Completion of the Panama Canal expansion project
Built from 1881 until 1914, the Panama Canal was among the largest and most difficult engineering projects ever undertaken. Functioning as a short cut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, it greatly reduced the travel times for ships – enabling them to avoid the lengthy, hazardous Cape Horn route around the southernmost tip of South America.
For nearly a hundred years, the canal enjoyed great success, acting as a key conduit for international maritime trade. By the early 21st century, however, it was handling far more vessel traffic than had ever been envisioned by its builders. In 1934, it was estimated that the maximum capacity of the canal would be around 80 million tons per year. In 2010, the actual figure was nearly 300 million tons and growing rapidly, with over a third of shipping traffic unable to pass through because of size. Global demand necessitated a major upgrade.
Plans were formulated for various improvements – including the excavation of new traffic lanes allowing more and larger ships to transit; two new locks, one each on the Atlantic and Pacific sides; the widening and deepening of existing channels; and the raising of Gatun Lake's maximum operating level. Construction was originally slated to take seven or eight years, with new locks beginning operations in late 2014, almost exactly a century after the canal first opened.
However, The long-delayed expansion of the Panama Canal is now expected to be finished by May, instead of April as was previously announced, Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela said Saturday. Varela made the announcement in an address to the Central American country.
In the speech, Varela urged the Spanish-led consortium behind the expansion, Grupo Unidos por el Canal de Panama, to focus on completing the project and to leave legal disputes to the “competent authorities,” according to Agence France-Presse. That plea came after an adjudication board ordered the state-run Panama Canal Authority to award the consortium $17 million for budget overruns and extra labor costs.
Microchipping of all dogs in England
From April 2016, every dog in England and Scotland will have to be microchipped in a move which the Government says will help reunite people with lost or stolen pets and track down the owners of vicious or illegal dogs.
Microchipping for dogs in Wales became law in March 2015, while Northern Ireland led the way by being the first devolved administration in the UK to introduce compulsory microchipping in April 2012.
As of 2012, there were 118,932 dogs reported lost or stolen, of which 55,898 (about 47%) were reunited with their owner. Around 6,900 (5%) were put to sleep. This cost £57m (US$89m) to the taxpayer and welfare charities each year. Only 7,098 dogs were microchipped in 2012, barely 0.1% of the 6.7 million dogs in England.
These implants are similar in size to a grain of rice. They are coated in a bio-compatible glass, the same material used in human pacemakers, ensuring they are not rejected. The devices are held firmly in place by fusing to the dog's bodily tissue. A simple procedure can be performed without anaesthetic, using a sterile needle to insert the chip between the shoulder blades.
Similar measures had already been introduced in New Zealand and Northern Ireland. Other countries begin to recognise the benefits of microchipping in the years ahead. By the 2040s, this is being extended into humans.*
In addition, the Environment Secretary Owen Paterson also announced in 2013 that people attacked by dogs on private property will be able to press charges. Thousands of postal workers and hundreds of telecoms engineers are attacked by dogs every year, mainly on private property such as gardens, drives and private roads.
Up until now they have not been covered by the law if they are bitten on private property.
The Government said householders will be protected from prosecution if their dog attacks a burglar or trespasser on their land.
China’s Supercomputers reach 100 petaflops
In 2013, China's Tianhe-2 became the fastest supercomputer in the world, achieving 33.8
petaflops, with a peak performance of 54.9 petaflops. It was nearly twice as powerful as its nearest competitor, the "Titan" machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, United States. Tianhe-2 showed great success in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), scramjet combustion and other aircraft simulations. Other research areas included genomics (population genetics) and biomedical applications. It continued to maintain the top spot for the next few years, with no other challengers, leading to concerns over a possible stagnation in the progress of supercomputing speeds. This was further compounded by trade restrictions – imposed by the United States government – which prevented China from using Intel's chip technology for upgrades. However, this actually boosted China's own processor development and production industry.
In 2016, Tianhe-2 will receive an extra 45 petaflops, thanks to a novel system architecture developed within China. The machine was renamed Tianhe-2A and will be the first supercomputer to demonstrate a peak performance of 100 petaflops, or 100 quadrillion floating point operations per second.* Alongside this upgraded version was a second machine, known as Shenwei-x. This too is capable of 100 petaflops. Both machines would reign at the top of the list for only a short while, however, as the United States was regaining its lead in supercomputer research. A project called "Aurora" was being developed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (180 petaflops), along with IBM's "Summit" (150 petaflops), the latter having an optional upgrade to 300 petaflops. This would be followed by the first exascale computers (1,000 petaflops) towards the end of the decade.
Ranking of the Top 10 PetaFLop Computers
RANK
|
SITE
|
SYSTEM
|
CORES
|
RMAX (Petaflops)
|
1
|
National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou,
CHINA
|
Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2) - TH-IVB-FEP Cluster,
Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C 2.200GHz, TH Express-2, Intel Xeon Phi 31S1P NUDT
|
3,120,000
|
33,862.70
|
2
|
DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
|
Titan - Cray XK7 , Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz,
Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA K20x, Cray Inc.
|
560,640
|
17,590.00
|
3
|
DOE/NNSA/LLNL, USA
|
Sequoia - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz,
Custom, IBM
|
1,572,864
|
17,173.20
|
4
|
RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational
Science (AICS), JAPAN
|
K computer, SPARC64 VIIIfx 2.0GHz, Tofu
interconnect, Fujitsu
|
705,024
|
10,510.00
|
5
|
DOE/SC/Argonne National Laboratory, USA
|
Mira - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60GHz,
Custom, IBM
|
786,432
|
8,586.60
|
6
|
Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS)
,Switzerland
|
Piz Daint - Cray XC30, Xeon E5-2670 8C
2.600GHz, Aries interconnect , NVIDIA K20x, Cray Inc.
|
115,984
|
6,271.00
|
7
|
King Abdullah University of Science and
Technology, Saudi Arabia
|
Shaheen II - Cray XC40, Xeon E5-2698v3 16C
2.3GHz, Aries interconnect, Cray Inc.
|
196,608
|
5,537.00
|
8
|
Texas Advanced Computing Center/Univ. of
Texas, USA
|
Stampede - PowerEdge C8220, Xeon E5-2680 8C
2.700GHz, Infiniband FDR, Intel Xeon Phi SE10P, Dell
|
462,462
|
5,168.10
|
9
|
Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ), Germany
|
JUQUEEN - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.600GHz,
Custom Interconnect, IBM
|
458,752
|
5,008.90
|
10
|
DOE/NNSA/LLNL, USA
|
Vulcan - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.600GHz,
Custom Interconnect, IBM
|
393,216
|
4,293.30
|
The world's largest single-aperture telescope is completed in China
The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is a major new astronomical observatory built in Guizhou province, southwest China. Constructed between March 2011 and September 2016,* it becomes the largest single-aperture telescope in the world, half a kilometre wide and featuring a collecting area of 2.1 million sq ft (196,000 sq m). This dwarfs the next largest – the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico – which had held the title since 1963.*The dish itself sits within a natural depression and is unable to move, due to its enormous size. However, the surface shape is changeable and the feed cabin (where radio waves are focused) can be moved around. This provides a viewing angle of up to 40° from the vertical.
FAST is able to gaze three times further into space and survey the skies ten times faster than Arecibo. Its primary roles include mapping the neutral hydrogen within the Milky Way at very high resolution, tripling the number of known pulsars from 2,000 to 6,000, and listening for possible signals from alien civilisations at distances of up to 1,000 light years; far more stars can be monitored than in previous surveys. FAST is the latest in a whole series of massive new telescopes being built around the world in the early 21st century, heralding a new era of astronomy.
UK Allows for Three People for IVF...
The UK has now become the first country to approve laws to allow the creation of babies from three people.
The modified version of IVF has passed its final legislative obstacle after being approved by the House of Lords. The fertility regulator will now decide how to license the procedure to prevent babies inheriting deadly genetic diseases. The first baby could be born as early as 2016. A large majority of MPs in the House of Commons approved "three-person babies" earlier this month. The House of Lords tonight rejected an attempt to block the plan by a majority of 232.
Power packs
Mitochondria are the tiny compartments inside nearly every cell of the body that convert food into useable energy. But genetic defects in the mitochondria mean the body has insufficient energy to keep the heart beating or the brain functioning. The structures are passed down only from the mother and have their own DNA, although it does not alter traits including appearance or personality.
The technique, developed in Newcastle, uses a modified version of IVF to combine the healthy mitochondria of a donor woman with DNA of the two parents. It results in babies with 0.1% of their DNA from the second woman and is a permanent change that would echo down through the generations.
Timeline
- March to August - The UK fertility regulator will develop and then publish their licensing rules for assessing applications to perform three-person IVF
- Early Summer - The team in Newcastle publish the final safety experiments demanded by the regulator
- 29 October - Regulations come into force
- 24 November - Clinics can apply to the regulator for a licence
- By the end of 2015 - the first attempt could take place
Polymer banknotes are introduced by the Bank of England
Until now, all banknotes in the UK were made from cotton fibre and linen rag. This made them susceptible to dirt and damage – five pound notes in particular, which lasted on average for just one year. In late 2016, a new range of smaller, plastic banknotes enters circulation.* These are produced from a thin, transparent and flexible film made of polypropylene which offers a number of advantages:- They are resistant to dirt and moisture, so stay cleaner for longer than paper banknotes.
- They are more secure than paper banknotes. They can incorporate advanced security features, making them more difficult to counterfeit. This includes a portion of the film left clear to form a "window" in the design.
- They are more durable. They last at least 2.5 times longer than traditional paper banknotes, so will take longer to become "tatty", improving the quality of banknotes in circulation. They can even survive being put into a washing machine by accident, for example.
In addition, they are more environmentally friendly and, because they last longer are, over time, cheaper than paper banknotes. Being thin and flexible, they fit into wallets and purses as easily as paper banknotes.
Modern polymer banknotes were first issued as currency by Australia in 1988 (coinciding with that country's Bicentenary year). By the early 2010s, around 20 other countries were using them.
________________________________________
Source(s)
- http://www.ibtimes.com/panama-canal-expansion-be-complete-may-panamas-president-juan-carlos-varela-says-2247279
- http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-21345730
- http://www.nextplatform.com/2015/07/15/inside-chinas-next-generation-dsp-supercomputer-accelerator/
- http://www.bbc.com/news/health-31594856
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RGhgsMd6vBA
So “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;”
____________________________________________________________
About Rick Ricker
An IT professional with over 23 years experience in Information Security, wireless broadband, network and Infrastructure design, development, and support.
For more information, contact Rick at (800) 399-6085 x502
Continuity Focus, Inc. (800) 399-6085 x502
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