Tropics Are Expanding,
May Affect Water Supply
By Peter Spotts

The tropics — the globe's most torrid climate belt — have widened during the past 27 years, expanding toward the poles by an average of about 140 miles, according to new research. If the trend continues through the end of the century, it would drive rain bearing storms toward higher latitudes, deprive heavily populated southern Europe of much-needed winter rain and snow, and expand the world's subtropical deserts, atmospheric scientists say. Full story. Berkeley Lab earth scientist Margaret Torn has done similar research in this area.

U.S., Chinese Scientists
Discuss Global Warming

HPC Potential of Cell
Processor Analyzed

STI Cell Processor

Though it was designed as the heart of the upcoming Sony PlayStation3 game console, the STI Cell processor has created quite a stir in the computational science community, where the processor's potential as a building block for high performance computers has been widely discussed and speculated upon. To evaluate Cell's potential, computer scientists at Berkeley Lab (with the Computational Research Division's Future Technologies Group) evaluated the processor's performance in running several scientific application kernels, then compared this performance against other processor architectures. Full story.