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Climate change-denying House science chairman is retiring
Lamar Smith, the chairman of the US House of Representatives' Committee on Science, Space and Technology, has announced that he'll retire when his term ends next year. The Texas representative, an avid climate change denier, has been a controversial and, to many, an unwelcome head of the committee. During his tenure, he has published multiple opinion pieces on climate change, including some that claim it isn't a reality and others that state it's real but beneficial.
ICYMI: Finally, cars can morph into robots!
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: A Turkish company says that for millions of dollars, it'll make you your very own Autobot (called a LeTrons) and while whether the car is actually driveable may be in question the video is still fairly incredible. No less an advancement for conductive thread, a $34 million grant from the National Science Foundation is letting a group of doctors, scientists and fashion designers create clothing that at-risk pregnant women can wear to track their health. If you're into augmented reality, this Pong game should get you going. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
ICYMI: Sound wave sewer checks, the feminized phone and more
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: A town in Maryland is checking for clogs in sewer lines with a sound wave system funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. And a Chinese-made smartphone is geared towards women in the most condescending of ways. In TL;DR, be sure to read up on Tesla's newest, 'low-cost' car. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
ICYMI: Pig poop could make more eco-friendly roadways
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: The chemical makeup of pig manure is so similar to petroleum that it's being tested as a more bio-friendly way to make asphalt roads, while the leftover bits can be used as fertilizer. Since pigs already produce 43 billion gallons of manure each year, re-using some for road construction might be the smartest thing we've done with bioengineering yet. You can find our diabetes story from Cambridge here, the first banking chatbot from Kasisto here, and the selfie drone that's going to be everywhere, here. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd
Science fund lets kids learn 3D printing, gene modification
President Obama declared June 17 to the 23rd to be the National Week of Making, and what better way to celebrate than funding research for kids? The National Science Foundation (NSF) created a $1.5 million "early-concept grant" for five youth-oriented projects. They include 3D printing for inner-city kids and a DNA project that teaches high schoolers to build their own organisms (yep). "A core tenet of the maker movement is that experiences involving active exploration of ideas ... elicit enjoyment and foster lasting learning," says Rutgers' Elizabeth Bonawitz.
The Arecibo radio telescope is in trouble again
Unfortunately, the Arecibo Observatory's iconic radio telescope is facing an uncertain future once again... and there's only a short amount of time for you to have a say in its fate. The National Science Foundation is considering a number of options for the space-centric facility, including either putting its operations in the hands of partners or shutting it down entirely. It's holding public meetings today (June 7th) and accepting written comments until June 23rd to discuss the "environmental impact" of its options, but there's a good chance that the conversation will revolve around the telescope's survival.
NASA is building a new exoplanet-hunting tool
NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are done forming the special team of astronomers to build their new, powerful exoplanet hunter. The scientists were selected after holding a national competition and will be led by Penn State University assistant professor Suvrath Mahadevan. They'll now spend the next three years building the $10 million instrument called NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler Spectroscopy (NEID) for the joint project. Once it's finished, the instrument will be installed on the 3.5-meter WIYN observatory (pictured above) at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.
ICYMI: Teleport your hologram, changing ocean pH and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-681979{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-681979, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-681979{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-681979").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: Microsoft Research developed a new 3D camera capturing system that creates a live-time 3D hologram of a person that can be sent to interact with other people, as long as they have a matching virtual reality set-up. If that's confusing, the video straightens it right up.
ICYMI: Space junk reboot, biological machine v2 and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-763516{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-763516, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-763516{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-763516").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: NASA thinks it can extend the life of even dead satellites orbiting Earth with a new solution from the agency and Orbital ATK. Mission Extension Vehicles should go up in 2018 and give the sats battery power for as long as another 15 years. A game developer is trying to make older, classic Nintendo games 3D with an emulator that uses a custom algorithm to separate flat backgrounds into 3D objects. And the National Science Foundation funded work to create a biological machine that can be controlled with electrical or optical signals-- while using it's own muscle tissue for power. We also wanted to make sure you saw the ostrich chase video that is making the rounds. As always, please share any interesting science or tech videos, anytime! Just tweet us with the #ICYMI hashtag to @mskerryd.
Science confirms that gravitational waves exist
At last, scientists have validated a key part of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The National Science Foundation, Caltech and MIT have confirmed the existence of gravitational waves, or ripples in spacetime. Their two LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) detectors measured atomic-scale differences on September 14th, 2015 that point to the collision of black holes (also a new discovery) 1.3 billion years ago, triggering gravity ripples that only just reached Earth. There have long been hints of these waves, but hard evidence has proven elusive until now.
National Science Foundation funding rules target harassment
Sexual harassment has been an endemic problem within the scientific community for years. Well, the National Science Foundation is mad as hell and it's not gonna take it anymore. The NSF announced on Monday "its strong commitment to preventing harassment and to eradicate gender-based discrimination in science" and promised to cut funding to institutions that tolerate or enable such behavior.
ICYMI: Electrify your food and cleaning bubbles too
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-327950{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-327950, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-327950{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-327950").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: Virginia Tech researchers found they can better clean fruits and vegetables with electrified water bubbles. Japanese scientists are also harnessing the power of electricity, but this time putting it into a fork to subtly zap food into having saltier flavors. Allegedly. And a new smartphone case features a crank to get that precious charge up when you need a hit of the juice.
University of Illinois' Blue Waters supercomputer now running around the clock
Things got a tad hairy for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Blue Waters supercomputer when IBM halted work on it in 2011, but with funding from the National Science Foundation, the one-petaflop system is now crunching numbers 24/7. The behemoth resides within the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and is composed of 237 Cray XE6 cabinets and 32 of the XK7 variety. NVIDIA GK110 Kepler GPU accelerators line the inside of the machine and are flanked by 22,640 compute nodes, which each pack two AMD 6276 Interlagos processors clocked at 2.3 GHz or higher. At its peak performance, the rig can churn out 11.61 quadrillion calculations per second. According to the NCSA, all that horsepower earns Blue Waters the title of the most powerful supercomputer on a university campus. Now that it's cranking away around-the-clock, it'll be used in projects investigating everything from how viruses infect cells to weather predictions.
Alt-week 9.15.12: The ultimate wind machine, Egyptian Lego and the office of our dreams
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. Sometimes we wonder, what would we have ended up doing if we didn't spend our time trawling the web for the week's best alternative tech stories? We could have been paleontologists, novelists, engineers, or if we were really lucky, worked for Google. Instead, here we are bringing you some of the more colorful tech-tales from the last seven days, which we're really not complaining about. That said though, at least on this occasion, we got to taste a bit of all the above. This is alt-week.
Researchers propose à la carte internet services, overhaul for web infrastructure
A quintet of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation have envisioned a new internet architecture, one where features could be purchased à la carte. The proposed framework would allow users to fine tune their experience by choosing from a variety of connection services. Let's say, for example, that a customer's connection is fine for browsing the web, but it doesn't pass muster for streaming content -- a service dedicated to video delivery could be added to close the gap. "Ultimately, this should make the internet more flexible and efficient, and will drive innovation among service providers to cater to user needs," report co-author Rudra Dutta told The Abstract. A piecemeal next-gen web is no easy feat, however, as it would require revamping the web's infrastructure with new protocols for choosing particular features, completing payments and monitoring network performance. The group's rough blueprint will be presented at a conference next week, but you can thumb through their short paper at the source.
10 Gigabit per-second connection between US and China demoed
You, sir or ma'am, should probably not get too excited. Chances are, this trans-Pacific 10 Gigabit link won't do you any good, personally. On the other hand, researchers working together across the oceanic divide have tons to cheer about. The China Education and Research Network, the National Science Foundation and Indiana University worked together with BGI, one of the largest genomics organizations in the world, to christen the connection by transferring 24 Gigabytes of genomic data from Beijing to UC Davis in under 30 seconds. As a benchmark, the same file was sent between the same locations over the regular ol' Internet and it took over 26 hours. The high-speed link should prove to be a major boon for genetic research and DNA sequencing.
White House aims to make internet '90 percent cheaper' to build, teams up with Mozilla for $500k competition
The government's US Ignite partnership aims to push the growth of next-generation broadband networks, teaming up with over 100 start-ups, universities and existing tech companies like HP, Comcast and Verizon for the project. The President is set to sign an executive order today that aims to cut the cost of broadband construction across federal roadways and properties by up to 90 percent. The White House is also is looking to improve "next-generation applications and (the) digital experience," running on networks that are a heady 100 times faster than what's in use today. The National Science Foundation has thrown in $250 million to assist the partnership's creation of a national 1-gigabit network that would connect together academic and developer hubs. Mozilla has decided to team up with the foundation to offer up a $500,000 prize pot for developers looking to help create the "internet of the future". The challenge aims on education, healthcare, public safety and other (admittedly broad) topics, with the top ideas capable of grabbing $15,000 from the prize fund. And if Google reckons gigabit networks are the way to go, who's the White House to argue?
Supercomputer gets a memory boost with 380 petabytes of magnetic tape
Remember the Cray XK6 at the University of Illinois that drives the National Science Foundation's Blue Waters project? Well, it looks like it's getting a little memory upgrade, sorta. We're not talking a slick new SSD here, or even a sweet NAS, all that computational power requires nothing less than... tape. Okay, so it's actually a full storage infrastructure, and some of it -- 25 petabytes no less -- will be disk-based. The rest -- a not insignificant 380 petabytes -- will be the good old magnetic stuff. The idea is that the disk part will be used for instant access, with the tape section serving as "nearline" storage -- something between an archive and online solution. Spectra Logic is providing the tape, and says it'll take a couple of years to implement the whole lot. Once complete, the system will support the supercomputer's lofty tasks, such as understanding how the cosmos evolved after the Big Bang and, y'know designing new materials at the atomic level. And we thought we were excited about out next desktop.
VT nears completion of HokieSpeed, world's 96th most powerful supercomputer
If basking in the presence of a powerful supercomputer is on your list of "must-haves" when selecting a proper university, then you may wish to fire off an admissions application to the Hokies at Virginia Tech. The school's HokieSpeed system is now in its final stages of testing, which combines 209 separate computers, each powered by dual six-core Xeon E5645 CPUs and two NVIDIA M2050 / C2050 448-core GPUs, with a single-precision peak processing capability of 455 teraflops. To put things in perspective, HokieSpeed is now the 96th most powerful computer in the world, and yet it was built for merely $1.4 million in loose change -- the majority of which came from a National Science Foundation grant. As a further claim to fame, HokieSpeed is the 11th most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world. Coming soon, the system will drive a 14-foot wide by four-foot tall visualization wall, which is to consist of eight 46-inch Samsung 3D televisions humming in unison. After all, with virtually limitless potential, these scientists will need a fitting backdrop for all those Skyrim sessions. The full PR follows the break, complete with commentary from the system's mastermind, Professor Wu Feng.
University gets $188 million AMD-based supercomputer, free copy of Norton
It used to be that you only needed a bachelor's degree and elbow patches to be taken seriously as an academic, but now it's all about that 50-petaflop supercomputer with 500 petabytes of storage whirring away in the basement. The University of Illinois used to shop with IBM, but it's just about to have a brand new Cray XK6 installed instead, so it can continue providing computing power to the National Science Foundation's Blue Waters project. It's not all about inciting gadget envy, of course: the machine's unlikely truce of AMD Opteron 6200 16-core processors and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs will help more than 25 teams of scientists to model and understand real-world phenomena, from the damage caused by earthquakes to the way viruses to break into cells. Breakthroughs from these projects will -- hopefully, one day -- make the $188 million total cost of Cray's products and services seem like a bargain. Full details in the PR after the break.
