Engineers at North Carolina State University have achieved a new record for the fastest moving soft robot. A team from the university's Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department created a robot capable of moving 2.7 times its own body length each second, more than three times faster than the previous record of 0.8 times body length per second. The tiny robot--it weighs just 1.5 ounces and measures 2.7 inches long--was designed to run like a cheetah, with four bent legs and a long flexible torso made from silicone. A team of engineers at North Carolina State University developed a small'soft' robot modeled after a cheetah, which uses silicone bands to expand and contract in a galloping motion that mimics a cheetah's movement'We were inspired by the cheetah to create a type of soft robot that has a spring-powered, "bistable" spine, meaning that the robot has two stable states,' North Carolina State's Jie Yin told Eurekalert. 'We can switch between these stable states rapidly by pumping air into channels that line the soft, silicone robot.

The US just took back the title for the world's fastest supercomputer. On Friday, the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee unveiled the'Summit' supercomputer that can deliver a peak performance of 200 petaflops, or about 200 quadrillion calculations per second. It managed to beat out the previous record holder that was China's Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer. Summit is 60% faster than the TaihuLight supercomputer, which could achieve a peak performance of 93 petaflops. The feat puts the US at the front of the top 500 supercomputers in the world -- the first time it has held such ranking since June 2013. Summit has been in development for several years now and is made up of thousands of chips.

The Department of Energy pulled back the curtain on the world's most powerful supercomputer Friday. When Summit is operating at max capacity, it can run at 200 petaflops -- that's 200 quadrillion calculations per second. That smokes the previous record holder, China's Sunway TaihuLight (which has a 93 petaflop capacity). Summit is also about seven times faster than Titan, the previous US record holder which is housed at the same Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. For perspective, in one hour, Summit can solve a problem that it would take a desktop computer 30 years to crack.

May I be the first to wish you a Happy New Year? For me anyway, 2017 seemed to fly by in the blink of an eye. I almost can't believe it's late December and we are about to put this one into the books. The pending start of a new year means that it's prediction season once again, where pundits and columnists make their calls about what they expect to see in the coming year. And unlike most others, I actually go back over my work and fact check everything at the end of each year, so I need to be careful with my predictions.