A presentation at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC) in San Diego on March 24 will examine the technologies that will emerge in the next three to four years to power warehouse-scale computing data centers, upon which companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, and many more are increasingly relying. The advent of distributed, massive-scale "cloud computing" today is something of a return to the early 1980s, when computing was of a different sort. Rather than individual desktop or laptop machines, which are the current norm, computers were usually time-shared among multiple users working

A team led by Princeton University scientists has tested Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity to see if it holds true at cosmic scales. And, after two years of analyzing astronomical data, the scientists have concluded that Einstein's theory, which describes the interplay between gravity, space and time, works as well in vast distances as in more local regions of space. The scientists' analysis of more than 70,000 galaxies demonstrates that the universe -- at least up to a distance of 3.5 billion light years from Earth -- plays by the rules set out by Einstein in his famous theory. Ever

Space physicists from the University of Leicester are part of an international team that has identified the impact of the Sun on Mars' atmosphere. Writing in the AGU journal Geophysics Research Letters, the scientists report that Mars is constantly losing part of its atmosphere to space. The new study shows that pressure from solar wind pulses is a significant contributor to Mars's atmospheric escape. The researchers analysed solar wind data and satellite observations that track the flux of heavy ions leaving Mars's atmosphere. The authors found that Mars's atmosphere does not drift away at a steady pace; instead, atmospheric escape occurs

Materials scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have designed a way to harvest small amounts of waste energy and harness them to turn water into usable hydrogen fuel. The process is simple, efficient and recycles otherwise-wasted energy into a useable form. "This study provides a simple and cost-effective technology for direct water splitting that may generate hydrogen fuels by scavenging energy wastes such as noise or stray vibrations from the environment," the authors write in a new paper, published March 2 in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. "This new discovery may have potential implications in solving the challenging energy and

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have created a molecular image of a system that moves electrons between proteins in cells. The achievement is a breakthrough for biology and could provide insights to minimize energy loss in other systems, from nanoscale devices to moving electricity around the country. The research, led by Carrie Wilmot, an associate professor in the College of Biological Sciences, is published in the March 12 issue of Science. "Evolution has been fine-tuning electricity in organisms for a lot longer than humans have been using it," Wilmot says. "We can learn a lot from nature about how to use

Shortly after the Moon formed, an asteroid smacked into its southern hemisphere and gouged out a truly enormous crater, the South Pole-Aitken basin, almost 1,500 miles across and more than five miles deep. "This is the biggest, deepest crater on the Moon -- an abyss that could engulf the United States from the East Coast through Texas," said Noah Petro of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The impact punched into the layers of the lunar crust, scattering that material across the Moon and into space. The tremendous heat of the impact also melted part of the floor of

Innovative sound-mapping software based on human hearing has been developed to help architects design out unwanted noise. The new software generates audibility maps of proposed room designs. The EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) project has been developed at Cardiff University. These maps show hotspots where conversations would not be intelligible if the room were busy. Architects can then adjust their designs to reduce reverberation until the hotspots are eliminated and audibility is maximised. Software already exists to help architects predict how a building will perform acoustically for an audience in places like theatres and concert halls. This new software is specifically designed

A team of engineers from the University of Seville (US) has created a system for monitoring historical monuments by remote control and detecting possible damage. Five years ago the researchers placed various sensors on the Giraldillo, the sculpture that crowns the Giralda, and now they are publishing the results in the journal Structural Health Monitoring. "The system has been connected to the Giraldillo to register different variables associated to the mechanical response of this sculpture, such as meteorological actions or conditions that it is subjected to, but it could be used to monitor other historical monuments", Mario Solís, main author of

Atrazine, one of the world's most widely used pesticides, wreaks havoc with the sex lives of adult male frogs, emasculating three-quarters of them and turning one in 10 into females, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, biologists. The 75 percent that are chemically castrated are essentially "dead" because of their inability to reproduce in the wild, reports UC Berkeley's Tyrone B. Hayes, professor of integrative biology. "These male frogs are missing testosterone and all the things that testosterone controls, including sperm. So their fertility is as low as 10 percent in some cases, and that is only if

One of the pleasures of perusing ancient maps is locating regions so poorly explored that mapmakers warned of dragons and sea monsters. Now, astronomers using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope find themselves in the same situation as cartographers of old. A new study of the ever-present fog of gamma rays from sources outside our galaxy shows that less than a third of the emission arises from what astronomers once considered the most likely suspects -- black-hole-powered jets from active galaxies. "Active galaxies can explain less than 30 percent of the extragalactic gamma-ray background Fermi sees," said Marco Ajello, an astrophysicist at