The high cost of keeping large data centers cool—and a need to expand its international presence—has prompted the social networking giant to launch plans to build a giant server farm in Sweden just 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Hydropower will supply the 120 MW needed to power the farm.
At the Georgia Tech Cyber Security Summit this week, researchers at the university released its latest report on the threats facing an interconnected world. Specific cyber threats include search poisoning, mobile web-based attacks, and stolen data used for marketing.
Using millions of Twitter subscribers as living "sensors," engineers from Rice University and Motorola Mobility have found a way to monitor fans’ levels of excitement and to keep track of the action in National Football League (NFL) games, without ever switching on a TV.
Detailed views of star formation in the Antennae galaxies are the first astronomical test images released to the public from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. Scheduled for completion in 2012, the array will look into the early history of the Universe and provide a better look at local planets and stars.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have created a new Urban Network Analysis (UNA) toolbox that enables urban designers and planners to describe the spatial patterns of cities using mathematical network analysis methods. Such tools can support better informed and more resilient urban design and planning in a context of rapid urbanization.
Physicists at The City College of New York have found a new way to map spiraling light that could help harness untapped data channels in optical fibers. The new model, called a Higher Order Poincaré Sphere, could also advance quantum computing.
Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University developed a system that uses a network of smartphones mounted on car dashboards to collect information about traffic signals and tell drivers when slowing down could help them avoid waiting at lights. By reducing the need to idle and accelerate from a standstill, the system saves gas.
Drivers are generally concerned with tracking their own location in two dimensions, but the third dimension of altitude has always been available through GPS, just with lower accuracy than that of the horizontal coordinates. A new software solution brings centimeter-scale positioning to this neglected dimension.
CERN is looking few good FLOPS it can leverage to run more simulations of high-energy particle physics. These simulations, which are submitted to a central database from the user’s home computers, will provide scientists with theoretical references for measurements obtained at accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider.
Heidenhain has increased the functionality of its Profibus rotary encoders. The encoders that feature the Profibus interface now support the DP-V2 encoder profile which makes them ready for robot control and production technology.
Brewster Kahle founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.
Seventeen institutions officially joined forces last week to link computers, data and people from around the world to establish a single, virtual system, called XSEDE, that scientists can interactively use to conduct research. The National Science Foundation-funded effort will build on the high-performance computing ground broken by TeraGrid.
The success of social networking sites has illustrated the importance of networking for humans; however for some animals, keeping informed about others of their kind is even more important. Researchers have shown that swarming, a phenomenon that can be crucial to an animal's survival, is created by the same kind of social networks that humans adopt.
In its initial phase, the new $62 million Advanced Networking Initiative will connect the three DOE unclassified supercomputing centers. But it will lead to a nationwide 100 Gbps scientific network, and eventually a 1-terabit network connecting the Dept. of Energy’s exascale supercomputers.
Upon first glance, USC’s Cyrus Shahabi’s maps contain the typical landmarks we've become accustomed to seeing on Yahoo or Google Maps. But a closer look reveals maps pulsing with images of moving cars, scenes of bustling people, and shifting colors of changing traffic patterns, all in real time. The concept of geo-immersion is beginning to blend the real and virtual worlds together.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state is restoring its computer system this week after a cyberattack that also targetted Battelle's corporate offices in Ohio and Thomas Jefferson National Laboratory in Virginia. Officials say they know the source and motive, but are not sharing that information yet.
Designing fiber optic networks involves finding the most efficient way to connect phones and computers that are in different places—a costly and time-consuming process. Now, researchers from North Carolina State Univ. have developed a model that can find optimal connections 10,000 times more quickly, using less computing power to solve the problem.
At a global security conference in Paris Friday, Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III outlined a pilot program in which the government helps the defense industry in safeguarding the information their computer systems hold. The program will share classified threat information and the know-how to employ it with participating defense companies or their Internet service providers.
NEC Corp. (NEC) and Tohoku Univ. announced the development of the world's first content addressable memory (CAM) that both maintains the same high operation speed and non-volatile operation as existing circuits when processing and storing data on a circuit while power is off.
The combination of a silicon-based cameras and mobile computing has been a powerful technological combination, multiplying digital media production and producing interesting applications like remote medical diagnoses. Now, the Smithsonian Institution has made tree identification as easy as snapping a photo.
America's new cyber czar said Wednesday, ahead of an international cybersecurity summit in London, that international law and cooperation--not another treaty--was enough to tackle cybersecurity issues for now. Christopher Painter’s comments were in response to the urging of Michael Rake, chairman of one of the world's largest telecommunications companies, to begin forming a cyber nonproliferation treaty.
Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have succeeded in encoding data at a rate of 26 terabits per second on a single laser beam, transmitting them over a distance of 50 km, and decoding them successfully. This is the largest data volume ever transported on a laser beam.
An international research team has upped the ante on molecular machinery. While molecules have already been used to perform individual logic operations, a single molecule has been designed that can perform 13 logic operations, some of them in parallel. It is operated by varying wavelengths of light.
IBM is still perhaps two years from marketing a medical Watson, but Columbia Univ. medical school professor Dr. Herbert Chase, who is working with the company to adapt the computer for medical tasks, says its ability to understand plain language and access medical history and symptoms might mean quicker diagnoses and treatments.
IBM, the California Dept. of Transportation and UC Berkeley have joined forces to analyze real-time traffic patterns and individual commuter travel history to forecast better, safer routes for drivers. The predictive modeling is an effort to shave some portion of the loss in money ($808), time (1 week), and gas (28 gallons) experienced every year by the average driver due to traffic.