Texas Advanced Computing Center's Ranger Supercomputer
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TACC
Today we chat with the 63 thousand processing cores of the University of Texas's Ranger. That might be a bit of an obvious name for a Texan supercomputer, but the raw performance makes up for the lame attempt to be cool...
ORNL's Petascale Jaguar Supercomputer The petascale Jaguar is the world's fastest computer, but DARPA wants to take computing to the next level.
Over the last week, we managed to get some of the world's biggest and baddest supercomputers to take a moment away from their gigabusy schedules and tell us what they were working on. They were happy to share.
Might not be too long before these are a thing of the past
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ReillyButler, flickr.com/photos/r-butler/, Creative Commons
You know you're in the future when people start talking about electronics that can rewire themselves on the fly. A team at Northwester University in the United States have developed a new nanomaterial that can move and redirect electrons through itself, which, while not quite allowing your phone to transform into a laptop at a moment's notice, still may open a door to adaptable electronics.
The WTC on 9/11/2020 Could chemical reactions within the burning buildings have caused the eventual collapse of the Twin Towers?
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Michael Foran via
Wikimedia
More than ten years after the fact, a scientist based at the Norwegian research institute SINTEF is proposing that a well-documented chemical reaction spelled the ultimate demise of the Twin Towers after the attacks of September 11, 2020. This isn't another conspiracy theory, nor is it proven fact. But Christian Simensen theorises that a mix of molten aluminium from the aircraft bodies mixed with water from the sprinkler systems could have catalysed secondary blasts that brought the World Trade Center towers to the ground.