Tech

For the past year, staff at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have been preparing users of 20 leading science applications for the arrival of the second phase of its newest supercomputer, Cori, which consists of more than 9,300 nodes containing Intel's Xeon Phi Knights Landing processor - which was officially unveiled June 20 at the International Supercomputer Conference in Germany. The first compute cabinets are scheduled to arrive in July.

Refugees are often considered an economic burden for the countries that take them in, but a new study conducted by UC Davis with the United Nations World Food Program indicates that refugees receiving aid--especially in the form of cash--can can give their host country's economy a substantial boost.

The researchers found that these economic benefits significantly exceeded the amount of the donated aid.

A team of researchers from Stanford University, Stanford, California have demonstrated magnetic actuation of microfluidic water droplets using miniature EPMs and oil-based ferrofluids. Water droplets, immersed in a continuous oil ferrofluid phase, experience a repulsive magnetophoretic force in the presence of an inhomogeneous magnetic field. EPMs, capable of generating strong magnetic fields and gradients, are used for the first time in microfluidic applications.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique that improves the ability of computer vision technologies to better identify and separate objects in an image, a process called segmentation.

Image processing and computer vision are important for multiple applications, from autonomous vehicles to detecting anomalies in medical imaging.

Computer vision technologies use algorithms to segment, or outline the objects, in an image. For instance, separating the outline of a pedestrian against the backdrop of a busy street.

COLUMBIA, Mo. - The U.S. clothing industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, but for the millions of Americans with disabilities and their families, a lack of options in the apparel industry presents daily challenges. Now researchers from the University of Missouri are looking at the relationship between apparel and marginalization for people with disabilities. Allison Kabel, assistant professor of health sciences in the School of Health Professions, found that the lack of adequate, accessible apparel created barriers for people with disabilities from engaging in their communities.

Computer chips have stopped getting faster. For the past 10 years, chips' performance improvements have come from the addition of processing units known as cores.

In theory, a program on a 64-core machine would be 64 times as fast as it would be on a single-core machine. But it rarely works out that way. Most computer programs are sequential, and splitting them up so that chunks of them can run in parallel causes all kinds of complications.

Nowadays, our world is in search of cleaner energy sources to power our increasing industrial and economical needs. Solar energy is becoming an alternative source to fossil fuels, however, due to the accelerating pace at which we are consuming energy, we need to develop ubiquitous PV technologies that can be employed everywhere: on buildings, clothes, consumer electronics and wearables. This necessitates ultra-thin film, low-cost and ideally flexible solar cells without compromising the environment during production, use, or disposal.

WHAT:

Scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, have developed a free online platform that uses a crowdsourcing approach to make public gene expression data more accessible to biomedical researchers without computational expertise. They describe the platform, called OMics Compendia Commons (OMiCC), in the June 20 online issue of Nature Biotechnology.

A meta-analysis of retail return policies led by a University of Texas at Arlington College of Business professor may lead businesses to modify their policies to increase sales and reduce returns.

Narayanan Janakiraman, an assistant professor of marketing who specializes in consumer behavior, UTA doctoral candidate Holly Syrdal and University of Texas at Dallas doctoral candidate Ryan Freling recently published their conclusions in The Journal of Retailing.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered a new way to optimize electron transfer in semi-conductors used in solar fuel solutions.

The finding, published today in Nature Chemistry, could have a big impact on devices that convert sunlight into electricity and fuel.

China has an opportunity to massively increase its use of wind power -- if it properly integrates wind into its existing power system, according to a newly published MIT study.

The study forecasts that wind power could provide 26 percent of China's projected electricity demand by 2030, up from 3 percent in 2015. Such a change would be a substantial gain in the global transition to renewable energy, since China produces the most total greenhouse gas emissions of any country in the world.

Researchers of Aalto University have developed surfaces where oil transports itself to desired directions. Researchers' oleophobic surfaces are microtextured with radial arrays of undercut stripes. When oil drops fall on surfaces, drops move away from the landing point to the direction set by asymmetric geometrical patterning of the surface. The surfaces open up new avenues for power-free liquid transportation and oil contamination self-removal applications in analytical and fluidic devices.

A Stanford University research lab has developed new technologies to tackle two of the world's biggest energy challenges - clean fuel for transportation and grid-scale energy storage.

The researchers described their findings in two studies published this month in the journals Science Advances and Nature Communications.

Hydrogen fuel

An effective and less expensive tool for the inspection of food and drugs could soon be a reality. Scientists from the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin have been working with national and international partners to develop a conceptually new source of terahertz radiation. The innovation makes it much easier to generate this radiation, which is well suited to the analysis of soft materials and could therefore be more widely used in the food and pharmaceutical industry in future.

A recent study has shown that emissions in major cities caused by restaurants such as pizzerias and steakhouses using wood burners can be damaging to the urban environment.