Science news from NBCNews.com
New tech said to clean up the water used in fracking A new water desalination technology may prove a savior for the oil and natural gas industries confronting growing concerns about the wastewater that flows to the surface in the months and years after a well is fracked.
The network, called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) harnesses about 360,000 processors operating at 150 trillion calculations per second. This is the third prime number discovered by Cooper.
“It’s analogous to climbing Mount Everest,” said George Woltman, the retired, Orlando, Fla.-based computer scientist who created GIMPS. “People enjoy it for the challenge of the discovery of finding something that’s never been known before.”
In addition, the number is the 48th example of a rare class of primes called Mersenne Primes. Mersenne primes take the form of 2 raised to the power of a prime number minus 1. Since they were first described by French monk Marin Mersenne 350 years ago, only 48 of these elusive numbers have been found, including the most recent discovery.
( via nbcnews.com )