The Imagine Cup, now in its eighth year, encourages high school and university students around the world to develop software aiming to solve global problems.

Team Skeek from Thailand took home the top prize for software design for creating a program that translates text into sign language using speech and facial recognition. Their application eyeFeel lets hearing impaired people communicate using a visual augmented reality environment.

Team Skeek Wins Top Prize at Imagine Cup, photo courtesy of Microsoft

SmarterME from Taiwan won the embedded development category with a device that targets the biggest energy-suckers in the home. The application lets homeowners see the appliances that use the most power and raise the electric bill.

By Implication from the Philippines won in game design for an X-Box enabled game that allows players to perform human intelligence tasks and gets young people interested in volunteering. It uses an X-Box controller and social media to encourage youth to help battle some of the worlds biggest problems, ranging from poverty to environmental disasters.

The game Wildfire was inspired byTyphoon Ketsana, a devastating storm that ravaged the island nation.

The winning team in each of the five categories took home $25,000. The other winners were:

• WeiQiu Wen from China, IT Challenge
• Mirror Vita from Taiwan, Digital Media
• Jigga-Dongxi from Taiwan, Envisioning 2020 Award
• Xormis from Jamaica, Interoperability Award
• Wanna Be Alice from Korea, Next Generation Web Award
• Team Note-Taker from the United States, Touch and Tablet Accessibility Award
• Beastware from the United States, Windows Phone 7 Rockstar Award
• Rhea from Poland, Internet Explorer 8 Award

The federal agencies submitted their budget requests to Congress this week, marking a big moment for all things science. According to preliminary reports about $148 billion of the Presidents full $3.8 trillion budget is heading for scientific research programs.

Photo courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory

Visualization of a river bed created using VisTrails, a system developed by University of Utah computer scientists Photo by: Juliana Freire and Claudio Silva, University of Utah

A two-year experiment to build a framework to analyze the massive amount of data scientists are collecting will push research to better understand our planet, our bodies and the limits of the Internet.

The National Science Foundation initiative called Cluster Exploratory or the CLuE program is a partnership between I.B.M. and Google to put scientists to work solving the problem of how to deal with so much information.

The answer? Cloud computing. Using virtual locations online to cope with the large data stream will allow science to answer some big and complex questions.

Top 8 in the Science Cloud:

Sloan Digital Sky Survey–obtained deep, multi-color images covering more than a quarter of the sky and created 3-dimensional maps containing more than 930,000 galaxies and more than 120,000 quasars.

Visible Human–is an anatomical data set licensed from the National Library of Medicine, Visible Human Project.

IRIS Seismology Database–allows you to monitor global earthquakes in near real-time, visit seismic stations around the world, and search the web for earthquake or region-related information.

Protein Data Bank–contains information about experimentally-determined structures of proteins, nucleic acids, and complex assemblies.

Linguistic Data Consortium–supports language-related education, research and technology development by creating and sharing linguistic resources.

TerraFly–View images and data anywhere in the United States and in much of the World.

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope–A large aperture, wide field survey telescope and 3200 Megapixel camera to image faint astronomical objects across the sky.

Open Topography–provides integrated access to high-resolution topographic data and web-based processing tools as well as enables its user community to share knowledge, resources and build science collaborations.

When the ants go marching two by two, pay attention to what they are doing. Scientists are. And they are discovering clever ways to improve cyber security just by mimicking the behavior of ants.

The foraging insects use something called swarm intelligence to efficiently locate and gather food. Computer scientists are applying this behavior to computer networks to find viruses, worms and other electronic threats.

Story written and produced by Michelle Ma

Just as we have to monitor our own health, now we have to be more aware of our computer’s health. While high cholesterol and blood pressure aren’t issues for our machines, keeping them free of viruses and worms are.

A new piece of malware, known as the Conficker worm, that has been worming its way into millions of computers for the better part of a year is self-replicating–just like a human virus. And, it is raising new security concerns from experts in law enforcment, science and government.

It’s time for a new sub-discipline of computer science–computer virology.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, Google Earth users can now search the moon.

Just over a year old, the Apple iTunes App Store is churning out–or rather independent developers are–applications to calculate tips, find restaurants and even play countless games. But there is little for the science-interested smart phone users.

Oh sure, among the tens of thousands of applications currently available there are a handful of sci apps but relatively few. The subject doesn’t even merit its own category.

But several lists have been generated, touting the few useful science applications currently available.

And, we’ve tried to separate the intelligent from the app crap.

Listen here.

A few Select SciApps:
Atoms in a Box
Molecules
EleMints
Starmap
Formul8
Genetic Decoder
Get All the Science
The Extraordinaires

The Extraordinaires–on-demand volunteering for citizen scientists

Story written and produced by Michelle Ma

Scientists at the University of California are developing a way for the public to contribute data to research projects using a ubiquitous sensing device – the smart phone. This is a great way to collect data in weeks that would otherwise take years.

It’s called participatory sensing and could be a new wave of citizens helping science.

For 35 years, the Rubik’s Cube has been puzzling people and teaching science. Starting with its inventor, Erno Rubik, first used his “magic cube” to demonstrate three-dimensional design to his architecture students.

Now mathematicians across the world are employing the brightly-colored plastic puzzle to demonstrate algebraic theories to high school students and even use the cube as a model for distributed computing.

Story written and produced by: Lee Fehrenbacher.

Listen here.

No one wants to hear that scientific journals fall prey to unscrupulous scientists who manufacture data or worse whole papers. And sometimes they even are the victims of hoaxes–even some conducted in the name of science.

Philip Davis and Kent Anderson pulled a fast one on an open access journal recently by submitting a paper that was entirely written by a computer program. Even though it made no logical sense the journal accepted the paper for publication, igniting a controversy and forcing and editor out of a job.

Summer is no time for idle minds. About 70 Georgia girls are getting a crash course in crime scene investigation, astronomy, dinosaurs and chemistry, neuroscience, computer science and mathematics.

The goal of the Women in the Sciences summer camp is to interest young women in pursuing careers in science.

Other summer science camps for girls.

Sally Ride Summer Camp

Summer Days Math and Science Camp

Girls and Science Summer Camp (GAS)

Girl Start