Somehow I Missed This: Tombaugh's Ashes are Aboard New Horizons

When the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto it was the first time mankind has visited what is now called a dwarf planet.

On board that spacecraft, is a man – or rather his ashes – from New Mexico.

Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto as a young astronomer in Arizona. He later moved to New Mexico and founded the astronomy dept at New Mexico State University in 1955.

When NASA launched its Pluto mission 9 years ago, they placed a canister of Tombaugh’s ashes on board the spacecraft.

link.

hm.  Perhaps they ought to have named the spacecraft Tombaugh.  ah well.
 

Canada's Big Iron Goes Live

It has taken a year and $50-million to put together, and its brain takes up as much room as a warehouse full of refrigerators.

Today, the monster finally opens its eyes, as the University of Toronto's newest supercomputer – the fastest such machine in Canada – goes online.

There's no shortage of beastly metrics by which this computer's power can be measured: It can perform more than 300 trillion calculations a second, simulate the Earth's climate 100 years into the future in four days and help researchers study cosmic background radiation, a calculation-intensive task that offers a glimpse into what the universe looked like 13 billion years ago.

The guy in charge, Dr Chris Loken, and I go back a loooooooooooooong ways (yes, HPC is far, far too small of a world). We were both at NMSU. Me as an undergrad and Chris as a postdoc. He left around 1996, iirc, and went to another position in Kansas, I think, following the rest of the cosmology team of the NMSU astronomy dept head that got a deanship here. We lost track of each other for a very long time after that until in 2006, I went to the Commodity Cluster Conference in Baltimore. I picked a table at random to sit down and talk to the people there over lunch (a habit at conferences unless I have a preset agenda to work through progects). It turned out that I DID know someone at the table: Chris.

NM has a very far reaching impact on HPC and science in general is seems. Not bad for a low ranking, little populated purple state.

Congratz to Chris et al for getting their monster up and running.

New Spicy Chile Champion

Researchers at New Mexico State University recently discovered the world’s hottest chile pepper. Bhut Jolokia, a variety of chile pepper originating in Assam, India, has earned Guiness World Records’ recognition as the world’s hottest chile pepper by blasting past the previous champion Red Savina. In replicated tests of Scoville heat units (SHUs), Bhut Jolokia reached one million SHUs, almost double the SHUs of Red Savina, which measured a mere 577,000.

Dr. Paul Bosland, Director of the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University’s Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences collected seeds of Bhut Jolokia while visiting India in 2001. Bosland grew Bhut Jolokia plants under insect-proof cages for three years to produce enough seed to complete the required field tests. “The name Bhut Jolokia translates as ‘ghost chile,’” Bosland said, “I think it’s because the chile is so hot, you give up the ghost when you eat it!” Bosland added that the intense heat concentration of Bhut Jolokia could have significant impact on the food industry as an economical seasoning in packaged foods.

Huzzah! Now we have a tasy new one to try. Now, folks, repeat after me: it's chile not chili.