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Iowa State University professor of electrical and computer engineering Srinivas Aluru talks about the school's new $1.25 million IBM BlueGene supercomputer, Monday, Jan. 30, 2006, in Ames, Iowa. Weaning the world away from petroleum and toward renewable sources for fuel and plastics is at the root of a research project to sequence the corn genome at Iowa State using the supercomputer. (KEYSTONE/AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)