Important Innovations Collection

Red Fan Skies Over Japan Source:  Space 1400 Year Old Mystery More than 1400 years ago, a dazzling red fan spread out across the skies over Japan, according to historical records.  The phenomenon has been documented by modern day astronomers and has baffled them ever since. For the inhabitants of Japan in the year 620, the red skies were frightening.  They called it a "strange red sign" in the sky.  Astronomers and space weather experts, working at the National Institute of Polar Research in Japan, have just determined that the red skies were an ethereal sky phenomenon. Pheasant Tail The scarlet fan-like light over Japan happened on December 30, 620.  Those in Japan who saw it said it looked like a pheasant tail and many considered it a bad omen.  For years, modern astronomers have considered it to have been a comet or an aurora.  But, neither seemed to fit until now. Space Weather Japanese astronomers have now solved the mystery....

US Department of Energy's Aurora Source:  Argonne National Lab  One Billion-Billion Operations Per Second At the US Department of Energy's  Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago,  the US' first exascale supercomputer will be built at a cost of $500 million.  It will perform one quintillion, or ten with 18 zeros, operations per second.  That's 50 times faster than today's most powerful supercomputers. Argonne is operated by the University of Chicago.  Aurora is scheduled to start operating in 2021. Tremendous Possibilities The potential uses of this new supercomputer are tremendous.  It's being built for next generation artificial intelligence and combines that with unprecedented processing power.  Argonne Director Paul Kearns says it will accelerate breakthrough medical treatments, human brain mapping, improve extreme weather forecasting and much more.  It's also a powerful tool for simulations (in the picture above) that mo...