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#HiddenFigures #Friday Here we spotlight some of the women who revolutionized our understanding of the elements. Marie Curie is the most celebrated, for her double Nobel-prizewinning research on radioactivity and for discovering polonium and radium. Stories of other women’s roles are scarce. So, too, is an appreciation of the skills required, including tenacity and diligence in performing experiments, sifting through data and reassessing theories.

Brigitte Van Tiggelen and Annette Lykknes spotlight female researchers who discovered elements and their properties.

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Since the first Roomba came out in 2002, it has seemed inevitable that one day iRobot would develop a robotic lawn mower. After all, a robot mower is basically just a Roomba that works outside, right? Of course, it’s not nearly that simple, as iRobot has spent the last decade or so discovering, but they’ve finally managed to pull it off.

More than 10 years in the making, Terra wants to do for your lawn what Roomba has done for your floors.

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At the IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture in February, Illinois computer engineering associate professor Rakesh Kumar and his collaborators will make the case for a wafer-scale computer consisting of as many as 40 GPUs. Simulations of this multiprocessor monster sped calculations nearly 19-fold and cut the combination of energy consumption and signal delay more than 140-fold.

Engineers aim to use “silicon interconnect fabric” to build a computer with 40 GPUs on a single silicon wafer.

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To make its developers’ jobs more rewarding, Facebook is now using two automated tools called Sapienz and SapFix to find and repair low-level bugs in its mobile apps. Sapienz runs the apps through many tests to figure out which actions will cause it to crash. Then, SapFix recommends a fix to developers, who review it and decide whether to accept the fix, come up with their own, or ignore the problem.

Engineers began using Sapienz to review the Facebook app in September 2017, and have gradually begun using it for the rest of the company’s apps (which include Messenger, Instagram, Facebook Lite, and Workplace). In May, the team will describe its more recent adoption of SapFix at the International Conference on Software Engineering in Montreal, Canada (and they’re hiring).

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Last year, a wildlife photographer spotted a “one in a million” coyote with captivating blue eyes while out on a walk in California’s Point Reyes National Seashore.

The sighting quickly became national news and prompted an investigation by National Geographic, which confirmed the coyote’s eye color was indeed rare — as coyotes’ irises are almost always some shade of gold. At the time, Juan Negro, a senior researcher at the Spanish Council for Research in Spain, told the publication he hadn’t seen something like that in the 25 years he’d been studying animal coloration.

“Deviants, or strange colors, arise from time to time as mutants,” Negro suggested back in June.

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