Computers & Peripherals
Computer scientists develop video game that teaches java programming
April 8, 2013 6:21 pm | News | Comments
Java is one of the most common programming languages in use today, which is partly why researchers at the University of California, San Diego, have developed an immersive, first-person player video game designed to teach students in elementary to high school how to use the language effectively, despite never having been exposed to programming previously.
Protected data cloud to analyze cancer data
May 20, 2013 9:16 am | News | Comments
The University of Chicago has recently launched the first secure cloud-based...
Silicon Valley-area hub becomes factory town
May 20, 2013 7:33 am | by Martha Mendoza, AP National Writer | News | Comments
Something unique is happening in Fremont, California, a nondescript suburb of 217,000...
New keyboard developed for touchscreens
April 17, 2013 4:32 pm | News | Comments
A research team in Europe has created a new keyboard called KALQ that enables faster...
Stampede opens supercomputing gates to research teams
March 28, 2013 12:37 am | News | CommentsA world-class supercomputer called Stampede—which has already enabled research teams to predict where and when earthquakes may strike, how much sea levels could rise and how fast brain tumors grow—was officially dedicated this week at the University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center. The new research tool will be utilized by thousands of research groups.
Cyberwar manual lays down rules for online attacks
March 20, 2013 10:01 am | by Raphael Satter, Associated Press | News | CommentsEven cyberwar has rules, and one group of experts is putting out a manual to prove it. Their handbook, the Tallinn Manual, due to be published later this week, applies the practice of international law to the world of electronic warfare in an effort to show how hospitals, civilians and neutral nations can be protected in an information-age fight.
Laser-like photons signal major step towards quantum “Internet”
March 19, 2013 3:47 pm | News | CommentsA variety of solid-state systems are currently being investigated as candidates for quantum bits of information, or qubits. One such qubit, a quantum dot, is made of semiconductor nanocrystals embedded in a chip, but the quality of photons generated from solid-state qubits can be low due to decoherence. Now, researchers in the U.K. have generated single photons with tailored properties from solid-state devices that are identical in quality to lasers
Project aims to manage traffic in California using data
March 19, 2013 10:56 am | by Gordy Slack, CITRIS | News | CommentsTwo California urban areas have the dubious distinction of being tied for second-worst traffic in the country. Commuters spend 61 hours per year being stuck in traffic in the Bay Area and in Los Angeles. A new project called Connected Corridors, led by University of California, Berkeley, is developing new technologies that will help Caltrans gather and analyze traffic data to make real-time whole-system traffic management recommendations
Mechdyne licenses CAVE2 from University of Illinois at Chicago
March 12, 2013 9:27 am | News | CommentsMechdyne Corporation has recently announced that it has licensed the CAVE2 hybrid reality environment developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at University of Illinois at Chicago. The licensing agreement was signed in January of 2013, and continues the strong working relationship that began in 1994 when Mechdyne licensed the EVL-designed original CAVE technology.
Interactive Mathematics Initiative
March 8, 2013 3:55 pm | Product Releases | CommentsMaplesoft has announced a major new initiative to support teaching and learning. The Möbius Project is designed to help users create rich, interactive mathematical applications, share them with everyone, and grade them to assess understanding.
Serial Communication Board
March 7, 2013 3:56 pm | Product Releases | CommentsACCES I/O Products, Inc. has announced the release of a new family of PCI-104 serial communication boards—the 104I-COM-8SM Series. These PCI-104 boards feature a selection of 8, 4, or 2-ports of field selectable RS-232, RS-422, and RS-485 asynchronous serial protocols on a port by port basis.
Researchers achieve breakthrough in spin storage
February 1, 2013 12:21 pm | News | CommentsAn international team of researchers affiliated with Göttingen University in Germany has found a way to store vast amounts of data—up to one petabyte—per square inch. The scientists developed a unique molecule with an exploitable electron that carries a spin. This serves as the memory for their electronic device, which can be read out by a magnetic reference electrode at room temperature.
Winners of annual NSF visualization competition announced
February 1, 2013 12:03 pm | News | CommentsThe National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the journal Science, this week announced the 53 winners and honorable mentions of the International Science & Technology Visualization Challenge, a contest jointly sponsored by NSF and the joournal Science. The winning entries highlight the often stunning capabilities of computer-aided visualization techniques.
Dow opens innovation center at the University of Illinois
January 16, 2013 7:29 am | News | CommentsThe Dow Innovation Center, a new research facility to be located at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has recently been announced by Dow and will develop data management solutions. At the same time, Dow has entered into an industry partnership with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, providing access to expertise and equipment which will accelerate Dow’s discovery processes.
Virtual reality system is key to medical discovery
December 11, 2012 12:31 pm | News | CommentsBecause of the limited image spatial-resolution of even today's best-quality laptop and desktop computers, researchers and physicians often can’t see phenomena that are too large, too small, too complex, or too distant. CAVE2, a next-generation, large-scale virtual environment, combines the benefits of scalable-resolution display walls with virtual-reality system to create a revealing and seamless 2D and 3D environment that is becoming increasingly important in scientific discovery.
Toyota tests cars that communicate with each other
November 12, 2012 4:45 pm | by Yuri Kageyama, AP Business Writer | News | CommentsToyota Motor Corp. is testing car safety systems that allow vehicles to communicate with each other and with the roads they are on in a just completed facility in Japan. The size of three baseball stadiums, the Intelligent Transport System site hosts a fleet of cars that receive information from sensors and transmitters installed on the streets. The sensors help to minimize the risk of accidents in situations such as missing a red traffic light, cars advancing from blind spots, and pedestrians crossing the street.
Predicting presidents, storms and life by computer
November 12, 2012 11:09 am | by Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer | News | CommentsOver the course of two weeks this fall, computer models made a startling sequence of correct and useful predictions. By running thousands of simulations on polling data, Nate Silver correctly forecasted how all 50 states would vote for president. In the case of Hurricane Sandy, meteorologists identified the potential danger to the Northeast nearly a week before the storm arrived. Computer models of many kinds have improved in recent years, and the approach is finding new, unexpected uses.
Data storage: How magnetic recording heats up
November 7, 2012 2:15 pm | News | CommentsMost electronic data is stored on magnetic hard drives that cannot simply be enlarged to store more data. The required spinning speed for larger sizes strains components. Researchers in Singapore report that an alternative technology, heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), is now a significant step closer to commercial realization. The method has the potential to double storage capacity for a given hard drive.
Breakthrough produces dense carbon nanotube chip
October 30, 2012 2:29 pm | News | CommentsAt IBM, scientists have for the first time precisely placed and tested more than 10,000 carbon nanotube devices in a single chip using mainstream manufacturing processes. Achieved through conventional chemistry, materials, and wafer fabrication methods, the invention helps validate the used of carbon nanotube technology for future electronic circuit design.
ORNL debuts Titan supercomputer
October 30, 2012 1:36 pm | News | CommentsThe U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory launched a new era of scientific supercomputing on Tuesday with Titan, a system capable of churning through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second—or 20 petaflops—by employing a family of processors called graphic processing units first created for computer gaming. Titan will be 10 times more powerful than ORNL's last world-leading system, Jaguar.
Where do I click, again? A guide to Windows 8
October 29, 2012 11:16 am | by Peter Svensson, AP Technology Writer | News | CommentsWith the launch of Windows 8, people are about to discover a computing experience unlike anything they've seen before. The Associated Press has written a brief guide to getting past some of the hurdles of this markedly different operation system experience.
Treading carefully: Footwear forensics works with partial prints
October 26, 2012 9:57 am | News | CommentsA new computer algorithm developed at the University of Buffalo can analyze the footwear marks left at a crime scene according to clusters of footwear types, makes and tread patterns. The tool is able to group recurring patterns in a database of footwear marks, even if the imprint recorded by crime scene investigators is distorted or only a partial print.
Study reveals impact of public DNS services
October 26, 2012 9:31 am | News | CommentsA new study by Northwestern University researchers has revealed that public domain name services (DNS) could actually slow down users’ web-surfing experience. As a result, researchers have developed a solution to help avoid such an impact: a tool called “namehelp” that could speed web performance by 40%.
Scientists find new route to large-scale quantum computing
October 22, 2012 1:14 pm | News | CommentsSo far, quantum researchers have only been able to manipulate small numbers of qubits, not enough for a practical machine. But researchers at Princeton University have developed a method that may allow the quick and reliable transfer of quantum information throughout a computing device, potentially allowing engineers to build computers consisting of million of quantum bits.
Google opens window into secretive data centers
October 17, 2012 3:40 pm | by Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writer | News | CommentsThrough a new website unveiled Wednesday, Google is opening a virtual window into the secretive data centers where an intricate maze of computers process Internet search requests, show YouTube video clips, and distribute email for millions of people. The photographic access to Google's data centers coincides with the publication of a Wired magazine article about how the company builds and operates them.
New software is like a Rosetta Stone for spectrometry data
October 9, 2012 3:46 pm | News | CommentsAfter leading mass spectrometer manufacturers agreed to license technology that has enabled researchers to develop software allows scientists to easily use and share research data collected across proprietary instrument platforms. Called the ProteoWizard Toolkit, this cross-platform set of libraries and applications is expected to bolster large-scale biological research and help improve the understanding of complex diseases like cancer.
Interactive system detects touch and gestures on any surface
October 9, 2012 3:25 pm | News | CommentsPeople can let their fingers—and hands—do the talking with a new touch-activated system that projects onto walls and other surfaces and allows users to interact with their environment and each other. Developed at Purdue University, the "extended multitouch" system allows more than one person to use a surface at the same time and also enables people to use both hands, distinguishing between the right and left hand.
New software tool helps utilities monitor for network security
October 9, 2012 9:35 am | News | CommentsNamed for the Greek word for wisdom, Sophia is a software sentry developed at Idaho National Laboratory that can passively monitor communication pathways in a static computer network and flag new types of conversations so operators can decide if a threat is present. It is the first such cybersecurity technology for SCADA control system network administrators that is being evaluated for deployment to industry.
Researchers develop 'BIGDATA' toolbox to help genome researchers
October 4, 2012 3:41 am | News | CommentsToday's life scientists are producing genomes galore. But there's a problem: The latest DNA sequencing instruments are burying researchers in trillions of bytes of data and overwhelming existing tools in biological computing. It doesn't help that there's a variety of sequencing instruments feeding a diverse set of applications. Researchers from Iowa State University are developing a set of solutions using high-performance computing.
