China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer most powerful in the world

China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer has retained its position as the world's most powerful system for the sixth consecutive time on the biannual Top 500 list of supercomputers. Tianhe-2, or Milky Way -2, has a performance of 33.86 petaflops per second (Pflop/s).

One hour of calculation by the machine equals 1,000 years of difficult sums done by 1.3 billion people--coincidentally China's current population--on a calculator.

China's first dark matter satellite

China successfully launched its first dark matter satellite at a launch center in northwest China's Gansu province on Dec. 17. The satellite, nicknamed "Wukong," is named after the heroic Monkey King in the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West.

Designed in a one-cubic-meter box, weighing 1.9 metric tons and with four probes aboard, Wukong will spend the next three years searching for dark matter, a theoretical form of matter that is believed to make up a very large part of the cosmos and hold the key to understanding phenomena that cannot be explained with our current knowledge of physics.