Further Findings

Penguin fossil found in Peru showed surprising evidence of feathers and their colors.

During the fall semester of 2010, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin revealed:

An ancient penguin with surprising colors

Honey bees with a failure to communicate

Criminal virus spreaders using evolutionary forensics

An electron switch between molecules with cool battery potential

That as biological clock ticks down, libido rises

A dinosaur who thrived when its competition died

Ways the earth moves

That’s not all.

A team of students launched two satellites, which they built, into
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Undergraduate students who want to be America’s next top modeler can step toward that goal through an undergraduate certificate program at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Science (ICES).

First, understand that we’re talking about someone who programs models and runs simulations on a computer and not someone who struts down a runway—not that they are mutually exclusive.

But for those who want to develop models of physical systems, the Certificate in Computational Science and Engineering might be the ticket.

In the program, the students
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From 27 August 2010 Vol 329, Issue 5995, Pages 985-1112. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

It’s not the same as getting your picture on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, but getting an image you created on the cover of Science is still cool.

Georg Stadler’s computer-generated image of a brand-new way to more accurately show plate tectonics in a computer simulation was featured on the cover of the journal’s Aug. 27 edition.

“We heard about the interest of Science in featuring our
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These students will try to build a supercomputer that runs on 26 amps. They are, from left, Bethany Barrientos, Phillip Verheyden, Vladimir Coxall, Loren Micheloni, Alex Heinzmann. Jason Kilman is not pictured

You’re going to blow a fuse if you get too many kitchen appliances going at the same time.

So you really don’t want to plug in a power hungry supercomputer between the toaster oven and the coffee maker. Your entire zip code – or more – could go dark.

But it
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Several members of the Mantle Convection PetaApps project: Omar Ghattas, Lucas Wilcox, Carsten Burstedde, Georg Stadler, all of The University of Texas at Austin, and Michael Gurnis of Caltech.

Plate tectonics was a revolutionary theory at one time. But over the years, it was accepted to explain the movements of the Earth that pulls continents apart and shoves them together.

An interdisciplinary and multi-institutional team of scientists is trying to understand how these plates move by creating the most detailed simulation of
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Brewster McCracken, executive director of the Pecan Street Project

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has been a reminder about the tremendous expertise The University of Texas at Austin has in petroleum and related issues.

Experts from petroleum engineering, supercomputing, government and law have been sought for their views on the BP spill: what happened, what continues to happen and what it all means.

The June 1 Austin Forum event is a reminder that the university has ample expertise in alternative forms of energy: wind,
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It’s been 44 years since “Fantastic Voyage.” That’s the movie in which Raquel Welch and a team of scientists were shrunk to a microscopic size and injected into a man’s bloodstream.

We still can’t do that, but we can model what’s happening inside the human body–and other living things–using powerful computers like the ones at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

The work of some of the researchers who use the center’s resources to study biology is highlighted on the TACC website.

The scientists
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Mary Wheeler, member American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Mary Wheeler does complex mathematics and computation to figure out what’s going on under the surface. She’s director of the Center for Subsurface Modeling at The University of Texas at Austin and her work is used to recover and gas, determine where groundwater contaminants are going and whether carbon sequestration works.

She was named this week as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Read about Wheeler in a Cockrell School of Engineering
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Stan Watowich, World Community Grid user

The World Community Grid (WCG) now has a half-million users dedicating the unused power of their personal computers—and bigger computers, in some cases—to solving pressing scientific questions.

A story on the Web site of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), which donates cycles from one of its high-performance computers to the WCG, looks at the WCG and how it works.

The story highlights the research of Stan Watowich, an associate professor of Biochemistry at The University of Texas Medical Branch.

His
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Ranger

In a world in which small computing devices such as the iPad and its cousins get a lot of attention and what they’re used for is getting smaller (I’ve used more than 140 characters already), it’s good to know there is still room for Big Iron.

Of course, big problems—such as astronomy, energy, biosciences, geosciences and climate—need a big computer with a lot of processing power.

That’s what we’re talking about with the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Some Ranger
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