Computers, Mathematics Archives

25 January 1999 | ScienceNOW

Gore Offers $366 Million for Computing

by Robert F. Service and David Malakoff

ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA--The field of computing is chock-full of acronyms, from RAM to Y2K. Yesterday the Clinton Administration coined another one: IT2, to describe its plan to boost basic research in...

30 November 1998 | ScienceNOW

High Court Hears Census Debate

by David Kestenbaum

WASHINGTON, D.C.--The bitter partisan battle over whether the Census Bureau may use statistical sampling to estimate the nation's population in the 2000 census landed at the feet of the Supreme...

5 November 1998 | ScienceNOW

A Transatlantic Black Hole Merger

by Robert Irion

Scientists in the United States and Germany will merge two supercomputers across nine time zones next week to watch a neutron star crash into a black hole. The project will...

4 November 1998 | ScienceNOW

Blue Light as a Feather

by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel

Ornithologists will be revising a century-long misconception in textbooks with a report upsetting the prevailing view about why some bird feathers appear blue. The work, published in this week's issue...

22 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Computer to Pinpoint Distant Galaxies

by Govert Schilling

European radio astronomers have switched on a new supercomputer that will provide some of the sharpest views of the universe ever obtained. Today, researchers at the Joint Institute for Very...

21 October 1998 | ScienceNOW

Durable Food Webs, by Computer

by Dan Ferber

Food webs are woven from many plant and animal species that interact in fantastically complex ways. The intricacies of these interactions have eluded attempts to construct realistic computer models of...

23 September 1998 | ScienceNOW

Perturbations of a Mystery Planet

by Science News Staff

Neptune was first spotted on this night in 1846. This was the first time that Newton's theory of gravitation had been used to deduce the position of an unknown planet....

14 September 1998 | ScienceNOW

Fighting Corruption in the Quantum World

by Andrew Watson

One strategy for taking computers into a whole new realm of miniaturization is based on harnessing the unfamiliar quantum laws of the atomic world. Quantum computers, which could be enormously...

26 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Descendants of the Wife of Bath

by Gretchen Vogel

The study of medieval literature may seem far removed from the rigor of 20th-century science. But techniques from evolutionary biology have helped scholars to sort out the relationships among medieval...

24 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Court Nixes Census Sampling

by David Kestenbaum

WASHINGTON, D.C.--A federal court ruled today that the Census Bureau may not use statistical sampling to perform a national head count in the 2000 census. The decision is a victory...

21 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

Math's New Superstars

by Allyn Jackson

BERLIN--Mathematicians officially anointed four new superstars when the 1998 Fields Medals were presented here this week at the opening ceremonies of the International Congress of Mathematicians. There is no Nobel...

7 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

The Mind of Machines

by Science News Staff

Sunday, 9 August, is the 71st birthday of computer scientist Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence--the quest to develop computers that can learn, think, and perform...

3 August 1998 | ScienceNOW

IBM Pushing Faster Chips

by Science News Staff

IBM announced today that it will soon begin producing microprocessor chips that it says could boost operating speeds by 25% and overall chip performance by more than a third. In...

23 June 1998 | ScienceNOW

First Computer Whiz

by Science News Staff

Alan Turing, an English mathematician who was a trailblazer in computer theory, was born on this day in 1912. Turing is best known for a classic paper he published in...

8 May 1998 | ScienceNOW

Wild Arterial Rides

by Science News Staff

Blood is known to spiral as it flows through arteries, but researchers at a Royal Academy of Engineering conference announced yesterday in London that these helical streams themselves whirl like...

5 May 1998 | ScienceNOW

Prewitt to Take On Census

by Science News Staff

The White House is mum, but the word on the street is that the Administration plans to nominate political scientist Kenneth Prewitt for the unenviable job of Census Bureau director....

14 April 1998 | ScienceNOW

Making Light Work of Encryption

by Science News Staff

Researchers have developed a way to encode information transmitted by light. The advance, described today at the International Society for Optical Engineering's AeroSense 98 Conference in Orlando, Florida, could lead...

10 March 1998 | ScienceNOW

Search in the Blink of a Photon

by Science News Staff

Quantum computers are a long way off, but scientists are already busy dreaming up software for them. One such algorithm, for example, could factor a thousand-digit number in about half...

24 February 1998 | ScienceNOW

Top U.S. Students Lag in Math and Science

by Science News Staff

U.S. high school seniors have flunked the latest international science survey. The students performed near the bottom in general science literacy, were second to last in advanced mathematics, and brought...

17 February 1998 | ScienceNOW

Digital Libraries Put to Work

by Science News Staff

Efforts to make the Internet's digital flood as useful and easy to navigate as bookstacks in a good old-fashioned library will get a big boost sometime in the next few...

6 February 1998 | ScienceNOW

Cardiology by the Numbers

by Science News Staff

A mathematical analysis of heartbeat patterns can detect certain heart disorders with unerring accuracy. Previous mathematical tools for diagnosing heart disease have generally not been reliable enough to use clinically....

4 February 1998 | ScienceNOW

Problem Drinking Studies

by Science News Staff

Scientists who claim that a glass of wine a day will help you live longer may be all wet. An analysis of a mountain of data from previous studies on...

18 December 1997 | ScienceNOW

'Sieving' Prime Numbers From Thin Ore

by Science News Staff

Like prospectors, mathematicians who study prime numbers would like to know how these unusual numbers are scattered through the ore of other integers. Now they have a new prospecting tool....

18 November 1997 | ScienceNOW

Supercomputing Goes Global

by Science News Staff

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA--The first permanent international grid of supercomputers came on line today here at the SC97 supercomputing conference, and its performance--such as a three-dimensional (3D) simulation of two black...

11 November 1997 | ScienceNOW

Prize Offered for New Fermat Theorem

by Science News Staff

The story of the most famous problem in mathematics, Fermat's Last Theorem, has all the ingredients of a real-life treasure hunt: a cryptic note left behind by the French mathematician...

5 November 1997 | ScienceNOW

Phased by Traffic Jams?

by Science News Staff

Traffic jams sometimes start for no apparent reason and can last for hours. Now, after observing a notoriously choked stretch of autobahn, two German researchers think they understand better why...

14 October 1997 | ScienceNOW

Nobel Prize for Stock Option Model

by Science News Staff

Robert Merton of Harvard University and Myron Scholes of Stanford University have won the Nobel Prize in economics for a method for figuring the price of stock options and other...

8 August 1997 | ScienceNOW

The Mind of Machines

by Science News Staff

Tomorrow is the 70th birthday of computer scientist Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence--the quest to develop computers that can learn, think, and perform tasks just...

24 July 1997 | ScienceNOW

Net Hogs Slow the Web

by Science News Staff

Any regular reader of ScienceNOW has experienced the spates of congestion that afflict the Internet. As computers send volumes of data from server to server, phone lines fill up, causing...

23 June 1997 | ScienceNOW

First Computer Whiz

by Science News Staff

fAlan Turing, an English mathematician who was a trailblazer in computer theory, was born on this day in 1912. Turing is best known for a classic paper he published in...

17 June 1997 | ScienceNOW

Microsoft Puts Down Roots in Cambridge

by Science News Staff

LONDON--Cambridge University and the software giant Microsoft hastily convened a news conference today to confirm mounting rumors that they had struck a deal to site Microsoft's first foreign research center...

3 June 1997 | ScienceNOW

Microsoft and Cambridge Talk Up Research Complex

by Science News Staff

LONDON--Billionaire Bill Gates, founder of the software giant Microsoft, is negotiating with the U.K.'s Cambridge University to set up a joint multimillion-dollar software research complex at the university. Gates is...

22 May 1997 | ScienceNOW

For Sale: A Piece of Human History

by Science News Staff

The Internet has been a boon to science, but paleoanthropologists surfing the Web last week got an unpleasant surprise: A site called Fossilnet is advertising 20,000-year-old human skulls and even...

21 May 1997 | ScienceNOW

NSF Funds Faster Connections

by Science News Staff

For scientists trying to share vast amounts of electronic data, traffic on the Internet can slow to an agonizing crawl. But the pace will pick up soon for 35 research...

9 May 1997 | ScienceNOW

Luring Light From the Straight and Narrow

by Science News Staff

Like a desert mirage, a small box with a wire and some sodium atoms can make light curve. This new device, described in the current issue of Physical Review Letters,...

6 May 1997 | ScienceNOW

Fickle Photons Hobble Quantum Cryptography

by Science News Staff

Scientists have devised a way to breach the security of information that might be encoded in photons. The findings, reported in the current issue of Physical Review Letters, appear to...

1 May 1997 | ScienceNOW

A Baker's Dozen Win Top Science Prizes

by Science News Staff

WASHINGTON, D.C.--National Science Foundation director Neal Lane announced here yesterday the 1997 recipients of the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor. Also announced were winners of the...

15 April 1997 | ScienceNOW

Wulf Wins Engineering Presidency

by Science News Staff

WASHINGTON, D.C.--After 2 years of turmoil, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has a new president. William Wulf, a University of Virginia computer engineer, was elected today by the NAE's...

15 April 1997 | ScienceNOW

Random Numbers Behaving Too Orderly?

by Science News Staff

Finding a random sequence is as easy as pi--or is it? Mathematicians often depend on irrational numbers like , e (the basis of natural logarithms), and 2 to give them...

14 April 1997 | ScienceNOW

Panel Would Block LHC, Internet Funding

by Science News Staff

WASHINGTON, D.C.--A House panel wants to delay or defer U.S. plans to participate in Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and upgrade the Internet. The moves are part of a raft...

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