China has opened the World’s longest sea-bridge, winning ove the United States. The 26.4 miles long bridge spans Jiaozhou Bay on the North-Eastern China.

The Jiaozhou Bay Bridge beats the previous record holder, 23.83 miles long Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. Guinness Book of World Records, state that the the new bridge is about 2.5 miles longer than the previous record holder.

The six-lane Qingdao-Haiwan road bridge, which spans Jiaozhou Bay in China’s Shangdong Province, is 42.5 km (26.4 miles) long. …. It is 4.07 km (2.53 miles) longer than the former record holder, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana, USA. 

The bridge was built in four years, at a cost of $2.3 billion. Some of the note-worthy features of the bridge are – six-lane, 5,200 pillars, earthquake- and typhoon-proof, and designed to withstand the impact of a 300,000-tonne vessel.

Nice areal-view of the bridge:

China’s Tianhe-1A supercomputer, capable of carrying out more than 2,507 trillion calculations a second (2.507 petaflops), is claimed to be the most sophisticated supercomputer ever built. Made with more than 7,000 graphics processors and 14,000 Intel chips, the supercomputer is performs almost twice (47% faster) the speed of the next fastest supercomputer, XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the US, that can carry out 1.75 petaflops per second.

The supercomputer is located in China’s National Center for Supercomputing in Tianjin. It is operational and currently works for the local weather service and the National Offshore Oil Corporation. The processors are kept in 103 refrigerated cabinets weighing a total of more than 155 tonnes.

The US is still the leader in having most supercomputers with more than half of the world’s top 500 supercomputers. Japan is told to be developing another machine, named K Computer, to be faster than Tianhe-1A. (source – Nvidia)

The fastest commercial train in the world is now operational in China running at a maximum speed of 394 kilometers per hour (km/hr) in a trail run. The train link connects two cities, Guangzhou in South to Wuhan in central China, and will travel at an average speed of 350km/hr (217mph). The 1,068 km distance between the two cities can now be covered by the high-speed train in two hours and forty five minutes – that is, a saving of about six hours of travel time.

The high-speed train line uses technology developed in co-operation with firms such as Siemens, Bombardier and Alstom.

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