A Japanese supercomputer is now the world’s fastest, unseating the previous record-holder by nearly a factor of four. The K Computer, based at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, can perform 8 petaflops — that’s 8 quadrillion calculations per second.

The next-best computer is China’s Tianhe-1A , which set a record at 2.6 petaflops last fall. The U.S.-based Jaguar computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is now in third place with 1.75 petaflops.

K Computer topped the newest TOP500 List of the world’s fastest supercomputers, announced Monday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg.

K Computer, built by Fujitsu and entirely made in Japan, has 672 racks equipped with a current total of 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs, each with eight cores. It will eventually have 800 racks and will be capable of performing 10 petaflops, according to a news release from RIKEN. RIKEN and Fujitsu plan to have the computer fully operational by November 2012.

At least two American 10-petaflop machines are set to come online next year — IBM is building Mira, based at Argonne National Laboratory, and Blue Waters, based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is getting a 20-petaflop IBM model called Sequoia.

K computer will be used for global climate research, meteorology, disaster prevention, and medicine, according to RIKEN.

Leave it to Japanese designers to turn technology into something both stylish and functional — and then keep it all to themselves. The SolarFold and SolarFan portable solar chargers unfold into surface-area-utilizing solar collectors when needed, supplying enough power to make a three-minute iPhone call after just ten minutes in the sun.

Even better, they’re available immediately — in Japan anyhow. The aptly named SolarFold packs into a tight, flat bundle about the size of a Sony PSP, but deploys like a folding screen to maximize solar exposure. But the even-cooler and equally well-named SolarFan fans out like, you know, a fan — and it comes with a handy little tripod so you can adjust the angle of your ersatz solar array to suit your location and the time of day.

Made by AmbienTec, the chargers run about $250 each and power just about anything that can juice up via USB. The devices haven’t hit U.S. stores yet, but AmbienTec will happily sell you one directly.

How the heck does it do that? Japanese telecom giant NTT DoCoMo has used the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to demo a very cool new handsfree interface you can use to control an MP3 player using gestures you make with your eyeballs. Sensors in the earbuds themselves measure changes in electrical potential to convert your eye movements to iPod commands. Fascinating stuff… and while using it on an MP3 player might seem a bit naff, there’s probably a range of other situations where handsfree, voice-free control options like this could be really useful.

So the idea is that the human eyeball has a measurable positive charge at the retina, and a negative at the cornea. Tiny electrodes (electroculograms) on these eye-controlled earbuds are able to detect tiny changes in electrical potential as the eyes move around, and effectively produce a readout of what the eyes are doing in real time.

These eye movements are converted into MP3 player controls – you look full left then right to play/pause the tracks, right-right to skip forward, left-left to skip backward, or rotate your eyes clockwise or anticlockwise to raise or lower the volume.

The Macworld video below seems to demonstrate the device taking a good clean reading as a DoCoMo rep takes the device through its paces – although it’s a promo video, not any sort of test. You’d have to wonder how ambient electrical field fluctuations might affect it.

Still, it’s a fascinating device and another new form of interface – this time, one that lets you control a device handsfree and voicefree. Eye movements can easily be performed in most circumstances – walking, using a PC, lying down, even driving, cycling or riding a motorcycle, provided it reads fairly quickly.

And while integrating this interface into an MP3 player or smartphone could be a clever way of pushing it into the consumer market, we can’t help but think it’s destined for some more interesting and less trivial applications down the track. Either way, who would have thought earbuds could measure the position of your eyes? Very nifty.

In the service, Health-related information is collected and analyzed by a small sensor attached to a human body, and it is viewed and managed on a mobile phone or a PC. The company commercialized the health monitoring system, which is called “human recorder system,” based on the research results of the Advanced Institute of Wearable Information Networks (WIN), a nonprofit organization established by researchers at the University of Tokyo. WIN is a group led by Kiyoshi Itao, professor emeritus at the university.

The sensor is used to measure electrocardiographic signals, heart rate, brain waves, accelerated velocity, body temperature, respiration, pulse wave and so forth. WIN helped develop, for example, a program to analyze each data and determine health condition.

This time, WIN Human Recorder released the “HRS-I,” a system that measures electrocardiographic signals, body surface temperature and human movements at the same time by attaching a sensor with wireless communication capability to the chest and determines health condition by using the software. Human movements are detected by a three-axis acceleration sensor.

The dimensions and weight of the sensor module are approximately 30 (L) x 30 (W) x 5mm (D) and 7g, respectively. Because of the small size and the light weight, the module does not give uncomfortable feeling when attached to a human body, the company said.

The sensor module has a 2.4GHz wireless communication function and can be continuously operated for three to four days with a CR2032 button battery. Because the obtained data can be wirelessly transmitted to a PC or a mobile phone, it is possible to monitor the health condition of an elderly person who lives alone in a remote place via the Internet.

The sensor module comes in various designs.

For example, stress level can be measured based on the state of autonomic nerves determined from an electrocardiogram, and the fluctuation of heartbeat period can be analyzed.

The expected users of the HRS-I are companies that provide health monitoring services. The pricing of the service is more than ¥10,000 (approx US$111) per month for the rental of the software and more than ¥30,000 for the purchase of the sensor.

Marubeni Information Systems Co Ltd, a sales agent for the HRS-I, aims at sales of about ¥1 billion in a year after the release of the system and about ¥5 billion after three years.