Friday, December 11, 2009 BERLIN: Germany Thursday unveiled the world's most powerful weather supercomputer that scientists hope will provide critical data on global warming for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).Weighing in at 35 tonnes and using 50 kilometres (31 miles) of cables, the supercomputer named "Blizzard" is capable of 158 TeraFlops, or 158 trillion calculations, per second.Scientists said that in addition to tracking reactions in the atmosphere and the oceans, "Blizzard" should be able to work out the influence of ice and plants on greenhouse gases and climate change.Blizzard is "60 times faster than its predecessor and one of the world's largest supercomputers," the German climate research centre in Hamburg said in a statement."The new supercomputer should be in a position to model even tornados and very small eddies," added the centre, whose data are also being used at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen.
Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in
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