🕵🏽 Pentagon’s new service to give US military remote access to supercomputers, new DNA-editing mechanism discovered in bacteria may outshine CRISPR, Pope to transition Vatican City to 100% green energy

INTERESTING ENGINEERING SHOP

The US Department of Defense has finally agreed to develop a supercomputer cloud service, which will add the capacity and the ability to remotely access Pentagon’s high-performance computers. The approval came after two companies completed an 18-month prototyping period.

Rescale and Parallel Works demonstrated that their solutions successfully increase the computing power of High-Performance Computing Modernization Program’s (HPCMP) Supercomputing Resource Centers without significantly increasing hardware costs or requirements. For more on this development, check out today’s Must-Read.

🔥Today’s job of the day as featured on jobs.interestingengineering.com:

> Principal Software Engineer, Platform
> Sr AI Engineer

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MUST READ

🕵🏽 Pentagon’s new service to give US military remote access to supercomputers

“This capability allows the HPCMP to securely combine the capacity and capability of DoD HPCMP Defense Supercomputing Resource Centers (DSRCs), with the flexibility and diverse hardware associated with commercial cloud providers in order to create a seamless ecosystem for DoD researchers,” said Dr. Benjamin Parsons, HPCMP Chief Technology Officer.

“Researchers are [now] able to access cloud resources when appropriate to augment their work at on-premises centers. This has given them access to a wider variety of hardware, and the ability to scale resources beyond what is currently possible, all within one secure, easy to use, environment.”

🦠 New DNA-editing mechanism discovered in bacteria may outshine CRISPR

A unique bacterial molecule might allow scientists to redesign genomes, enabling them to insert, delete, or flip large DNA segments. This technique, detailed in three recent papers in Nature and Nature Communications, uses jumping genes, which naturally insert themselves into genomes.

According to Sandro Fernandes Ataide, a structural biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia and an author of the Nature Communications paper, “if this works in other cells, it will be game-changing. It’s opening a new field in gene editing.”

☄️ The Vatican is going solar, Pope to transition City to 100% green energy

Pope Francis announces his plans to transition the Vatican to 100% solar power to support climate change efforts.

In his motu proprio Fratello Sole, an official proclamation of the Pope to the Roman Catholic Church, he diffused his instructions to the Vatican authorities to begin working with Italian officials to turn the Vatican into a green organization, as reported by Aciafrica.

The Catholic Church first began publicly addressing climate change with Pope Paul VI, who expressed his concern in 1971 that humanity’s “exploitation of nature runs the risk of destroying it.”

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