Content about Environment

Feature - Anthrax and the grid Researchers used Taverna to model molecules such as the anthrax bacillum. Image courtesy of EPSRC Bacillus anthracis, the bug that causes anthrax, is a peculiar creature.Even though it resembles a soil-growing bacterium, it just hibernates when in the ground, in some cases lying dormant for hundreds of years until ingested by a suitable animal host. Then it springs to life, often causing rapid, even fatal, illness. For years, scientists have wondered how and why this occurs. Now, using Taverna workflow technology developed under myGrid—an e-Science project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)—researchers Anil Wipat, Colin Harwood and colleagues at the North East Regional e-Science Center in Newcastle, UK, think that they have puzzled out the answer, by sequencing its genome and thus characterizing the proteins it secretes Proteins equip a bacterium to survive in its environment and reveal much about its lifestyle.  A soil-living bacterium, for exa

Link of the week - Children’s publication features tornado animation Simulated Twister This sequence of frames from an animation, created by PSC visualization specialist Greg Foss, show the simulated tornado as it moves within the grid volume and evolves. (Darkness of gray shading corresponds to water concentration.)Image courtesy of Pittsburgh Supercomputing CenterThe online edition of the classic children's publication Weekly Reader recently featured a tornado animation produced at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. PSC visualization specialist Greg Foss created the animation from a simulation by University of Oklahoma scientist Ming Xue. Xue, director of the Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms at Norman, used PSC supercomputing to simulate a 1977 supercell storm system and the high-intensity tornado it spawned. The results—which capture the tornado’s vortex structure, with wind speed of 260 miles per hour—represent the highest resolution simulation ever done of an entire thunderstorm and

  Feature - Wonderful wheats: automating the search for new genes How will growers meet the increasing demands for high quality food and feed produced in an environmentally sensitive, sustainable, and profitable manner? Engineering new wheat variety will allow for wheat cultivation to be transformed in the same way as maize, rice and soyabeans cultivation.Stock images from sxc.hu Providing vital food for billions of people, wheat cannot afford a sick-day off. It must resist new diseases, adapt to environmental change and flourish in the face of viruses, bacteria, insects and fungi.Cultivated since the dawn of civilization, wheat must now enter the 21st century. The race for survivalThe keys to flourishing wheat fields are diverse and effective genes, found in wheatÂ’s gargantuan genetic toolbox: a DNA collection containing an astounding 17 billion base pairs.“If you can find the right genes and the right alleles for a given genome, you can select the qualities you want in a new wheat variety,” says Philippe Leroy of Génét

Feature - Cutting edge computing helps discover the origin of life A snapshot from a large-scale molecular dynamics simulation of a 480 base pair DNA plasmid sandwiched between two sheets of a clay mineral. The plasmid structure remains essentially stable and intact at the elevated temperatures and pressures of deep ocean hydrothermal vents, where life on Earth may have originated. Image courtesy of P V Coveney. The National Grid Service in the UK and the TeraGrid in the U.S. have joined forces to help University College London scientists shed light on how life on earth may have originated.  Deep undersea secretsDeep ocean hydrothermal vents have long been suggested as possible sources of biological molecules, such as RNA and DNA, but it was unclear how they could survive the high temperatures and pressures that occur round these vents.Peter Coveney and colleagues at the UCL Centre for Computational Science have used computer simulation to provide insight into the structure and stability of DNA while inserted into layered

Announcement - UC San Diego joins the Green Grid Where does it go? The Green Grid breaks down energy consumption in data centers, offering guidelines and recommendations for best practise.Image courtesy of The Green GridThe University of California San Diego has become the first university to join The Green Grid, a global consortium of companies dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and computing ecosystems.Membership in The Green Grid underscores the university’s commitment to environmentally sound practices, including efforts at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, a national-level supercomputer center funded by the National Science Foundation and UCSD.The SDSC is currently undergoing a “green” building expansion featuring a host of energy-saving designs, materials and practices, all intended to put the data center at the leading edge of operational efficiency. The 80,000 square-foot building, to open next year, earned the 2005 Best Practices Award for innovative heating, ventilation and air

  Feature - Polar Grid: entering the ice age Polar grid will link the North and South Poles to teraflop facilities in the U.S., providing the massive power required to fill the gap in understanding of ice cap behavior in a changing climate.Images courtesy of Polar Grid “Things that took 100,000 years to change are now changing in ten years,” says Geoffrey Fox. “This was a relatively sleepy field. It has come rapidly to the forefront.”Fox is director of the Community Grids Lab at Indiana University’s Pervasive Technology Labs. A computer scientist by trade, he’s been swept into the fever of ice-sheet science.“In the last ten years something has happened,” he says. “Ten years ago the ice sheets weren’t melting. Now they are. And we don’t know why.” The need for information is critical. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report explicitly stated that understanding of ice flow dynamics is limited, that there is no consensus on the magnitude of i