The San Diego Supercomputer Center’s new data facility was designed to use less power than conventional data centers. (Alan Decker photo)

As buildings go, data centers can be energy hogs. The servers within them, which heat up like gas griddles, need to be kept cool constantly. In the arctic, that task might be a cinch, but in southern California, it’s obviously more challenging.

Now the San Diego Supercomputer Center, which is part of the University of California at San Diego, is opening an expanded “green” data center that will rely on a number of innovative technologies to reduce power use. Along with common features like low-E window glazing and solar shades, the 80,000-square-foot expansion also features a hybrid heating and cooling system that filters external air to help ventilate the building and maintain optimal humidity.

The most unusual feature in the building is a rack...

A detail of the GeoEye-1 photograph of the Kutztown U. campus. (GeoEye image)

A brand-new commercial satellite with a high-resolution camera snapped its first picture last week — a view of Kutztown University, in Pennsylvania, from 423 miles up.

The new satellite, GeoEye-1, was launched last month and cost $502-million. Although it is sponsored by Google, which will use its images in Google Maps and Google Earth, the satellite’s main customer will be the U.S. government’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, according to Wired Science. The satellite’s cameras are capable of picking up items as small as about 16 inches across, but a government rule will prevent GeoEye from selling such detailed images commercially. The company will, however, be able to market images showing items as small as about 20 inches across.

Why Kutztown? “When we opened the camera door at noon on...

When John McCain and Barack Obama meet at Hofstra University tomorrow night for this year’s final presidential debate, they’ll be doing a lot to pep up the Long Island economy. Wiring up the reporters and bloggers who will cover the debate from the campus is a major undertaking, to say nothing of feeding everyone.

For starters, the university’s media rate card offers a combination Internet-and-telephone package for $650, including both wireless and hard-wired network connections. Renting a laptop computer costs $250, a laser printer is $550 (supplies included), and a high-speed copier runs $1,650 (including paper). Add on another $15 for an outlet strip to plug everything in.

But bloggers won’t want to work standing up, of course — a four-foot table is $44 ($51.50 for the eight-foot version), and padded folding chairs are $11 each. A mini-fridge? That’s another $150.

For those...

Who’s your idea of the perfect presidential candidate? Maybe it’s not John McCain or Barack Obama — maybe it’s someone who can really claim to be a “man of the people.” Maybe it’s Julian Polonius Foley Marcos DeWiki III.

Senator DeWiki’s campaign Web site, created by a team of graduate and undergraduate students at Cornell University, explains what sets his candidacy apart — anyone can contribute or edit content, making additions to the candidate’s already-extensive biography or changing his positions on issues like immigration, free trade, local food, and network neutrality. The fictional candidate’s biography, in particular, is worth a read, and not just for the rumors about his father’s affair with Imelda Marcos or his family’s connection with the Dolly Parton hit “Jolene.”

The Cornell students who created the site are studying online civic participation, according to a university...

Microsoft is teaming up with a consortium of universities to study how best to use computer games to teach middle-school students math and science. The interdisciplinary research project, which is to be announced today, will involve New York University and a consortium of other institutions — the City University of New York, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Parsons the New School for Design, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Columbia’s Teachers College and NYU’s Polytechnic Institute are also involved.

In middle school, many students “become discouraged or uninterested and pour their time at home into gaming,” said Ken Perlin, an NYU professor of computer science, in a statement. “We think gaming is our starting point to draw them into math, science, and technology-based programs.”

Mr. Perlin will be a co-director of the research effort, which will be called the...

California State University’s Stanislaus campus will make almost $4-million this year by leasing out a portion of the radio spectrum on which it used to broadcast distance-learning courses. The courses are now distributed online.

According to The Modesto Bee, the university has signed a deal with an Internet-service provider, Clearwire Corporation, which will pay the university $4-million upfront and more than $1-million a year thereafter to lease the portion of the radio spectrum licensed to the university. The lease can be extended for up to 30 years, and could bring the institution as much as $54-million.

The university says it plans to use the money to offer free wireless service on its campus and make other technology improvements. The company will use the spectrum to offer wireless service in California’s Central Valley. —Lawrence Biemiller

An article about the College of New Jersey’s Facebook page reminded me that I had been meaning to see whether my alma mater — Franklin and Marshall College — has a page on Facebook. A quick Facebook search turned up a number of F&M pages, but the one at the top of the list has nothing to do with the college: It’s a page for an Italian clothing line that inexplicably picked up the college’s name back in 1999.

The Facebook page explains that two guys from Verona, Andrea Pensiero and Giuseppe Albarelli, decided to base their line of clothes on a “marketing mix based on true vintage, college, and American culture with references to the 1950’s and 1970’s.”

As someone who was an F&M student in the 70s, I can attest that the typefaces and logos the company has chosen for its products are perfect for the period. I guess that’s why its Facebook page claims that the company is “recognized as ...

Mathematics researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles have discovered the largest known prime number — a 13-million-digit behemoth — almost a year after setting up 75 computer-lab PC’s to work on the search in their spare time. The researchers are believed to have won a $100,000 prize offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the discovery of the first prime number of more than 10 million digits.

According to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, a project that has harnessed excess computing power of machines around the world to carry out the search, a UCLA computer discovered the number on August 23. A Mersenne prime takes the form 2P-1, and UCLA’s — the 45th known Mersenne prime — is 243,112,609-1. The Los Angeles Times says the number was discovered by a Dell Optiplex 745 running the project’s software on Windows XP.

Project officials say that...

About $4-million in student aid for some 15,000 students attending four California community colleges has been held up by problems with new student-services software.

The Contra Costa Times reports that the Peralta Community College District, based in Oakland, has been unable to process aid checks because of a difficulty in adapting the software to the needs of a multi-campus system. The district comprises Berkeley City College, the College of Alameda, Laney College, and Merritt College.

With some angry students walking out of classes to protest the delays, administrators have scrambled to offer fee waivers, vouchers for textbooks, and even short-term loans. But many students use the aid money for expenses that vouchers can’t cover, like rent and food. College officials told the Times that they did not know how many students, if any, had been forced to drop out because of the aid...

The new King Abdullah University for Science and Technology, in Saudi Arabia, plans to work with IBM to build a supercomputer that will be one of the world’s fastest machines, capable of 222 teraflops — 222 trillion floating-point operations per second.

According to the university, the machine will have 65,536 independent processing cores and will be the fastest in the Middle East — and the sixth-fastest commercially-available system in the world. It is designed to be energy efficient and to be expanded to offer petaflop capacity — 1,000 trillion floating-point operations per second.

The machine will be installed at the university’s campus in Thuwal. It will be used by researchers in various disciplines, the university said, and by the research partners at other institutions. It is a project of the new university’s KAUST/IBM Center for Deep Computing Research, which will initially...