61391617
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aarondubrow writes:
The tendency of HIV to mutate and resist drugs has made it particularly difficult to eradicate. But in the last decade scientists have begun using a new weapon in the fight against HIV: supercomputers. Using some of the nation's most powerful supercomputers, teams of researchers are pushing the limits of what we know about HIV and how we can treat it. The Huffington Post describes nine ways supercomputers are helping scientists understand and treat the disease.
61306185
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aarondubrow writes:
Sometimes, the laboratory just won't cut it. After all, you can't recreate an exploding star, manipulate quarks, or forecast the climate in the lab. In cases like these, scientists rely on supercomputing simulations to capture the physical reality of these phenomena — minus the extraordinary cost, dangerous temperatures or millennium-long wait times. This week, the Texas Advanced Computing Center released a Special Report on Stampede, the 7th most powerful computing system in the world. The report describes 8 example of how scientists are using the supercomputer to make discoveries in genetics, hurricane forecasting, renewable fuels and other fields.
60005983
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aarondubrow writes:
The Internet has evolved to support an incredibly diverse set of needs, but we may be reaching a point at which new solutions and new infrastructure are needed in particular to improve security, connect with the Internet of Things and address an increasingly mobile computing landscape. Today, NSF announced $15 million in awards to develop, deploy and test future Internet architecture in challenging real-world environments. These clean-slate designs explore novel network architectures and networking concepts and also consider the larger societal, economic and legal issues that arise from the interplay between the Internet and society.
Each project will partner with cities, non-profit organizations, academic institutions and industrial partners across the nation to test their Internet architectures. Some of the test environments include: a vehicular network deployment in Pittsburgh, a context-aware weather emergency notification system for Dallas/Fort Worth, and a partnership with Open mHealth, a patient-centric health ecosystem based in San Francisco.
60003615
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Ken Chiacchia writes:
Computer modeling has helped the Republic of Benin in West Africa determine how to bring more lifesaving vaccines to its children while adding the sorely needed vaccine for rotavirus, a major killer of children in low-income nations. The Hermes Logistics Modeling Team reports its findings this month in the journal Vaccine .
Results from the HERMES model, designed by researchers at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), the University of Pittsburgh School of Engineering and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, have helped Benin’s Ministry of Health pilot successful changes in their vaccine delivery system, says first author Shawn T. Brown of PSC. The government is now considering enacting those changes nation-wide, which could save them $500,000 through 2017 while vaccinating 99 to 100 percent of their children.
59251365
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aarondubrow writes:
Graphene, a one-atom-thick form of the carbon material graphite, is strong, light, nearly transparent and an excellent conductor of electricity and heat, but a number of practical challenges must be overcome before it can emerge as a replacement for silicon in electronics or energy devices. One particular challenge concerns the question of how graphene diffuses heat, in the form of phonons. Thermal conductivity is critical in electronics, especially as components shrink to the nanoscale. Using the Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, Professor Li Shi simulated how phonons (heat-carrying vibrations in solids) scatter as a function of the thickness of the graphene layers. He also investigated how graphene interacts with substrate materials and how phonon scattering can be controlled. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Applied Physical Letters and Energy and Environmental Science.
59250533
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rofkool writes:
Scientists at the University of California Santa Barbara have demonstrated a new level of qubit reliability that could herald the dawn of commercial quantum computing. Their research demonstrated a 99% level of qubit reliability, addressing one of the fundamental problems faced in the development of quantum computers for practical purposes. The findings could prove useful in furthering the applications of quantum computing for a variety of purposes, including economic systems, the environment, medicine and even space exploration.
59249429
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coop0030 writes:
Noe & Pedro Ruiz at Adafruit have created a pair of open source near-eye video glasses combined with a Raspberry Pi. Their 3D Printed design turns a pair of 'private display glasses' into a "google glass"-like form factor. It easily clips to your prescription glasses, and can display any kind of device with Composite Video like a Raspberry Pi. They have a video demonstrating the glasses, a tutorial on how to build them, along with the 3d files required to print it out.
59248451
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Zothecula writes:
A new lightweight, super strong material has been discovered thanks to one of nature’s most violent sociopaths. The peacock mantis shrimp may look like a colorful, reasonably mild-mannered aquarium dweller, but its claws have the punch of a .22 bullet. A team of researchers led by University of California, Riverside, has developed a carbon composite that imitates the claw’s structure. The result is a promising new material that may one day be used to build cars and airplanes.
59248329
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sciencehabit writes:
Physicists playing with rubber bands have discovered a new shape. In an attempt to create a spring that replicates the light-bending properties of cuttlefish ink sacs, a team of researchers suspended two rubber strips of different lengths. Connecting the bottoms of the two strips to a cup of water, the shorter band stretched to the same length as the longer one. After gluing the two stretched strips together, the researchers gradually drained the water from the cup. As the bands retracted and twisted from the reduced strain, the researchers were shocked to see the formation of a hemihelix with multiple rainbow-shaped boundaries called perversions. The team hopes their work inspires nanodevices and molecules that twist and transform from flat strips into predetermined 3D shapes on demand.
59246301
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mooterSkooter writes:
Magnetic Imaging tools were used to recover a dozen images produced by Andy Worhol on his Amiga computer. I would've just stuck the disks in an tried to copy it myself.
59146249
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jorge_salazar writes:
Cancer and Alzheimer's disease appear to have an inverse relationship. If you have one disease, you're less likely to get the other. Using supercomputers, Houston-based scientists have discovered a molecular-level missing link in the cell signaling pathways between the two dreaded diseases.
58821197
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Lasrick writes:
Tom Wigley is one of the world's top climate scientists, and in this interview he explains his outspoken support for both nuclear energy and research into climate engineering. Wigley was one of the first scientists to break the taboo on public discussion of climate engineering as a possible response to global warming; in a 2006 paper in the journal Science, he proposed a combined geoengineering-mitigation strategy that would address the problem of increasing ocean acidity, as well as the problem of climate change. In this interview, he argues that hat renewable energy alone will not be sufficient to address the climate challenge, because it cannot be scaled up quickly and cheaply enough, and that opposition to nuclear power 'threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change.'
58820715
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aarondubrow writes:
A “tidal disruption” occurs when a star orbits too close to a black hole and gets sucked in. The phenomenon is accompanied by a bright flare with a unique signature that changes over time. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are using Stampede and other NSF-supported supercomputers to simulate tidal disruptions in order to better understand the dynamics of the process. Doing so helps astronomers find many more possible candidates of tidal disruptions in sky surveys and will reveal details of how stars and black holes interact.
58816947
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malachiorion writes:
It sounds like the nightmare of all robotic nightmares: A flexible, snake-inspired bot that slides down your throat to snip and burn through your tissue. From there, thing get even more terrifying. If Medrobotics has its way, some version of its FLEX robot will enter patients' bodies through ... other orifices, traveling to nearly anywhere in the abdominal region with a single incision (far fewer than with other surgical robots).
In fact, the surgical snakebot could be a huge leap (slither) forward for robotic surgery, with less of a learning curve for operators and the eventual prospect of surgery with significantly less physical trauma. The potential mental trauma, of course, is another matter. Here's a quick overview of the FLEX system, which is cruising towards clearance in Europe and the U.S., with diagram included, for Popular Science.
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dcblogs writes:
The federal government is making one of the most powerful supercomputers in its computing arsenal available to any U.S. businesses that can help make the country more competitive. The system is the 5 petaflop Vulcan, an IBM Blue Gene/Q system running at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in Livermore, Calif. To qualify for system time a project must meet be able to establish that it can either: Boost American competitiveness, accelerate advances in science and technology, or develop the country's high-performance computing-skilled workforce.
