One of the world's fastest supercomputers, the Blue Gene/P, is powered by the PS3 CELL chip and has reached a speed of 280.6 teraflops. However, this is just a modicum of what the Institute for Advanced Architectures is planning: a computer that can use exaflops. An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a teraflop. That's faster than you can say "Leeroy Jenkins!" Oops, too slow. More in the full article.

Imperial College London currently has the most powerful microscope commercially available today. Known as TITAN, the transmission electron microscope was created by FEI Company and costs around GBP 2.4 million or roughly US$ 4.8 million.

It is capable of imaging objects just 0.14 nanometers in diameter (one nanometer is one-billionth of one meter). The machine works by firing electrons through "a sample, just microns (one millionth of a metre) thick, and observing the changes to the particles as they pass through and out the other side".

Once TITAN is in use, everyone has to stay quiet as this is one of the operational requirements of the machine. You see, the vibrations caused by talking too loudly are enough to spoil a sample being viewed by TITAN.

According to Imperial College London's Dr. David McComb, TITAN will be used to probe everything from new materials for supercomputers as well as tissue samples that will help the medical community understand certain diseases. McComb explained,

Clearly, if we want to tackle diseases like osteoporosis, we need new drugs and clinical trials. But in order to develop those we also need to understand the process of osteoporosis. We need to understand how bone and tissue interact and why that process changes as we get older.

Aside from this, the doctor also shared that other teams are working to understand the processes behind the dreaded Alzheimer's disease, specifically the role of iron metabolism in its development. McComb added,

We are not quite sure what the state of the iron is or how it interacts with the tissues in the brain. But if we can understand that then potentially we can feed that into research into something that can disrupt or modify that process. We're ramping up, we're starting to get results. I expect over the summer we'll really start rocketing.

Humans may have the ability to destroy the world, fly to the moon and build an information superhighway, but for some reason we still can't figure out how a mouse thinks. It's ironic, we know, but at least we're getting there.

If all mice only had half a brain, they'd still be too complex for the most powerful supercomputers around the world, say researchers at the IBM Labs in the University of Nevada. That's because half a mouse brain carries eight million neurons (brain cells) and each neuron has 8,000 synapses that trigger responses in living organisms.

Scientists attempted to simulate how a mouse thinks with the help of a supercomputer called the BlueGene L. The machine has 4,096 processors running on 256MB of memory each. All of these components try to anticipate all the possible responses that half a mouse brain will take, and does so successfully in the process.

There's just one hitch: The supercomputer is lagging behind half a mouse brain on a one to ten ratio.  The mouse can literally run circles on the CPU with ease. The scientists say that the rodent's mental activity simulation simply factors in "tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform."

The IBM Lab team plans to give their hardware more oomph as better gear becomes available. they say that this will make it a lot easier for them to actually simulate rodent thinking patterns in real time.

It's that part of Nature where the formerly solid line between Science and Spirituality starts to blur.

If proof of the Existence of the God/Goddess (or whatever you perceive He/She to Be) is ever to be found, it will be at the subatomic level - arguing in favor of what philosophers from Buddha and Aristotle to the present have been saying all along, that the Divine is present in all things.

The topic, of course is quantum physics, the science of the tiniest particles known. These particles, known as "quarks," exhibit what we mortals would consider very odd behavior. 

Six different types of quarks are held together by "gluons" to from protons.  The oddest of these is the recently identified "strange" quark. It literally "boils up" inside a proton and then "simmers back out of existence".

"Technically the strange quark contribution to the proton's charge distribution has proven elusive," said Dr. Derek Leinweber of the the University of Adelaide in Australia.  Working with researchers in Scotland and the U.S., the Australian team has come up with way of more precisely calculate  the properties of these subatomic particles. They used a method called "Lattice Simulations" on high-powered "supercomputers" and combined this with a separate field of physics known as Effective Field Theory. Combining these in a new an novel way has revealed many new clues to the behavior of the elusive "strange" quark.

"There is a huge industry in particle physics with groups of researchers around the world making new measurements that could reveal physics beyond the standard model of the universe," adds Leinweber. "Our result presents a huge challenge to experimental physicists in planning the next generation of experiments."