science wire

Death is new design consideration in technological age
At first glance, death seems like an unlikely thesis topic for a computer scientist. But for the University of Toronto's Mike Massimi , it makes perfect sense.

Computer Scientist Developing Intersections of the Future With Fully Autonomous Vehicles
AUSTIN, Texas — Intersections of the future will not need stop lights or stop signs, but will look like a somewhat chaotic flow of driverless, autonomous cars slipping past one another as they are managed by a virtual traffic controller, says computer scientist Peter Stone.

$15 million gift gives major boost to fellowships at Michigan Engineering
ANN ARBOR, Mich. - In recognition of a $15 million gift to the University of Michigan College of Engineering that includes the largest sum dedicated to fellowships in the college's history, the Computer Science and Engineering Building will be named the Bob and Betty Beyster Building.

Cell phone hackers can track your physical location without your knowledge
Using a cheap phone, readily available equipment, and no direct help from a service provider, hackers could listen to unencrypted broadcast messages from cell phone towers MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (02/16/2012) —Cellular networks leak the locations of cell phone users, allowing a third party to easily track the location of the cell phone user without the user's knowledge, according to new research by computer scientists in the University of Minnesota's College of Science and Engineering.

Carnegie Mellon University and Penn Engineering Receive $3.5 Million for Innovative Transportation Research
PITTSBURGH - The U.S. Department of Transportation has awarded Carnegie Mellon's College of Engineering and the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science a $3.5 mi

In new mass-production technique, robotic insects spring to life
Production method inspired by children's pop-up books enables rapid fabrication of tiny, complex devices : Caroline Perry , (617) 496-1351 - A new technique inspired by elegant pop-up books and origami will soon allow clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet.

Best time for a coffee break? There's an app for that
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Caffeinated drinks such as coffee and soda are the pick-me-ups of choice for many people, but too much caffeine can cause nervousness and sleep problems. Caffeine Zone software app developed by Penn State researchers, can help people determine when caffeine may give them a mental boost and when it could hurt their sleep patterns.

Father of the cybercar concept to discuss how new transportation systems shape cities at U of M Center for Transportation Studies event
Who: Michel Parent, scientific adviser, INRIA What: How New Transportation Systems Shape Cities: The Example of Greater Paris When: 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb.

Penn’s Work and Family Researchers Network Launches the Work and Family Commons Open Access Repository
The Work and Family Researchers Network at the University of Pennsylvania has launched the Work and Family Commons, the first open access work and family subject matter repository. The WFC was created to gather and preserve the intellectual output of the work and family research community and to offer free online access to the full text of research articles to the public.

Potential Key to Lowering Energy Costs of Cell Phones and Data Centers
AUSTIN, Texas — A systematic analysis of power usage in microprocessors could help lower the energy consumption of both small cellphones and giant data centers, report computer science professors from The University of Texas at Austin and the Australian National University.

Street smarts
Students develop hurricane response plans on Cambridge roads, gaining practical experience in computational science Debris lingered just outside New Orleans in July 2006 - almost a full year after Hurricane Katrina devastated the region.

Researchers to receive high-performance computing grants
Projects will advance both basic science and applications, and accelerate development of exascale computing systems Seven Harvard-affiliated researchers will receive grants to support collaborative projects in high-performance computing.

Quarter of Tweets Not Worth Reading, Twitter Users Tell Researchers
Study at CMU, MIT, Georgia Tech Finds Nine Ways To Improve Tweets : Byron Spice / 412-268-9068 / bspice [a] cs.cmu (p) edu PITTSBURGH—Twitter users choose the microblogs they follow, but that doesn't mean they always like what they get. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology found that users say only a little more than a third of the tweets they receive are worthwhile.

Risk-based passenger screening could make air travel safer
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Anyone who has flown on a commercial airline since 2001 is well aware of increasingly strict measures at airport security checkpoints.

Online news portals get credibility boost from trusted sources
University Park, Pa. - People who read news on the Web tend to trust the gate even if there is no gatekeeper, according to Penn State researchers.

Carnegie Mellon University Computer Scientist Wins International Prize for Computational Biology
: Carnegie Mellon University Computer Scientist Wins International Prize for Computational Biology-Carnegie Mellon News - Carnegie Mellon University Ziv Bar-Joseph To Receive Overton Prize, Pr

Robots go head to head, 250 miles above Earth
Third annual Zero Robotics competition pits robots against each other on the International Space Station.

New model shows how often to review material for flashcard programs
A challenge for students and teachers - and today, for designers of educational software: How often should material be reviewed for best learning? Wait too long to review and it fades away; review too soon and the effort is wasted.

SDSC’s East Building Receives LEED Gold Certification
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, has been awarded a LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) Gold certification for its SDSC East building expansion.

The advantage of ambiguity
Cognitive scientists develop a new take on an old problem: why human language has so many words with multiple meanings. Why did language evolve? While the answer might seem obvious - as a way for individuals to exchange information - linguists and other students of communication have debated this question for years.

The faster-than-fast Fourier transform
For a large range of practically useful cases, MIT researchers find a way to increase the speed of one of the most important algorithms in the information sciences. The Fourier transform is one of the most fundamental concepts in the information sciences. It's a method for representing an irregular signal - such as the voltage fluctuations in the wire that connects an MP3 player to a loudspeaker - as a combination of pure frequencies.

Stephen Chong wins Air Force Young Investigator Award

Yale Health earns top marks for its focus on patient-centered care
Yale Health has been recognized as a model of 21st-century primary care by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), which awarded the organization a perfect score for its accomplishments as a Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH).

DOE Awards Record Supercomputing Time to UC San Diego, SDSC Researchers
One Quarter Billion Hours Plus Allocated for 2012 Scientists from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and other areas of the University of California, San Diego, conducting research in physics, computer science, earth science, and engineering, together were awarded an all-time high of more than a quarter billion hours in supercomputing processor time by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the agency's 2012 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.

Supercomputers help Yale astrophysicists interpret secrets of the universe
A series of papers released this week by the international scientific collaboration known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey depended heavily on supercomputing performed by Yale astrophysicists.

Calculating What’s in the Universe from the Biggest Color 3-D Map
Scientific : Shirley Ho, cwho [a] lbl (p) gov Since 2000, the three Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS I, II, III) have surveyed well over a quarter of the night sky and produced the biggest color map of the universe in three dimensions ever.

Video games at school?
To video gamers, the name Microsoft Kinect is synonymous with the Xbox 360 video game console. To University of Toronto graduate student Uzma Khan , the motion-sensing input device offered a myriad of other possibilities.

Center for Advanced Computing receives national award for hepatitis research
The Cornell Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) has received a High-Performance Computing Innovation Excellence Award from the International Data Corp.

Los Alamos and EMC collaborate to advance high-performance computing

FCC Names Engineering Prof. Schulzrinne Chief Technology Officer
Columbia Engineering School Professor Henning Schulzrinne has been appointed as Chief Technology Officer by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

FCC Names Engineering Prof. Henning Schulzrinne Chief Technology Officer
Columbia Engineering School Professor Henning Schulzrinne has been appointed as Chief Technology Officer by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

Expanded Data Repository at Austin and Arlington Campuses to Improve Research Capacity for Entire UT System
AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin today announced that it is working with The University of Texas at Arlington to deploy a data rep

Researcher Develops New Way to Assess Risk for Chemicals
— Coral Gables — Approximately 80,000 industrial chemicals are in use and about 700 new chemicals are introduced to commerce each year in the United States, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Communities of Thought

Closest Type Ia Supernova in Decades Solves a Cosmic Mystery
Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia's) are the extraordinarily bright and remarkably similar "standard candles" astronomers use to measure cosmic growth, a technique that in 1998 led to the discovery of dark energy - and 13 years later to a Nobel Prize, "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe." The light from thousands of SN Ia's has been studied, but until now their physics - how they detonate and what the star systems that produce them actually look like before they explode - has been educated guesswork.

Three UC San Diego Computer Scientists Named ACM Fellows
Keith Marzullo, Dean M. Tullsen and Amin Vahdat, all professors in the department of computer science & engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering, have been named Fellows of The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

SDSC Welcomes ’Gordon’ Supercomputer as a Research Powerhouse
When it officially comes online in early January, Gordon , a unique new supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), will help researchers tackle the most vexing data-intensive challe

Trillion-frame-per-second video
By using optical equipment in a totally unexpected way, MIT researchers have created an imaging system that makes light look slow.

No bugs at annual CS 50 Fair

Computer scientist Margo Seltzer named 2011 ACM Fellow

Make Room for Stampede: TACC Expands Data Center for New Supercomputer
Austin, Texas — The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin today announced that it is expanding the center's current high performance computing (HPC) data c

A Better Way to ID Extreme Weather Events in Climate Models
You'd think that spotting a category 5 hurricane would never be difficult. But when the hurricane is in a global climate model that spans several decades, it becomes a fleeting wisp among mountains of data.

Pair of black holes ‘weigh in’ at 10 billion suns, the most massive yet
AUSTIN, Texas — A team of astronomers including Karl Gebhardt and graduate student Jeremy Murphy of The University of Texas at Austin have discovered the most massive black holes to date - two

Record massive black holes discovered lurking in monster galaxies
University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have discovered the largest black holes to date - two monsters with masses equivalent to 10 billion suns that are threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.

Design could help Facebook members limit security leaks
Town Hall Forum video posted Board executive committee reaffirms, ratifies earlier decisions Students host fundraiser to benefit abused children Penn State, PA Coalition Against Rape join to

Stanford President Hennessy wins IEEE’s highest honor
Hennessy was recognized by IEEE for pioneering the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) processor and for leadership in computer engineering and higher education.

Grassroots effort helps shape future IT community at Stanford
More than 300 information technology professionals at Stanford gathered on campus earlier this month for an "unconference" to share information face-to-face, to raise awareness around common IT issues and to lead discussions on a theme.

Princeton's new computing research center builds research capacity
by Catherine Zandonella After several years of planning and more than a year of construction, Princeton University's High-Performance Computing Research Center opened its doors this week.

At a crossroads
New research predicts which cars are likeliest to run lights at intersections. In 2008, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2.3 million automobile crashes occurred at intersections across the United States, resulting in some 7,000 deaths. More than 700 of those fatalities were due to drivers running red lights.

E-Reading with Grandma
Facebook, Twitter, e-readers, video games, and the seemingly endless “next generations” of smartphones.

All-optical silicon chips enabling faster computing
There has been enormous progress in recent years toward the development of photonic chips - devices that use light beams instead of electrons to carry out their computational tasks. Now, researchers at MIT have filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle that could enable the creation of photonic chips on the standard silicon material that forms the basis for most of today's electronics.

Structured English brings robots closer to everyday users
Move over, Jetsons. A humanoid robot named Mae is traipsing around Cornell's Autonomous Systems Lab, guided by plain-English instructions and sometimes even appearing to get frustrated. Mae understands and executes English commands, thanks to algorithms and a software toolkit called Linear Temporal Logic Mission Planning (LTLMoP) being developed in the lab of Hadas Kress-Gazit, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

Kilobots are leaving the nest
Swarm of tiny, collaborative robots will be made available to researchers, educators, and enthusiasts : Michael Patrick Rutter , (617) 496-3815 Photo courtesy of Michael Rubenstein. The Kilobots are coming. Computer scientists and engineers at Harvard University have developed and licensed technology that will make it easy to test collective algorithms on hundreds, or even thousands, of tiny robots.

New Stanford software takes Folding@home’s biological research to supercomputers
Stanford researchers, who made impossible protein-folding simulations routine with Folding@home, bring the technology to supercomputing.

Helping computers make faster decisions
Industrial and systems engineering professor Jeff Linderoth is working on a way to help computers make yes/no decisions faster by enhancing the standard algorithm computers use to solve a class of problems called integer programs.

Analyzing massive datasets is subject of major international conference
Seattle is host this week to the major international meeting about high-performance computing, giving UW scientists and computer specialists an opportunity to see over the horizon at developments that will influence how research is conducted for years to come.

New Center for Cloud Computing Will Impact Mobile Computing and Internet Security
AUSTIN, Texas — As part of its research efforts to help create safer and faster computing, the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin has partnered with SunGard Ava

Probing Question: Why are statistics important in modern life?
By Melissa Beattie-Moss Research/Penn State Quick! Think of professions that will be the jobs of the next decade. Statistician probably didn't leap to mind - but odds are it soon will. Number nerds, take heed: statistical skills are in increasingly high demand and being applied to an incredibly diverse set of exciting problems, said Penn State Professor of Statistics Naomi Altman.

$50,000 to Solve the Most Complicated Puzzle Ever Attempted
Every few years the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) holds a public competition to stretch the outer limits of what technology can do.

SDSC’s Trestles Debuts on ‘Graph500’ List
Trestles , a new supercomputer using flash-based memory and launched earlier this year by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, has made this year's

Stanford’s latest iPhone and iPad apps course now free on iTunes U

SDSC’s Gordon Ranks Among Top 50 Fastest Supercomputers in the World
Gordon , a unique data-intensive supercomputer using flash-based memory that will enter production in January at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Die

Engineering Breakthrough Improves Software Reliability and Security
Anyone who uses multithreaded computer programs—and that's all of us, as these are the programs that power nearly all software applications including Office, Windows, MacOS, and Google Chrome Br

"MythBusters" stars to hold discussion at U of M
What : MythBusters discussion with Grant Imahara and Tory Belleci When : 9 p.m. Saturday, Nov.

Space Shuttle Data Helps Researchers Develop Better Model for Forecasting Solar Power Production
The space shuttle program may have ended, but data the space craft collected over the past three decades are still helping advance science.

Galaxy DNA-analysis software is now available in the cloud
Galaxy - an open-source, Web-based platform for data-intensive biomedical and genetic research - is now available as a cloud computing resource. A team of researchers including Anton Nekrutenko, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State; Kateryna Makova, an associate professor of biology at Penn State; and James Taylor from Emory University, developed the new technology that will help scientists and biomedical researchers to harness such tools as DNA-sequencing and analysis software, as well as storage capacity for large quantities of scientific data.

New network will promote 'SAVI' uses of technology
Imagine a Blue Jays game where fans, reporters and pundits are sharing their insight and commentary using a variety of media (videos, audio and pictures).

Supercomputers Accelerate Development of Advanced Materials
NERSC : Linda Vu, (510) 495-2402, LVu [a] lbl (p) gov New materials are crucial to building a clean energy economy - for everything from batteries to photovoltaics to lighter weight vehicles - but today the development cycle is too slow: around18 years from conception to commercialization.

Lamont-Doherty Scientists Predict Faster Retreat for Antarctica Glacier
The retreat of Antarctica's fast-flowing Thwaites Glacier is expected to speed up within 20 years, once the glacier detaches from an underwater ridge that is currently holding it back, says a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. Thwaites Glacier, which drains into west Antarctica's Amundsen Sea, is being closely watched for its potential to raise global sea levels as the planet warms.

UW-Madison home to weather-predicting supercomputer
A new supercomputer designed to run weather prediction models is now the most powerful computer of its kind on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, where researchers will help make those models more accurate. The National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration approached UW-Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center with a $1 million grant to design and install the Supercomputer for Satellite Simulations and Data Assimilation Studies (known as S4).

Crowdsourcing nutrition in a snap
Counting calories in photos, PlateMate proves the wisdom of the (well-managed) crowd Americans spend upwards of $40 billion a year on dieting advice and self-help books, but the first step in any healthy eating strategy is basic awareness - what's on the plate. If keeping a food diary seems like too much effort, despair not: computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have devised a tool that lets you snap a photo of your meal and let the crowd do the rest.

New algorithm could substantially speed up MRI scans
Faster scans could reduce the time patients spend in the machine from 45 to 15 minutes. CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

It’s All About the Hair
It's not every day that computer science students get invited to a Hollywood premiere to recognize the work they have done.

NASA Launches JPL-Built Earth Science Experiment
October 31, 2011 An experiment developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., to test technology for future NASA Earth science missions was aboard one of five small "CubeSat" research satellites that hitched a ride to orbit Oct. 28 with NASA's newest Earth-observing satellite, the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project, or NPP.

Your phone as counselor: monitoring mental health from your pocket
Your smartphone knows where you go and how fast, while its microphone hears your voice. Soon, your phone may use these capabilities to measure the stress in your life and help you deal with it.

Fall 2011 SEAS newsletter is now available
Dive down into the genetic rabbit hole, learn about cool research, and discover other news around Oxford Street Dean's Note: Down the Genetic Rabbit Hole "While we cannot - and should not

Stanford’s John McCarthy, seminal figure of artificial intelligence, dies at 84
McCarthy created the term "artificial intelligence" and was a towering figure in computer science at Stanford most of his professional life.

Living With Future Tech Entrepreneurs
Someday, Columbia's engineering graduates may fondly recall launching their successful startup company while huddled around a whiteboard in their dormitory suite.

Professor Steven Bellovin Discusses Computer Security
Steven Bellovin always had a knack for catching computer hackers—even before most people knew what they were.

Shih-Fu Chang Sees New Angles in Visual Search
Engineering professor Shih-Fu Chang is trying to make visual search technology as effortless as typing a keyword like “Morningside restaurants” into Google.

Computer Scientist Seeks the Real Meaning of Language
Better be careful about telling a lie to Julia Hirschberg. The computer science professor, an expert in spoken language, examines what people unconsciously communicate through such things as intonation, accent and phrasing. One of the enduring questions she studies is whether it's possible to detect a lie.

Seeing through walls
Researchers at MIT's Lincoln Lab have developed new radar technology that provides real-time video of what's going on behind solid walls. Lincoln Laboratory researchers John Peabody and Gregory Charvat explains how their team's system can see through walls. Video: Melanie Gonick CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

University of Minnesota robots to join search for invasive species
$2.2 million NSF grant funds development of robotic boats to track nonnative carp Media Note: View video of prototype robotic boats in action at z.umn.edu/carptracker.

Computer Models of "Brilliant" Engineering Professor Drive Animated Films and New Research
In September, Popular Science named Eitan Grinspun to its “Brilliant 10” list of top researchers in the U.S. Calling him a “computational contortionist,” the magazine

Caltech Awarded $12.6 Million for New Institute for Quantum Information and Matter
The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has been awarded $12.6 million in funding over the next five years by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a new Physics Frontiers Center.

Hennessy, Girod describe opportunities and challenges of StanfordNYC to Faculty Senate

$3.45M for new technologies to study birds, other species
A gift and a grant totaling $3.45 million will help the Cornell Lab of Ornithology develop new computer technologies to better understand the movements and behaviors of birds and other species.

With NSF and Microsoft support, Cornell team aims to take errors out of cloud computing
Cloud computing, which taps the resources of a network of remote computers, offers tremendous potential for storing and processing vast amounts of data quickly and cheaply.

Progress in quantum computing, qubit by qubit
Researchers control the rate of photon emission from luminescent imperfections in diamond Engineers and physicists at Harvard have managed to capture light in tiny diamond pillars embedded in silver, releasing a stream of single photons at a controllable rate.

University of Minnesota receives $8M grant for first-of-its-kind use of global population and environment data
Terra Populus: A Global Population / Environment Data Network will integrate the world's largest population database with global data on land use, land cover and climate change.

Weatherspoon gets $1.35M to fix ’potholes’ in private information superhighways
To avoid the congestion of the public Internet, scientists, the military and the managers of huge "cloud computing" data centers have created private information superhighways - dedicated fiber-optic systems known as lambda networks.

Car Talk
Calling all gamers: If you like to play first-person racing games, you may be able to help campus researchers better understand typical driving behaviors.

UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts announces events for fall 2011
Media Arts (DMA) is offering a variety of events for the public's enjoyment this fall, including exhibitions, seminars, symposia and lectures.

Saving heart attack victims with computer science
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Subtle markers of heart damage hidden in plain sight among hours of EKG recordings could help doctors identify which heart attack patients are at high risk of dying soon. That's according to a new study involving researchers from the University of Michigan, MIT, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Tech Industry Visionaries Foresee "Internet of Everything" at Marconi Symposium
The "Internet of everything" has arrived, and according to a panel of prominent experts who assembled at the University of California, San Diego earlier this month for the 2011 Marconi Society Sympos

SDSC Announces Scalable, High-Performance Data Storage Cloud
San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) SDSC Cloud UC San Diego Arista Networks OpenStack SDSC Announces Scalable, High-Performance Data Storage Cloud Web-based System Offers Hig

Researchers Develop Optimal Algorithm for Determining Focus Error in Eyes and Cameras
Sept. 26, 2011 AUSTIN, Texas — University of Texas at Austin researchers have discovered how to extract and use information in an individual image to determine how far objects are from the focus distance, a feat only accomplished by human and animal visual systems until now. Like a camera, the human eye has an auto-focusing system, but human auto-focusing rarely makes mistakes.

Dieter Fox to co-lead new Intel Science and Technology Center
Intel newsroom Intel Science and Technology Center – UW Fox faculty page University of Washington computer scientist Dieter Fox will co-lead an Intel Science and Technology Center th

NSF-funded project to test cloud computing for smart grid
A Cornell research team has received a four-year, $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a system for computation and information sharing when designing a "smart" electrical grid.

Smarter robot arms
A combination of two algorithms developed at MIT allows autonomous robots to execute tasks much more efficiently - and move more predictably.

NSF Grant to Help Identify New Teaching Methods to Retain Women in Computing and IT
Sept.

UCLA, Rutgers collaborate on technology to reduce traffic congestion, air pollution
The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant worth nearly $2 million to UCLA and Rutgers to develop intelligent metropolitan traffic management technology that reduces urban traffic congestion and air pollution.

University of Minnesota to host first-ever Cyber Security Summit Oct. 3
Event focuses on securing the nation's digital infrastructure As the global economy increasingly operates in a digital world, the Technological Leadership Institute (TLI) in the University of Minnesota's College of Science and Engineering is hosting the First Annual Cyber Security Summit.

Smartphone battery life could dramatically improve with new invention
Sept. 15, 2011 Smartphone battery life could dramatically improve with new invention ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A new "subconscious mode" for smartphones and other WiFi-enabled mobile devices could extend battery life by as much as 54 percent for users on the busiest networks.

Website shines spotlight on Stanford’s bid to build a campus in New York City

New study quantifies use of social media in Arab Spring
In the 21 st century, the revolution may not be televised – but it likely will be tweeted, blogged, texted and organized on Facebook, recent experience suggests.

Ferroelectrics could pave way for ultra-low power computing
Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that it is possible to reduce the minimum voltage necessary to store charge in a capacitor, an achievement that could reduce the power draw and heat generation of today's electronics. “Just like a Formula One car, the faster you run your computer, the hotter it gets.

$13-million NSF center to explore new ways to manipulate light at the nanoscale
Sept. 9, 2011 $13-million NSF center to explore new ways to manipulate light at the nanoscale ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A new $13-million National Science Foundation center based at the University of Michigan will develop high-tech materials that manipulate light in new ways.

NASA Gives Public New Internet Tool to Explore the Solar System
PASADENA, Calif. - NASA is giving the public the power to journey through the solar system using a new interactive Web-based tool.

Robots learn to handle objects, understand new places
Infants spend their first few months learning to find their way around and manipulating objects, and they are very flexible about it: Cups can come in different shapes and sizes, but they all have handles. So do pitchers, so we pick them up the same way. Similarly, your personal robot in the future will need the ability to generalize - for example, to handle your particular set of dishes and put them in your particular dishwasher.

Word association: Princeton study matches brain scans with complex thought
by Morgan Kelly In an effort to understand what happens in the brain when a person reads or considers such abstract ideas as love or justice, Princeton researchers have for the first time matched images of brain activity with categories of words related to the concepts a person is thinking about.

New laser could treat acne with telecom technology
Aug. 30, 2011 New laser could treat acne with telecom technology ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A laser developed at the University of Michigan is designed to melt fat without burning surrounding tissue. It could potentially be used to treat acne, researchers say. Its 1,708-nanometer, infrared beam takes advantage of a unique wavelength that fat can absorb more efficiently than water , which makes up more than half of the human body.