Stories about: Rice University

Researchers at Rice University have demonstrated a new data storage medium made out of a layer of graphite only 10 atoms thick.

President-elect Barack Obama will soon outline an economic stimulus plan that likely will include billions of dollars for infrastructure projects, such as roads, bridges and new schools. Obama also is hearing calls for new funding to improve the information infrastructure and the virtual highways it runs on, and to broaden access to high-performance computing (HPC) systems.

As its open source desktop software grows in popularity across a wider range of electronic devices, the GNOME Foundation has decided to hire a new executive director to continue its spread.

The bounceback e-mail messages come in at a trickle, maybe one or two every hour. The subject lines are disquieting: "Cyails, Vygara nad Levytar," "UNSOLICITED BULK EMAIL, apparently from you."

Nanotechnology researchers have built the darkest material ever made by man.

We at Computerworld would be the last to say that science and technology aren't creative pursuits. Still, when most people say, "Oh, she's very creative," they're probably not talking about the subject's ability to perform higher math or engineer a network. Such people might be amazed to learn of the remarkable number of actors, directors, musicians and other celebrities who nurture an inner geek.

For years, the name of the game in supercomputing has been raw speed, with hardware and software designers striving to boost the number of instructions per second -- FLOPS -- that could be crunched. Gigaflops computers gave way to teraflops machines, which are now yielding to petaflops models -- those able to execute 1 quadrillion computations per second.

IBM researchers in Zurich have devised a single molecule switch. It can be flipped between two detectable 'on' and 'off' states by applying voltage pulses to it. Both states are stable and data read-out is nondestructive. More than 500 switching cycles have been demonstrated by IBM's researchers, Heike Riel and Emanuel Lortscher.

Re-engineering programs to work on multicore chips is already difficult but will get even harder as the number of processors continues to multiply.

Randy Carter, CIO at Cabot in Boston, has a daughter and two sons, one of whom was a freshman in college during the dot-com boom, when many parents didn't think twice about urging their school-age kids to get into IT. Carter's son graduated as a computer engineer into the gloomy hiring climate of 2003, made even gloomier by the increasing practice of offshoring, which was taking hold at the time.

Researchers at Rice University have discovered what they say is a flaw in the beta version of Google's Desktop Search product that could allow third parties to access users' search result summaries, providing a sneak peek at part of the content of personal files.