Chilean Air Force’s F-16 Fighter Aircraft

Chilean Air Force is about 12,500 strong, and the air assets of Chile are distributed among five air brigades headquartered in Iquique, Antofagasta, Santiago, Puerto Montt, Punta Arenas, and an airbase on King George Island, Antarctica. The Air Force took delivery of the final 2 of 10 F-16s, all purchased from the U.S. in March 2007, and in the same year Chile also took delivery of reconditioned Block 15 F-16s from the Netherlands, bringing to 18 the total of F-16s purchased from the Dutch. F-16 stands for the Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcon, a multi-role jet fighter aircraft originally developed by General Dynamics for the United States Air Force. F-16, a success on the export market, serves in the air forces of 25 nations, though no longer being purchased by the U.S. Air Force.

The oldest heliographic engraving in the world

Photo: The first known surviving heliographic engraving in the world, made by French inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1825 by contact under an engraving with the heliographic process.

Niepce’s seminal work was a step towards the first permanent photography taken with a camera obscura, an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is a reproduction of a 17th century Flemish engraving, showing a man leading a horse. The Bibliothèque nationale de France bought it for euro 450,000 € in 2002, deeming it as a national treasure.

Photography evolved as a result of studies and scientific inventions over many centuries. Long before the first photographs were shot, Chinese philosopher Mo Di described a pinhole camera in 5th century BCE. Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040) studied the camera obscura and pinhole camera, Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) invented silver nitrate, and Georges Fabricius (1516-1571) invented silver chloride. Daniel Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1568. Wilhelm Homberg explained photochemical effect, i.e., how light darkened some chemicals, in 1694. The fiction book Giphantie (1760) by French author Tiphaigne de la Roche described what can be interpreted as photography.

The first permanent photo-etching was an image produced in 1822 by Nicéphore Niépce, but it was destroyed by an attempt to duplicate it. However, Niépce was successful to produce another etching again in 1825 (see photo). He made the first permanent photograph with a camera obscura in 1826. His photographs took as long as 8 hours to expose. So, to find a new process, he worked with Louis Daguerre and they experimented with silver compounds, based on the discovery by Johann Heinrich Schultz in 1724 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light.

Though Niépce died in 1833, Daguerre continued the work and developed the daguerreotype in 1837, and took the first ever photo of a person in 1839 when, while taking a daguerreotype of a Paris street, a pedestrian stopped for a shoe shine, long enough to be captured by the long exposure of several minutes. Later, France agreed to pay Daguerre a pension for his formula in exchange for his promise to announce his discovery to the world as the gift of France which he did in 1839.

Canon Digital Camera IXUS

The Digital IXUS (IXY Digital in Japan and PowerShot Digital ELPH in US and Canada) is a series of ultra-compact digital cameras released by Canon. The first Digital IXUS released in June 2000 fitted the technology of the PowerShot S10 into a body similar to the APS IXUS II. Between 2003 and 2004, starting with the Digital IXUS II, Canon moved from the use of CF cards to SD cards to create thinner cameras.

Canon's PowerShot A and S line of the time were being made as small as contemporary technology allowed. Canon used its experience with small film cameras, particularly the APS IXUS, to mass-produce good digital cameras smaller than anyone else had managed up to the time.

Supercomputers

PHOTO: The Columbia Supercomputer at NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Facility at Ames Research Center

Columbia Supercomputer at NASA is a cluster of 20 machines, each with 512 processors, each of which processes two data streams concurrently. Named in honor of the crew who died in the Columbia disaster, Columbia Supercomputer, built by Silicon Graphics for NASA, has as its main purpose to simulate the violent collision and merger of spiral galaxies that lead to the formation of elliptical galaxies. It is connected to the NASA Research and Engineering Network and was installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility in 2004.

Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s and were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC). In the 1970s Cray established his own company, Cray Research and took over the supercomputer market with his new designs and held the top spot in supercomputing for five years (1985–1990). In the 1980s many competitors entered the market and many of these disappeared in the mid-1990’s supercomputer market crash. Currently supercomputers are custom-designed and produced by companies such as Cray, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Supercomputers are used for calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling such as computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals, and physical simulations such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion.

As of November 2009, the fastest supercomputer in the world is the Cray XT5 Jaguar system at National Center for Computational Sciences with more than 19000 computers and 224,000 processing elements, based on standard AMD processors. The fastest heterogeneous machine is IBM Roadrunner, a cluster of 3240 computers, each with 40 processing cores and includes both AMD and Cell processors.

The SGI Altix platform was selected due to a positive experience with Kalpana, a single Altix 512-CPU system operated by NASA Ames which was integrated into the Columbia supercomputer system.

In November 2009, the AMD Opteron-based Cray XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was announced as the fastest operational supercomputer, with a sustained processing rate of 1.759 PFLOPS.

As against supercomputers, a quasi-supercomputer is like Google's search engine system with estimated total processing power of between 126 and 316 teraflops, as of April 2004. In June 2006 the New York Times estimated that the Googleplex and its server farms contain 450,000 servers. According to recent estimates, the processing power of Google's cluster might reach from 20 to 100 petaflops.