Science | WPN World People News

One of the most powerful supercomputers in the world has now been fully installed and tested at its remote, high altitude site in the Andes of northern Chile. This marks one of the major remaining milestones toward completion of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the most elaborate ground-based telescope in history. The special-purpose ALMA correlator has over 134 million processors and performs up to 17 quadrillion operations per second, a speed comparable to the fastest general-purpose supercomputer in operation on Friday.

Cross-section of a prototype pFEL, with the free electron source on the right and the photonic crystal inside the red part.

A novel microfluidics platform allowed viewing of structural details of rotavirus double-layered particles; the 3-D graphic of the virus, in purple, was reconstructed from data gathered by the new technique.

This false-color composite image, constructed from data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, shows Saturn's rings and southern hemisphere. The composite image was made from 65 individual observations by Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer in the near-infrared portion of the light spectrum on Nov. 1, 2008. The observations were each six minutes long.

NASA/JPL's popular mobile app continues to amass many exciting images including the Mars Curiosity Rover, dying stars, moons of Saturn and giant asteroids.

This image shows a novel bifunctional catalyst for the Mannich reaction.

The giant star Zeta Ophiuchi is having a "shocking" effect on the surrounding dust clouds in this infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Stellar winds flowing out from this fast-moving star are making ripples in the dust as it approaches, creating a bow shock seen as glowing gossamer threads, which, for this star, are only seen in infrared light.