The top two computers from last year are still the most powerful machines on the newest release of the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list. The total combined performance of all the machines on the list reached 22.6 petaflops, nearly twice the combined performance of last year’s list. The top machine remains the IBM Roadrunner system at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has a performance of 1.105 petaflops. The Cray XT5 Jaguar system at Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory remains the second most powerful supercomputer, with a performance of 1.059 petaflops. The highest-ranking new supercomputer on the list is the JUGENE, an IBM BlueGene/P system in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich research center. JUGENE, which runs 825.5 trillion calculations per second and is capable of a theoretical peak performance of more than a petaflop, took over the third spot on the list, displacing a NASA machine called Pleiades. Only two supercomputers in the top 10 are located outside the United States, JUGENE and Europa, a computer at the Juelich research center that is capable of 274.8 trillion calculations per second. The last machine on the list, which runs 17.1 trillion calculations per second, would have placed 274th only six months ago.

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As robots increasingly move from industrial environments to the real world, human safety has become an important issue. Unlike industrial robots that perform repetitive tasks in controlled environments, household and real-world robots will have a relative amount of autonomy, and will work in ambiguous, human-centered environments. Before such robots become widespread, regulators are trying to determine how to approach the safety and legal issues that may arise. In a study published in the International Journal of Social Robotics, researchers proposed a framework for a legal system for next-generation robot safety issues. The goal is to ensure safer robot design through safety intelligence and to provide a method for handling accidents when they occur. The guiding principle of the study’s proposed system is to categorize robots as third-existence entities, since they are neither living or biological (first existence), or non-living/non-biological (second existence). Third-existence entities will resemble living things in appearance and behavior, but will not be self-aware. Robots are currently legally classified as second existence, or human property, but the authors believe that a third-existence classification could simplify incidents involving accidents and responsibility. A major component of integrating robots into human society will involve dealing with open texture risk, or risk that occurs due to unpredictable interactions in unstructured environments, such as getting robots to understand the subtleties of human language.

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Nagoya University researchers have developed a light-activated switch to turn nanomachines on and off. The team used tiny triggered tweezers made of DNA to open and close in response to ultraviolet (UV) and visible light. “We are designing DNA nano-robotics that are mechanically operated by light rather than chemical fuel,” says Nagoya researcher Hiroyuki Asanuma. The researchers focused on a loop of DNA that looks like a hairpin with two arms. At the end of each arm, azobenzene groups are integrated into the DNA sequence. Under visible light, the azobenzene groups adopt the trans isomer, allowing the base pairs to join together. When UV light is applied, the azobenzene groups switch to the more sterically-constrained cis isomer. The system is fully reversible, allowing it to have great potential to be applied to other nanotechnologies that use DNA. “To be able to switch biomolecular conformational changes is of considerable interest for many applications in biomedicine and bionanotechnology,” says Technical University of Munich’s Friedrich Simmel.
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