The world's fastest supercomputer, known as Frontier, is located at the Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. This machine churns through data at record speed, outpacing 100,000 laptops working simultaneously.

With nearly 50,000 processors, Frontier was designed to push the bounds of human knowledge. It's being used to create open-source large language models to compete with commercial AI systems, simulate proteins for drug development, help improve aeroplane engine design, and more.

This is an audio version of our Feature: A day in the life of the world’s fastest supercomputer

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Children with Down’s syndrome have a 150-fold increased risk of developing leukaemia than those without the condition. Now, an in-depth investigation has revealed that changes to genome structures in fetal liver stem-cells appear to be playing a key role in this increase.

Down’s syndrome is characterised by cells having an extra copy of chromosome 21. The team behind this work saw that in liver stem-cells — one of the main places blood is produced in a growing fetus — this extra copy results in changes in how DNA is packaged in a nucleus, opening up areas that are prone to mutation, including those known to be important in leukaemia development.

The researchers hope their work will be an important step in understanding and reducing this risk in children with Down’s syndrome.

Research Article: Marderstein et al.

News and Views: Childhood leukaemia in Down’s syndrome primed by blood-cell bias

How taking pints of beer off the table lowers alcohol consumption, and a small lizard’s ‘scuba gear’ helps it stay submerged.

Research Highlight: A small fix to cut beer intake: downsize the pint

Research Highlight: This ‘scuba diving’ lizard has a self-made air supply

How tiny crustaceans use ‘smell’ to find their home cave, and how atomic bomb X-rays could deflect an asteroid away from a deadly Earth impact.

Science: In the dark ocean, these tiny creatures can smell their way home

Nature: Scientists successfully ‘nuke asteroid’ — in a lab mock-up

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Astronomers have spotted a pair of enormous jets emanating from a supermassive black hole with a combined length of 23 million light years — the biggest ever discovered. Jets are formed when matter is ionized and flung out of a black hole, creating enormous and powerful structures in space. Thought to be unstable, physicists had theorized there was a limit to how large these jets could be, but the new discovery far exceeds this, suggesting there may be more of these monstrous jets yet to be discovered.

Research Article: Oei et al.

The knitted fabrics designed to protect wearers from mosquito bites, and the role that islands play in fostering language diversity.

Research Highlight: Plagued by mosquitoes? Try some bite-blocking fabrics

Research Highlight: Islands are rich with languages spoken nowhere else

Making metal alloys is typically a multi-step process that creates huge amounts of emissions. Now, a team demonstrates a way to create these materials in a single step, which they hope could significantly reduce the environmental burdens associated with their production. In a lab demonstration, they use their technique to create an alloy of nickel and iron called invar — a widely-used material that has a high carbon-footprint. The team show evidence that their method can produce invar to a quality that rivals that of conventional manufacturing, and suggest their technique is scalable to create alloys at an industrial scale.

Research article: Wei et al.

How AI-predicted protein structures have helped chart the evolution of a group of viruses, and the neurons that cause monkeys to ‘choke’ under pressure.

Nature News: Where did viruses come from? AlphaFold and other AIs are finding answers

Nature News: Why do we crumble under pressure? Science has the answer

Subscribe to the Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.

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