World’s Fastest Supercomputer is Made in China & Other Tech

#HappyTuesday! Welcome to another day of science and technology news from all around the world. Enjoy today’s digest.

World’s Fastest Supercomputer is Made in China

China has just unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer, called Sunway TaihuLight, that has not used any parts sourced from other nations. It is nearly three times faster than its predecessor - the Tianhe-2 – with 41,000 chips having 260 cores each (that’s a total of 10.65 million cores!). The supercomputer is able to execute 93 quadrillion calculations per second, or 93 petaflops.

“As the first number one system of China that is completely based on homegrown processors, the Sunway TaihuLight system demonstrates the significant progress that China has made in the domain of designing and manufacturing large-scale computation systems,” said Prof. Dr. Guangwen Yang, Central Director.

According to TOP500 News, the demonstration of TaihuLight’s prowess “end[s] any remaining speculation that China would have to rely on Western technology to compete effectively in the upper echelons of supercomputing."

Hybrid Particles that Carry Energy

Physicists from the US have made topological plexcitons that make the transfer of energy more efficient in solar cells and other electrical circuits.

“When light and matter interact, they exchange energy,” explained Joel Yuen-Zhou, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC San Diego and the first author of the paper. “Energy can flow back and forth between light in a metal (plasmon) and light in a molecule (exciton). When this exchange is much faster than their respective decay rates, their individual identities are lost, and it is more accurate to think about them as hybrid particles; excitons and plasmons marry to form plexcitons.”

Converting Plastic into Liquid Fuel

Polyethylene waste disposal is a problem that because we don’t have a lot of methods to break down plastic. But now, a team of chemists from China have come up with a way to convert polyethylene to liquid fuel.

“Polyethylene (PE) is the largest-volume synthetic polymer, and its chemical inertness makes its degradation by low-energy processes a challenging problem,” according to the study, “We report a tandem catalytic cross alkane metathesis method for highly efficient degradation of polyethylenes under mild conditions. With the use of widely available, low-value, short alkanes ([such as] petroleum ethers) as cross metathesis partners, different types of polyethylenes with various molecular weights undergo complete conversion into useful liquid fuels and waxes.”

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