In a new study in the journal Patterns, data scientist and firearm proliferation researcher Maurizio Porfiri, Institute Professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and co-authors Roni Barak Ventura, a post-doctoral researcher at Porfiri’s Dynamical Systems Lab, and Manuel Ruiz Marin of the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Spain describe a spatio-temporal model to predict trends in firearm prevalence on a state-by-state level by fusing data from two available proxies – background checks per capita and suicides committed with a firearm in a given state. Calibrating their results with yearly survey data, they determined that the two proxies can be simultaneously considered to draw precise information regarding firearm ownership.

Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that 18 million node-hours have been awarded to 45 scientific projects under the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) program. The projects, with applications ranging from advanced energy systems to climate change to cancer research, will use DOE supercomputers to uncover unique insights about scientific problems that would otherwise be impossible to solve using experimental approaches.

The inability of the heart muscle to regenerate after a heart attack is allegedly due, at least in part, to a class of steroid hormones: glucocorticoids. An international study led by the University of Bologna has shown that their inhibition produces promising outcomes in repairing damaged heart tissue

In a step toward robots that can learn on the fly like humans do, a new approach expands training data sets for robots that work with soft objects like ropes and fabrics, or in cluttered environments.