U.S. No Longer Planet's Supercomputing Leader

According to this story from CNET, a supercomputer in China is now the fastest computer on the planet.  China has unveiled the Tianhe-1A, which runs at 2.67 petaflops per second.  Number two on the world's fastest supercomputers list is the U.S.' old Cray XT5 located at the University of Tennessee.

Not to worry, though.  The Tianhe-1A runs Unix and was build on Intel and Nvidia hardware.  Times do change, don't they?

Full article here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20022731-260.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Second (third, fourth?) Big Bang and We’re Still Here

Those quirky scientists at CERN have successfully re-created a “mini Big Bang” at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe.  Needless to say, if you are reading this, then you already know that we were not obliterated by a large singularity as a by-product of the event (yes, people were really afraid that we would all die if they did this).

The LHC just started a new phase of experiments this weekend.  Since it went into operation in 2008, the LHC has been slamming protons into each other in hopes of discovering the Higgs-Bosun particle (“The God Particle”) – this is the magical little guy that holds the parts of atoms together.  It exists in quantum physics, it has just not been observed (i.e. proven) yet.

This past Sunday, the LHC started slamming iron ions into one another in hopes of recreating the same conditions experienced during the Big Bang.  This pic above is an actual shot of the collision.  They were successful and the experiment resulted in a collision which reached a temperature of over ten trillion degrees.  Yes, ten trillion.  Dr. David Evans, one of the researchers working on the project explains what happens at this temperature: “At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma.”  Now, that is pretty cool – melting atoms.

It will take some time to review the data from the experiment and more will be run before returning to proton-based runs.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11711228

CERN Web site: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/Welcome.html

Major Revisions to the Metric System Proposed

Okay...the basics will stay the same: a kilometer will still equal 1,000 meters, but the definitions of the most basic units are under scrutiny and a new global initiative to revise these is underway.

The NIST has backed the movement to update the definitions of seven base units of measurment: the second (time), the meter (length), the kilogram (mass), the ampere (electric current), the kelvin (thermodynamic temperature), the mole (amount of substance) and the candela (luminous intensity).

The proposal aims to base the new unit definitions on modern definitions and scientific constants (i.e.: Planck and Boltzmann) discovered since the original definitions were created.

For example, the kilogram is based on the weight of a platinum-iridium cylinder kept in a vault at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France (see pic above).  This cylinder was created 130 years ago, and, as we now know, materials break-down and degrade over time, so this cylinder weighs less than it initially did.  The proposal aims to base the kilogram on a formula based on Planck's constant, removing this variability.

Read the full article at the NIST Web site here: http://www.nist.gov/pml/wmd/20101026_si.cfm