Archive for April, 2009

As part of the largest, most ambitious attempt ever launched to figure out how tornadoes form and how to predict them more accurately, engineers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst this week are readying two special mobile Doppler radar systems for deployment to the Great Plains. The national project known as Verification of the Origins of ...

Every brain has a soundtrack. Its tempo and tone will vary, depending on mood, frame of mind, and other features of the brain itself. When that soundtrack is recorded and played back -- to an emergency responder, or a firefighter -- it may sharpen their reflexes during a crisis, and calm their nerves afterward.

Cooling a supercomputer consumes more electricity than is required to run the machine, even machines as powerful as the IBM Blue Gene/P—called Intrepid—at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. Though Intrepid is one of the fastest and most energy-efficient computers in the world, researchers at Argonne's Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) are continually ...

Roughly 20 percent of the electricity consumed worldwide is used to light homes, businesses, and other private and public spaces. Though this consumption represents a large drain on resources, it also presents a tremendous opportunity for savings. Improving the efficiency of commercially available light bulbs -- even a little -- could translate into dramatically lower ...