Bill Cannon

Tackling a trillion

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

November 16, 2015

Assembling a flood

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

November 10, 2015

Laser focus

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

October 14, 2015

Costly crumbling

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

September 16, 2015

Mounting a charge

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

July 21, 2015

Zooming in

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

July 15, 2015

When electrons cooperate

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

July 7, 2015

Exascale road bumps

Building a computer that solves scientific problems a thousand times faster than the best ones available today is harder than… Read More

November 14, 2014

Chilly models

Flying over Greenland and looking down on land previously covered by the island’s massive ice sheet, Stephen Price got a… Read More

November 12, 2014

Time-honored

A typical global climate model does about a thousand trillion calculations to simulate a single year’s worth of interactions among… Read More

November 6, 2014