For the second time running (no pun intended), the Department of Energy's Cell-powered Roadrunner system has once again claimed the top spot in the Top 500 Supercomputers list.

Oh, you'd think the Large Hadron Collider would have made an impact (again, no pun intended) on the list, but nooo, the PS3 chip's advanced - and slightly hybrid-ized - brother is leaving the rest of the competition in the dust.

This one's for everyone who misses the Science blog. So that includes me? *Grin*. Anyway, In case you didn't know, the Large Hadron Collider's atom smasher will start today.

So how would you feel about contributing to the research of the Large Hadron Collider? You know, help destroy the world and everything. I kid. But someday you might be able to contribute to the LHC's research. That part's true. Following in the footsteps of Folding@Home is LHC@Home. Dun dun dunnn.

And a big load of thanks goes to trigger for the tip!

It seems to have been in development forever doesn't it? The long wait for Mercenaries 2: World in Flames finally seems to be coming to an end though, we've got the minimum and recommended specs right here. Will you need a supercomputer to run it? Will the 8800GT remain triumphant? The suspense is killing me!

Click on for decency's sake!

The mysterious nature of dark matter has always been a point of contention for some scientists. However, a recent simulation using one of the world's most powerful supercomputers has created a mockup of dark matter clumps possibly existing in the inner regions of the Milky Way. Find out more about this dark matter puzzle in our full article after the jump.

Meep meep. The PlayStation 3's powerful hardware does it again, contributing its powerful Cell Broadband Engine to create the world's fastest supercomputer, er... again. Named the Roadrunner, this new supercomputer runs at speeds exceeding one petaflop - that is, one thousand trillion calculations per second. Let's see Wile E. Coyote try to catch up with that. Watch a mini-documentary of the supercomputer in the full article.

 How do you get bacteria to solve math problems for you? Placing them in a life and death situation is one way. In order for them to be able to withstand the drugs, researchers injected these tiny life forms with proteins that will act like variables in an equation. Learn more in the full article up next.

Size does matter, even in the world of small things. Scientists at Purdue University have been able to take a three-dimensional image of a virus at a resolution of 4.5 angstroms. An angstrom is 0.1 nanometer long, or 1/10 billionth of a meter. So you can imagine that's quite an achievement. Check out the full article to see the magnified virus.

So what's to say that the next major tsunami event doesn't befall the Pacific Northwestern region this time? Researchers from the San Diego State University are currently looking into a study which will simulate the next "megathrust" disaster event by running several scenarios through the San Diego Supercomputer Center's DataStar supercomputer. You can find out more about the results of this study by reading the full article.

One of the world's fastest supercomputers, the Blue Gene/P, is powered by the PS3 CELL chip and has reached a speed of 280.6 teraflops. However, this is just a modicum of what the Institute for Advanced Architectures is planning: a computer that can use exaflops. An exaflop is a thousand times faster than a teraflop. That's faster than you can say "Leeroy Jenkins!" Oops, too slow. More in the full article.

Scientists have challenged Mother Nature by building a better plant - only theirs is a digital one. Researchers at the University of Illinois have built a simulation program for a SuperLeaf: it doesn't leap tall building in a single bound but its efficiency allows it to produce more leaves and fruit using the same amount of energy a normal leaf uses.

Now if only they can actually make the leaf... Read the full article for more details on SuperLeaf.