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 (Nature News) Supercomputer time will help ornithologists make ecological sense of millions of records of bird sightings. John Cobb is a principal investigator for TeraGrid at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and a co-investigator for DataONE, a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation to gather and harmonize ecological and environmental data sets. With vast amounts of computing power comes the opportunity to turn the work of many amateur birders into a nuanced portrait of how species migrate. "It is a wonderful story about how they have used all those people who are enthusiastic about birdwatching and made a scientifically significant data set," says Cobb....8/10
(Knoxville News Sentinel) Gore played a significant role in gaining approval for the SNS, but Tuesday was his first visit since the $1.4 billion project was completed in 2006....8/11
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(Daily News & Analysis) An award winning high-performance computing application developed by scientists has been used to examine the nanoscale inhomogeneities in superconductors that had long been noticed but left unexplained. Thomas Maier and colleagues Gonzalo Alvarez, Michael Summers and Thomas Schulthess from Oak Ridge National Laboratory rewrote computational code for the numerical Hubbard model that previously assumed copper-compound superconducting materials known as cuprates to be homogenous - the same electron density - from atom to atom....8/10
(Scientific Computing) To date, three real-world applications have broken the petaflop barrier (1015 calculations/second), all on the Cray "Jaguar" supercomputer at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory....8/10 |
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DOE
(DOE Press Release) The U.S. Department of Energy today announced the members of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB). Eliminated during the last administration, SEAB is being reestablished under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The twelve member board comprised of scientists, business executives, academics and former government officials will serve as an independent advisory committee to Secretary Chu....8/10
(Knoxville News Sentinel) [Please scroll down] Earlier this year, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex announced that they were separating their benefits program after years under a single umbrella...8/11
East Tennessee
 (Knoxville News Sentinel) Until its recent discovery in North Knox County, thousand cankers disease had spread throughout eight Western states, but nowhere east of the Mississippi River. Officials believe the beetle made the jump to East Tennessee on firewood, or on a piece of walnut used in woodworking....8/11
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National
(Washington Post) With the recovery losing momentum, the Federal Reserve moved Tuesday to try to boost growth, an about-face by a central bank that has spent most of the last year winding down its aggressive measures to support the economy....8/11 [Registration Required]
(Christian Science Monitor) About half the money in the House plan goes toward 1,500 new border personnel. Not in the plan: money for any border fences. President Obama could sign a version of the bill in September....8/11
State & Regional
(Knoxville News Sentinel) TVA faced its highest demand for electrical power since 2007 this month and customers will be seeing an increase in their monthly bills because the agency had to buy extra electricity to meet this demand....8/11
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(New York Times) Though the science of ugliness lags behind investigations into the evolution of beauty and the metrics of a supermodel's face, a few researchers are taking a crack at understanding why we find certain animals unsightly even when they don't threaten us with venom or compete for our food....8/11
(BBC News) A linguistic mystery has arisen in Scotland, surrounding symbols on stones that predate the formation of the country itself....8/11
(PhysOrg) Glaciologists who drilled through an ice cap perched precariously on the edge of a 16,000-foot-high Indonesian mountain ridge say that the ice field could vanish within in the next few years, another victim of global climate change....8/10
(Wired) Russia's killer heat wave and monster South Asian monsoon floods could be more than isolated examples of extreme weather. Though separated by a continent, they could be linked. Monsoon rains drive air upward, and that air has to come down somewhere. It usually comes down over the Mediterranean, producing the region's hot, dry climate. This year, some of that air seems to have gone north to Russia....8/11