSMOS@DiRAC supercomputer will advance our understanding of the origin and structure of our universe. Cosmology is now a precision science, so we need machines like COSMOS to reach out and touch the real universe, to investigate whether our mathematical models are correct." —Professor Stephen Hawking Professor Stephen Hawking has launched the most powerful shared-memory supercomputer in Europe.

Harvard computer scientists develop a tool to improve software fault isolation By Mureji Fatunde '12 : Caroline Perry , (617) 496-1351 A team led by Harvard computer scientists, including two undergr

Researchers at the Peninsula Medical School and Plymouth University are leading a national competition to develop apps that can help young people with diabetes better manage their condition.

Big data needs big power. The server farms that undergird the Internet run on a vast tide of electricity.

For years, the U.S. Navy has employed human divers, equipped with sonar cameras, to search for underwater mines attached to ship hulls.

New digital media is often described as a boundless force for democracy. That is how the arab spring became a twitter revolution.

Your smart phone may soon be able to predict where you are going, according to research by University of Birmingham computer scientists. The researchers have devised an algorithm which is able to capture your mobility patterns and those of your social group and can predict, down to 20 metres, where you might be 24 hours later.

Allan Snavely, a widely recognized expert in high-performance computing whose innovative thinking led to the development of the Gordon supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego, died of an apparent heart attack on Saturday, July 14.

Melbourne researchers are now simulating in 3D, the motion of the complete human rhinovirus, the most frequent cause of the common cold, on Australia's fastest supercomputer, paving the way for new drug development.

A new method for producing multiple-perspective 3-D images could prove more practical in the short term than holography.

Some of Oxford University's top sportsmen and women, past and present, have described their excitement at welcoming the Torch to Oxford with weeks until the beginning of the London Olympic Games.

Biologists' capacity for generating genomic data is increasing more rapidly than computing power. A new algorithm will help them keep up.

The Minister of State for Universities and Science visited Durham University to see for himself some of the most interesting and innovative projects currently being undertaken at the University's wor

: Carnegie Mellon's Smart Headlight System Will Have Drivers Seeing Through the Rain-Carnegie Mellon News - Carnegie Mellon University Shining Light Between Drops Makes Thunderstorm Seem Like a Drizz

Geneva, 9 July 2012.

A new algorithm lets networks of Wi-Fi-connected cars, whose layout is constantly changing, share a few expensive links to the Internet.

Two new supercomputers that will help scientists to tackle challenges across a range of disciplines, and businesses to develop new technologies, went into service on 3 July.

Maria Spiropulu and Harvey Newman , both professors of physics at Caltech, lead the Caltech team of 40 physicists, students, and engineers that is part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Scientists from the University of Glasgow working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are celebrating the observation of a new particle, consistent with being the elusive Higgs boson. Thirty-five academics, researchers, technicians, and postgraduate students from the University are part of the ATLAS Experiment, one of the two teams that today (4 July 2012) announced that the search for the Higgs boson has yielded a significant signal.

XSEDE Resource Provides Open-Access Phylogenetic Supercomputing A new Web resource developed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego is helping thousands of researchers worldwide unravel the enigmas of phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary relationships among virtually every species on the planet.