A simple online game can teach people to more accurately sort waste—with lasting results.

For scientists wrestling with problems as diverse as containing superhot plasma in a fusion reactor, improving the accuracy of weather forecasts, or probing the unexplained dynamics of a distant galaxy, turbulence-spawning shear flow is a serious complicating factor. A new supercomputer-powered effort aims to make modelling shear far easier.

Scientists have taken a novel approach to unraveling the complex structure and regulation of enzymes: They Googled it.

Wine forgery, including adulteration, counterfeiting (e.g. mislabeling/misrepresentation) and intellectual property infringement, takes place on a global scale, but is on the rise in central Europe. To help in the fight against fraud, the industry are turning to NMR fingerprinting to stamp out the problem.

Samsung's recent announcement of 30TB drives is part of a wider trend within high-performance computing (HPC) towards big storage. But, as HPC consultant Laurence Horrocks-Barlow writes, these huge storage capacities present unique challenges and opportunities for organizations on a budget.

Motivated by a deadly chemical attack in Syria, researchers at the University of Texas at San Antonio are pursuing research that may help save lives during an airborne chemical attack. The team used the Stampede2 supercomputer and innovative computer simulation models to replicate the dispersion of the chemical gas released in the Syrian event, which may help improve evacuation speed during future attacks.

A single bacterial cell on its own is vulnerable to attack and like many living things they can benefit from safety in numbers. But bacteria take communal living to a whole new level, forming veritable civilizations - the bacterial biofilm.

The rate at which new drugs are discovered is in decline, and computer-aided drug design has not produced the radical change in the success of candidate drugs the pharma industry anticipated. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based approaches are the new hope for revolutionizing the drug discovery process. But are these, as computer-aided drug design was, an over-hyped time bomb waiting to be found out? Or is it truly a revolution on the cusp of realizing its promise?

As part of the host-pathogen arms race, viruses are continually evolving to evade the host immune response, be it from previous infection or immunity acquired through vaccination. Here we take a look at the processes of antigenic drift and antigenic shift.