This months stories

NASA scientists part of Arctic Sea ice study

The Polar-5 aircraft, carrying the EM instrument that was used to validate Cryosat-2 sea ice thickness measurements, flying over the validation site.

New research using combined records of ice measurements from NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), the European Space Agency's CryoSat-2 satellite, airborne surveys and ocean-based sensors shows Arctic sea ice volume declined 36 percent in the autumn and 9 percent in the winter over the last decade. The work builds on previous studies using submarine and NASA satellite data and confirms computer model estimates that showed ice volume decreases over the last decade, and builds a foundation for a multi-decadal record of sea ice volume changes. In a report published online recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a large international collaboration of scientists outlined their work to calculate Arctic sea ice volume. The satellite measurements were verified…

Engineers show feasibility of superfast materials

'Organic topological insulators' for quantum computingUniversity of Utah engineers demonstrated it is feasible to build the first organic materials that conduct electricity on their edges, but act as an insulator inside. These materials, called organic topological insulators, could shuttle information at the speed of light in quantum computers and other high-speed electronic devices. The study published this week in the journal Nature Communications will help pioneer a new field of research in materials science, in the same way organic materials lowered the cost and eased production of light-emitting diodes and solar cells, says senior author Feng Liu, professor and chair of materials science and engineering. "This is the first demonstration of the existence of topological insulators based on organic materials,"…

NIST Initiates Development of New Cybersecurity Framework

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today announced the first step in the development of a Cybersecurity Framework, which will be a set of voluntary standards and best practices to guide industry in reducing cyber risks to the networks and computers that are vital to the nation's economy, security and daily life. President Obama called for the Cybersecurity Framework in his Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Executive Order. In accordance with the Executive Order, the Secretary of Commerce has directed the Director of NIST to lead the development of a framework to reduce cyber risks to critical infrastructure, such as power plants and financial, transportation and communications systems. NIST will issue a Request for Information from critical infrastructure owners…

Bern supercomputer simulation helps to better understand the origin of our solar system

Simulations boost the significance of image and measurement data from space missions: based on the example of an asteroid, Bernese astrophysicist Martin Jutzi shows how collisions with other celestial bodies can be reconstructed and that even the internal structure of so-called protoplanets can be described. These models help to understand the development of our solar system. The study appears as today’s cover story in the journal Nature. Four and a half billion years ago, dust particles in a giant, dusty gas cloud combined to form increasingly large clumps. These collided, aggregated and thus grew into planets. Between the planetary orbits of Mars and Jupiter, however, hundreds of thousands of smaller fragments remained. They formed the so-called asteroid belt and hardly…

Mellanox Boosts OpenStack Performance by 20X

Mellanox announces contribution of OpenStack network and storage plug-ins to boost performance, harden security and simplify management Mellanox Technologies has announced availability of hardware-based network virtualization and storage acceleration solutions for OpenStack-based public and private clouds. Using Mellanox 10/40GbE NICs and switches and the OpenStack Quantum plug-in, customers can deploy an embedded virtual switch (eSwitch) to run virtual machine traffic with bare-metal performance, provide hardened security and QoS, all with simpler management through Software Defined Networking (SDN) and OpenFlow APIs. Using Mellanox’s eSwitch approach, virtual machines can run with 20X lower messaging latency, consume less CPU resources, and gain native access to hardware offloads and RDMA. In addition, Mellanox provides an OpenStack Storage (Cinder) plug-in that allows users to run…