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RALEIGH, NC — North Carolina health officials on Tuesday released a report showing 170 ongoing COVID-19 clusters in K-12 schools or child care settings. While the state Department of Health and Human Services said it does not have data on the number of pupils quarantined statewide or the share of those forced to miss school without a remote learning option, districts without mask-wearing requirements are seeing substantially more spread of the virus and hours of lost learning among students. Union County Public Schools, which voted down a proposal last month to require mask wearing in the state’s sixth-largest public school...

Dense Star Clusters Could be the Places Where Black Hole Mergers are Common Article written: 12 Apr , 2018 by Matt Williams In February of 2016, scientists working for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) made history when they announced the first-ever detection of gravitational waves. Not only did this discovery confirm a century-old prediction made by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, it also confirmed the existence of stellar binary black holes – which merged to produce the signal in the first place.And now, an international team led by MIT astrophysicist Carl Rodriguez has produced a study that suggests that ...

Everybody is looking to shake up the server business this days, it seems. But everyone had better get in line behind 3Leaf Systems, which is launching its much awaited "Aqua" system pooling and virtualization chipset and an intriguing x64 system to match. A little more than two years ago, 3Leaf Systems came out of stealth mode with a funky I/O virtualization product for X64 servers and the promise that it would create a special chip for system boards that would allow for the virtualization of multiple CPUs dozens or hundreds of servers and - here's the neat part - the...

MINNEAPOLIS — Ayub Abdi is a cute 5-year-old with a smile that might be called shy if not for the empty look in his eyes. He does not speak. When he was 2, he could say “Dad,” “Mom,” “give me” and “need water,” but he has lost all that. He does scream and spit, and he moans a loud “Unnnnh! Unnnnh!” when he is unhappy. At night he pounds the walls for hours, which led to his family’s eviction from their last apartment. As he is strapped into his seat in the bus that takes him to special education class,...

Everyone is scientific circles is abuzz with the big news: there's proof that dark matter exists! The paper from the scientists who made the discovered is here; and a Sean Carroll (no relation) has a very good explanation on his blog, Cosmic Variance. This discovery happens to work as a great example of just why good science needs good math. As I always say, one of the ways to recognize a crackpot theory in physics is by the lack of math. For an example, you can look at the electric universe folks. They have a theory, and they make predictions:...

Biggest Collision in the Universe Summary - (Sep 24, 2004) An international team of scientists have discovered one of the most powerful events since the Big Bang: a collision between two galaxy clusters, which is smashing millions of stars into each other. The galaxy clusters are colliding like hurricanes, tossing individual galaxies out into interstellar space, and creating shockwaves more than 100-million degrees hot. Although the cluster, Abell 754, has been known for a long time, the astronomers used the ESA's XMM-Newton X-Ray Observatory to trace back the interactions and collisions with great detail, and get a much deeper understanding...

Two compelling Christmas clusters that we first discovered back in 2000 have continued to grow. We have been saving them to share on the eve of this happiest season of the year. In our research of longer and longer codes, some of them have crossed through these Christmas clusters with fascinating results, nothing short of collisions between Christmas and the “end times.” We began our search for codes about Christmas in the Tanakh a little over two years ago. The first place that we looked was in Micah 5:2, where the village of Bethlehem is mentioned as the birthplace of...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 November 29 Open Star Clusters M35 and NGC 2158 Credit & Copyright: N. A. Sharp (NOAO), AURA, NSF Explanation: Open clusters of stars can be near or far, young or old, and diffuse or compact. Open clusters may contain from 100 to 10,000 stars, all of which formed at nearly the same time. Bright blue stars frequently distinguish younger open clusters. M35, pictured above on the upper...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 October 17 Centaurus A: Young Blue Star Stream Credit: E. Peng and H. Ford (JHU), K. Freeman (ANU), R. White (STScI), CTIO, NOAO, NSF Explanation: Almost lost in this cosmic jumble of stars, gas and dust is a faint but definite blue arc -- a stream of young stars whose formation was probably triggered as a small dwarf galaxy was torn apart approaching the giant elliptical galaxy...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 October 12 Chandra Deep Field Credit: Riccardo Giacconi et al., JHU, AUI, NASA Explanation: Officially the Chandra Deep Field - South, this picture represents the deepest ever x-ray image of the Universe. One million seconds of accumulated exposure time with the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory went in to its making. Concentrating on a single, otherwise unremarkable patch of sky in the constellation Fornax, this x-ray image corresponds...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 October 2 Star Clouds Toward the Southern Crown Credit & Copyright: David Malin, UK Schmidt Telescope, AAO Explanation: The flowing trails of dust toward Corona Australis, the constellation of the Southern Crown, are visible here because not because they glow, but because they absorb and reflect. The dust appears bluer when seen near bright stars because it preferentially reflects blue light. The densest knots of dust are...

Breaking Performance Bottlenecks of SMP Systems with Opteron By Spencer Kittelson Date: July 29, 2002One of the most wonderful performance enhancing features of the forthcoming [AMD] Opteron (Hammer) are the multiple independent direct memory channels that are built into each CPU.  This is a huge, huge difference from the shared memory (actually, shared everything) approach of Intel symmetric multi-processing (SMP) systems.  Given the limitations of today's memory technology, this was an exceedingly smart move on the part of AMD and will likely change the way we design some of our applications in the very near future. Intel SMP systems exhibit...