Monday, February, 9, 2004                                                  
Orange County Science Calendar                                             
By GARY ROBBINS                                                            
The Orange County Register                                                 

 Notes: UCI chemist Larry       
 Overman, pictured at left, is in Taipei, China this week to give a lecture 
 to the Chinese Academy of Sciences on how to make molecules that might be  
 used in medicines ...Ken Baldwin, a UCI physiologist, is in Washington,    
 D.C. to advise NASA on a biological and physical science program that      
 could play a key role in preparing astronauts to travel to Mars...And      
 UCI\x{2019}s Earth System Sciences program has become the first department of its 
 kind in the country to have a supercomputer solely devoted for future      
 climate modeling. The supercomputer can calculate at 528 gigaFLOPS. To get 
 an idea of how fast this really is, consider a computer that runs one      
 billion calculations each second. A billionth of a second is about the     
 time it takes for light to move one foot. So, if you stood on the goal     
 line of a football field and struck a match, a supercomputer could perform 
 more than 300 calculations before someone standing on the other goal line  
 saw the match light.