Research Bits is an occasional roundup of technology research. This week's topics deal with digital ants, seeing the world from an animal's point of view, and collages of the future.

Ants: an Inspiration

Ants. We’ve watched them march around their eponymous farms, we’ve seen them finish our picnic leftovers, and we’ve had them crawl up our pant legs. Now they are being used by researchers at Wake Forest University as inspiration for a new tool that fights computer worms and viruses, The Daily Telegraph reports.

After watching the actual insects fight off interlopers using “swarming...

Washington--Supercomputers keep breaking records for processing speed, but software to operate them has not kept up with that increasingly zippy hardware. The often-rickety supercomputing computer code is becoming an obstacle to making better weather models, medical simulations, and other applications of high-performance computers, said experts at a conference here Wednesday on the future of academic supercomputing.

"Codes are still being used from the 1960s," said Ed Seidel, director of the National Science Foundation's office of cyberinfrastructure, in an interview at the meeting. "Those have to be retooled or rethought" to take full advantage of the latest supercomputers, he said.

Attendees at the meeting said one of the most popular computer languages used to create programs for supercomputers is

The operators of the .edu domain are planning to enhance security for .edu Web sites, in a move experts say is long overdue.

Once the new system is in place, work that is expected to be completed by March of next year, it should be harder for a third party with bad intentions to take control of .edu sites protected by the security system. Called Domain Name System Security Extensions, it uses a digital signature to verify that the site being visited is in fact the site it purports to be. People browsing Web sites will be less likely to be redirected to malicious sites posing as legitimate ones.

Web sites ending in .edu will be able to opt into the security system. A spokesman for Educause, a nonprofit group that operates the .edu domain...

With a new $10.1-million grant from the National Science Foundation, Indiana University at Bloomington plans to build an experimental network to link supercomputers at campuses across the country to help scientists tackle large-scale reseach problems.

The project aims to create a distributed supercomputer by linking some 1,400 processors at five universities. The new network will be called FutureGrid.

Bradley Wheeler, the university's vice president for information technology, says that the goal of the project is to figure out the best way to do such networking of high-end computers. The ability to create faster machines by linking several supercomputers online could help projects such as modeling climate systems or comparing DNA segments.

"This whole project hinges on the question, What’s next?" Mr. Wheeler said. "We are creating an experiment...

Google has donated cellphones to 11 colleges and universities for use in introductory computer-science courses this fall, hoping that students will build some interesting applications for the company's cellphone software.

Each college has received 20 HTC phones loaded with Google’s Android operating system, which the company says allows students with no programming experience to create applications for sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The colleges getting the phones are Ball State University, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Indiana University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mills College, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Michigan, the University of San Francisco, and Wellesley College.

The program between Google and the colleges kicks off as cellphone...

The University of Iowa law professor Lea VanderVelde has no problem with her students using Wikipedia. In fact, she hopes others use the information her students have posted in their own research.

Law professors across the country have struggled with how they can use technology in their classes and teaching to their advantage.

Some professors have banned laptops in their classes, saying they can just be a distraction. In California, one group began teaching law courses in virtual reality using Second Life.

When Ms. VanderVelde was preparing to teach a class on employment law last semester, she was trying to think of a new way to teach the complex differences among states’ laws. She decided to divide the states up and give a few to each student to research extensively, and to post their...

Computer science is taking on a public-service bent at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where students and faculty in a new program are using code to combat societal problems like homelessness and the spread of HIV.

The program, dubbed “Computing for Good,” or “C4G” for short, spun out of a course taught last spring by Santosh Vempala, a computer-science professor at Georgia Tech, and two other faculty members. Students in the class, which saw its enrollment jump to 50 this fall from 17 last spring, developed mobile kiosks for recording war-crimes testimony in Liberia and built a Web-based monitoring system for blood supplies that the World Health Organization is considering deploying worldwide. Other projects included developing computerized systems for Atlanta homeless shelters trying...

The number of students enrolled in computer-science programs rose for the first time in six years, says a new report.

Data from the Taulbee Survey, an annual poll by the Computing Research Association, reveals that enrollment jumped 6.2 percent this year among students majoring or intending to major in computer science in the United States and Canada. The data include candidates for bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees.

Top programs, like the ones at the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University, have been reporting increases in enrollments in recent years, but this report makes it official: The computer science major is back.

“It definitely appears that U.S. computer-science departments are replenishing the freshman and sophomore...

Computers have already relieved their human creators of plenty of mental chores, such as doing their taxes and keeping track of their appointments. But what about reading a date’s signals at dinner?

Now, just in time for Valentine’s Day, three undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon University have applied computer technology to the science of romance with their EyeTable, an artificially intelligent dinner table that reads physical gestures and speech patterns and lets the participants know how the date is going—in real time.

Here’s how it works: EyeTable’s centerpiece is a pair of motion sensors that communicate with sensors attached to a headset worn by each participant. The table analyzes the movements and orientation of the participants’ heads—sensing whether they are making eye contact or glancing restlessly around the...

A new effort to increase several overseas universities’ access to cloud computing, or using Web-based resources to execute computationally intense tasks, could allow researchers there to use more sophisticated tools for field study.

IBM announced today that it had selected three universities in Qatar — Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Texas A&M University at Qatar, and Qatar University — as collaborators for its cloud-computing software. In a news release, IBM said it hoped the technology would aid in the universities’ advanced research into the region’s oil and gas exploration and production. Other uses of the technology may include the development of Arabic-language search engines.