The Associated Press reports that Syracuse University and IBM are teaming up to build a computer center that officials hope will be a model for green computing and green building.

The $12-million structure will have its own natural-gas cogeneration plant, which will produce steam for heat along with electricity. The fuel, natural gas, is cleaner than coal, which is used to generate electricity in most parts of the country. The data center is also expected to use half the energy of a typical data center. That’s important because data centers consume about 1.5 percent of the country’s energy generation — a figure that is expected to double by 2011, the article notes.

IBM will contribute $5-million to the project in the form of equipment and support. The New York State Energy Research and...

A new seven-story, $127-million building at the University of California at Berkeley houses an interdisciplinary technology institute intended to commercialize the findings of researchers on four University of California system campuses. The building, Sutardja Dai Hall, had its formal opening Friday.

The 141,000-square-foot building, designed by SmithGroup, mixes research space with collaboration areas, offices, and conference rooms. In addition, the building houses two 15,000-square-foot “clean rooms” for manufacturing microchips “at resolutions 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair,” the university says. To keep vibration levels down, the nanofabrication labs sit on concrete slabs 39 inches thick. The building also has a main-floor technology museum, a cybercafe, and a 149-seat auditorium.

The building will serve as the home of the...

Long before the Greeks and the Romans created the monumental architecture that serves as the ceremonial backdrop for much of American democracy — including today’s inauguration, of course — the Egyptians created an equally impressive building style. Now the Experiential Technologies Center at the University of California at Los Angeles has released a digital reconstruction of one of the most famous Egyptian temple complexes, at Karnak.

The project takes advantage of decades of scholarship but also the latest technology, incorporating photos, videos, animated timelines, and Google Earth imagery. The site offers information on the architecture of the complex, built — and frequently changed — over a period of more than 2,000 years, as well as information on how it was constructed, the rituals and festivals that took place there, and the significance of various elements, which included...

A mock-up of the cable holding up New York’s Williamsburg Bridge will be used to test sensors for monitoring corrosion. (Columbia U. photo)

What would happen if unseen corrosion caused the failure of a cable on a major suspension bridge? The short answer is, you don’t want to find out. Nor does anyone else. What you want to do instead is detect the corrosion early enough to make repairs to the cable. That’s a complex and costly job in itself, but far preferable to losing the bridge — and possibly lives as well.

So on Monday researchers at Columbia University’s Carleton Laboratory will begin a six-month experiment to test a system of corrosion sensors in a 20-foot-long mock-up of the cable that holds up New York’s 1903 Williamsburg Bridge, which crosses the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn. The bridge, which has four main cables, has a span of 1,600 feet between the two...

If you’ve missed your chance to celebrate John Milton’s 400th birthday — which is Tuesday — by attending a marathon reading of Paradise Lost, you can still go online to enjoy a thoroughly annotated version of the poem in the Milton Reading Room. The Dartmouth College site — created by Thomas H. Luxon, a professor of English — offers annotated versions of a number of other Milton poems as well, including Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes.

The annotations certainly come in handy, even for English majors. Say you’re reading the opening lines of Book 6:

All night the dreadless Angel unpursu’d Through Heav’ns wide Champain held his way, till Morn, Wak’t by the circling Hours, with rosie hand Unbarr’d the gates of Light. …

Click on the hotlinked “dreadless Angel” and you learn that Milton refers to “Abdiel, a fearless angel.” The “circling Hours” turn out to be the Horae, three (or ...

The U.S. Military Academy, in West Point, N.Y., has established a video oral-history project that will collect the stories of soldiers of all ages and make them available online for students, historians, journalists, and the public. The project, created by the academy’s history department, already has a preview site with a video explaining its goals, but the site’s formal unveiling won’t come until sometime in 2009.

“Soldiers’ personal stories are a largely untapped mine of military insight and historical testimony,” said Todd Brewster, a former journalist who is director of the project. In addition to recording battlefield stories of soldiers — including those now deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as those who served in conflicts as far back as World War II — project leaders hope to interview senior policy makers, among them former secretaries of defense and state. Besides...

Why are so many beloved trees being cut down on Pennsylvania State University’s University Park campus? University officials turned to the Internet to explain why to students, faculty members, and alumni — with a series of online videos, as well as with a page of frequently asked questions and a map showing trees to be taken down.

A disease called elm yellows has afflicted 47 of the university’s 287 landmark elm trees, some dating as far back as 1890 and standing as tall as 115 feet. The disease, according to one Penn State video, is believed to kill every tree it attacks, and the only way the university knows to fight it is to cut down affected trees in hopes of limiting the disease’s spread.

Penn State’s plant pathologists say that comparatively little is known about elm yellows, even though it has been spreading inexorably across the United States. The disease, which kills the...

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology created an interactive map of its unfinished campus.

Recruiting students and faculty members for a university whose campus is still under construction isn’t easy, even if the university has $10-billion at its disposal. So officials at Saudi Arabia’s new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology — known as Kaust — commissioned an interactive map that lets users click on icons and see images of the facilities that will be constructed.

The university, due to open next year, will offer graduate-level research programs open to both men and women. Its 8,900-acre campus, located on the Red Sea, has been planned by HOK Architects.

The map offers exterior and interior renderings of Modernist academic, residential, and recreational buildings, as well as of a covered “pedestrian spine” linking the main research buildings with the...

Gary Garrels, a Hammer Museum curator, talks with six artists in one of the new Web site’s multimedia offerings.

For an art gallery, the Armand Hammer Museum of Art has always been both interactive and inventive. The museum — which is part of the University of California at Los Angeles — not only offers patrons a wide variety of talks, readings, screenings, and field trips, but it also goes outside the box when it organizes exhibitions.

On Monday, though, the museum surpassed itself — and every other museum I can think of, either on a campus or off — by unveiling a new Web site that all but vibrates with podcasts, videorecordings of presentations, blog posts, slide shows, and more. Many museums offer images of works in their collections or in special exhibitions, along with calendar listings, directions, and hours, but usually that’s about it. At the Hammer site, so much is...

Yesterday Google unveiled three new services — two that may make campus-network administrators groan and one that could prove to be a boon to researchers in a number of disciplines.

The search giant’s voice- and video-chat offerings could encourage more campus-network users to switch from low-bandwidth communication technologies — instant messaging, e-mail, social networks — to chat applications that consume considerably more network resources. Voice and video chatting have been available for some time, of course, through Skype, Apple’s iChat, and other applications. But Google’s search and e-mail functions are widely used, and the software is easy to install and use, so more people may be drawn in.

That’s the bad news, at least as far as overtaxed campus networks are concerned. The good news is a new flu-tracking service called Google Flu Trends, which the company says “may provide ...