Tackling a trillion

November 16, 2015

To study the development of the universe or plasma physics, scientists run into what could be the biggest big-data problem:… Read More

Assembling a flood

November 10, 2015

A cascade of genetic information is drowning science. Sequencing machines decode plant and animal DNA so quickly computers can’t analyze… Read More

Laser focus

October 14, 2015

Laser physicists are tantalizingly close to building a device that delivers highly focused beams of tumor-killing ionized particles and packing… Read More

Costly crumbling

September 16, 2015

The chemical bonds that tie silicon to oxygen can be expensive to break. Miners want to sever these bonds in… Read More

Picture show

August 4, 2015

Scientists sometimes rebuff James Ahrens when he offers to help them analyze results from their high-performance computing (HPC) simulations of… Read More

Mounting a charge

July 21, 2015

Few would be surprised today that power – the rate of energy consumption – looms as a key constraint in tomorrow’s… Read More

Zooming in

July 15, 2015

Anyone familiar with high-performance computing knows that the ability to generate torrents of data far outpaces scientists’ capacity to extract… Read More

When electrons cooperate

July 7, 2015

Remaining uncertainties in the century-plus effort to explain superconductivity and advance its applications has a University of Illinois team of… Read More

As below, so above

May 28, 2015

Over millions of years, Earth’s continental plates have slammed against each other to form mountain ranges and have slid under… Read More

Cleansed coal

May 13, 2015

Coal produces 39 percent of America’s electricity, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports. It’s everywhere, and the United States can… Read More