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fliptop writes:

Over at ACM.org, Doug Meil posits that programming languages are often designed for certain tasks or workloads in mind, and in that sense most languages differ less in what they make possible, and more in terms of what they make easy:

I had the opportunity to visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, a few years ago. It's a terrific museum, and among the many exhibits is a wall-size graph of the evolution of programming languages. This graph is so big that anyone who has ever written "Hello World" in anything has the urge to stick their nose against the wall and search section by section to try find their favorite languages. I certainly did. The next instinct is to trace the "influenced" edges of the graph with their index finger backwards in time. Or forwards, depending on how old the languages happen to be.

[...] There is so much that can be taken for granted in computing today. Back in the early days everything was expensive and limited: storage, memory, and processing power. People had to walk uphill and against the wind, both ways, just to get to the computer lab, and then stay up all night to get computer time. One thing that was easier during that time was that the programming language namespace was greenfield, and initial ones from the 1950's and 1960's had the luxury of being named precisely for the thing they did: FORTRAN (Formula Translator), COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), ALGOL (Algorithmic Language), LISP (List Processor). Most people probably haven't heard of SNOBOL (String Oriented and Symbolic Language, 1962), but one doesn't need many guesses to determine what it was trying to do. Had object-oriented programming concepts been more fully understood during that time, it's possible we would be coding in something like "OBJOL" —an unambiguously named object-oriented language, at least by naming patterns of the era.

It's worth noting and admiring the audacity of PL/I (1964), which was aiming to be that "one good programming language." The name says it all: Programming Language 1. There should be no need for 2, 3, or 4. Though PL/I's plans of becoming the Highlander of computer programming didn't play out like the designers intended, they were still pulling on a key thread in software: why so many languages? That question was already being asked as far back as the early 1960's.

The author goes on to reason that new languages are mostly created for control and fortune, citing Microsoft's C# as an example of their answer to Java for a middleware language they could control.

Related:
Non-Programmers are Building More of the World's Software
Twist: MIT's New Programming Language for Quantum Computing
10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages

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upstart writes:

Decision will be binding on many companies and change the way they protect your data:

In the not-too-distant future—as little as a decade, perhaps, nobody knows exactly how long—the cryptography protecting your bank transactions, chat messages, and medical records from prying eyes is going to break spectacularly with the advent of quantum computing. On Tuesday, a US government agency named four replacement encryption schemes to head off this cryptopocalypse.

Some of the most widely used public-key encryption systems—including those using the RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman algorithms—rely on mathematics to protect sensitive data. [...]

Researchers have known for decades these algorithms are vulnerable and have been cautioning the world to prepare for the day when all data that has been encrypted using them can be unscrambled. Chief among the proponents is the US Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which is leading a drive for post-quantum cryptography (PQC).

On Tuesday, NIST said it selected four candidate PQC algorithms to replace those that are expected to be felled by quantum computing. They are: CRYSTALS-Kyber, CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON, and SPHINCS+.

[...] While no one knows exactly when quantum computers will be available, there is considerable urgency in moving to PQC as soon as possible. Many researchers say it's likely that criminals and nation-state spies are recording massive amounts of encrypted communications and stockpiling them for the day they can be decrypted.

See also: NIST announcement, particularly if you have any digital signature algorithms you want to enter for consideration.

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upstart writes:

NASA Restores Contact With CAPSTONE Spacecraft – Prepares for Trajectory Correction Maneuver:

The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, or CAPSTONE, is a CubeSat that will fly a unique orbit around the Moon intended for NASA's future Artemis lunar outpost Gateway. Its six-month mission will help launch a new era of deep space exploration. Credit: NASA Ames Research Center

Mission crews for NASA's Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) have re-established contact with the spacecraft via NASA's Deep Space Network after experiencing communications problems.

Data downloaded from CAPSTONE indicate that the spacecraft is in good health and that it operated safely on its own when it was not in communication with Earth. Teams are preparing to perform CAPSTONE's first trajectory adjustment maneuver as early as 11:30 a.m. EDT (8:30 a.m. PDT) on July 7. It will more accurately target CAPSTONE's transfer orbit to the Moon. CAPSTONE is still on schedule to arrive in lunar orbit on November 13, as originally planned.

See Yesterday's story: NASA Loses Contact With Just-Launched Spacecraft Headed Toward Moon

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fliptop writes:

Microsoft security researchers have discovered new variants of the one-year-old Hive ransomware that was written in the Go programming language but has been re-written in Rust:

Hive emerged in June 2021 and was spotlighted by the FBI in an alert two months later. In November, European electronics retail giant MediaMarkt also got stung by Hive. It's another ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) double-extortion gang that has recently been targeting vulnerable Microsoft Exchange Servers, vulnerable RDP servers, compromised VPN credentials, and phishing to deploy their ransomware and steal leak-worthy information.

Hive's Rust migration has been underway for a few months as it adopted lessons from BlackCat ransomware, which is also written in Rust. Via BleepingComputer, Group-IB researchers in March found that Hive had converted its Linux encryptor (for targeting VMware ESXi servers) to Rust to make it harder for security researchers to spy on its ransom talks with victims.

Microsoft's analysis indicates that Hive's Rust rewrite is much more comprehensive, but backs up the importance of the change to its encryption methods noted in March.

[...] "Instead of embedding an encrypted key in each file that it encrypts, it generates two sets of keys in memory, uses them to encrypt files, and then encrypts and writes the sets to the root of the drive it encrypts, both with .key extension," Microsoft notes.

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upstart writes:

A gentler, more precise laser cutting technique:

Laser cutting techniques are usually powered by high energy beams, so hot that they melt most materials. Now scientists from McGill University have developed a gentler, more precise technique using low-power visible light.

The new process called 'cold photo-carving' uses a fraction of the energy required in traditional laser cutting techniques. "We engineered crystal building blocks that can be cut by low-power light with amazing precision. Unlike traditional heat cutting methods, sculpting down to a resolution of nanometers is possible with our approach because light can be focused more precisely than heat can," says Professor Tomislav Friščić of the Department of Chemistry.

According to the researchers, the new technique could also be used to engrave complex patterns into surfaces. "Imagine taking the famous geoglyphs in the Nazca Desert in Peru and engraving that pattern at a million-times the reduced size," say Professor Friščić. The researchers hope that the new approach could one day be developed to create new materials like metals or ceramics that are easily shaped or cut using low-power light and are now looking at potential applications in solar cell materials.

Journal Reference:
Borchers, T. H., Topić, F., Christopherson, J.-C., et al. Cold photo-carving of halogen-bonded co-crystals of a dye and a volatile co-former using visible light, Nature Chemistry (DOI: 10.1038/s41557-022-00909-0)

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hubie writes:

This is the first time scientists have directly tracked natural selection in a large animal over a time-scale of 100,000 years:

An international group of geneticists and archaeologists, led by the Francis Crick Institute, have found that the ancestry of dogs can be traced to at least two populations of ancient wolves. The work moves us a step closer to uncovering the mystery of where dogs underwent domestication, one of the biggest unanswered questions about human prehistory.

Dogs are known to have originated from the gray wolf, with this domestication occurring during the Ice Age, at least 15,000 years ago. But where this happened, and if it occurred in one single location or in multiple places, is still unknown.

Previous studies using the archaeological record and comparing the DNA of dogs and modern wolves have not found the answer.

In their study, published in Nature today (29 June), the researchers turned to ancient wolf genomes to further understanding of where the first dogs evolved from wolves. They analysed 72 ancient wolf genomes, spanning the last 100,000 years, from Europe, Siberia and North America.

[...] By analysing the genomes, the researchers found that both early and modern dogs are more genetically similar to ancient wolves in Asia than those in Europe, suggesting a domestication somewhere in the east.

However, they also found evidence that two separate populations of wolves contributed DNA to dogs. Early dogs from north-eastern Europe, Siberia and the Americas appear to have a single, shared origin from the eastern source. But early dogs from the Middle East, Africa and southern Europe appear to have some ancestry from another source related to wolves in the Middle East, in addition to the eastern source.

[...] As the 72 ancient wolf genomes spanned around 30,000 generations, it was possible to look back and build a timeline of how wolf DNA has changed, tracing natural selection in action.

[...] "We found several cases where mutations spread to the whole wolf species, which was possible because the species was highly connected over large distances. This connectivity is perhaps a reason why wolves managed to survive the Ice Age while many other large carnivores vanished."

Journal Reference:
Bergström, A., Stanton, D.W.G., Taron, U.H. et al. Grey wolf genomic history reveals a dual ancestry of dogs [open]. Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04824-9

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fliptop writes:

The UK's Intellectual Property Office has decided artificial-intelligence systems cannot patent inventions for the time being:

A recent IPO consultation found many experts doubted AI was currently able to invent without human assistance.

Current law allowed humans to patent inventions made with AI assistance, the government said, despite "misperceptions" this was not the case.

Last year, the Court of Appeal ruled against Stephen Thaler, who had said his Dabus AI system should be recognised as the inventor in two patent applications, for:

• a food container
• a flashing light

The judges sided, by a two-to-one majority, with the IPO, which had told him to list a real person as the inventor.

"Only a person can have rights - a machine cannot," wrote Lady Justice Laing in her judgement.

"A patent is a statutory right and it can only be granted to a person."

But the IPO also said it would "need to understand how our IP system should protect AI-devised inventions in the future" and committed to advancing international discussions, with a view to keeping the UK competitive.

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Previously:
When AI is the Inventor Who Gets the Patent?
AI Computers Can't Patent their Own Inventions -- Yet -- a US Judge Rules
USPTO Rejects AI-Invention for Lack of a Human Inventor
AI Denied Patent by Human-Centric European Patent Office
The USPTO Wants to Know If Artificial Intelligence Can Own the Content It Creates
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Asks If "AI" Can Create or Infringe Copyrighted Works

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owl writes:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/5/23195827/lockscreen-content-apple-ios-16-glance

Unlocking your phone and opening an app is too much work, apparently

Your phone's lock screen is the hottest new real estate in tech. Apple made the iPhone's lock screen a centerpiece of iOS 16, giving users more control over how theirs looks and works. But while Apple talked about pretty clock fonts and nifty color-matched wallpapers, it also showed off a world in which your lock screen is more than just a security measure; it's becoming another surface on which companies can put information, apps, and even ads. Apple's far from the only company thinking about this, too. TechCrunch reports that Glance, a lock screen content company (which apparently is a thing!), is already in talks with US carriers and plans to launch on some Android phones in the US in the next two months.

The competition for your eyeballs and attention has already come out of apps and onto your homescreen through widgets and notifications. Now, it looks like it's headed one step further: onto the first thing you see when you turn on your phone before you even pick it up or unlock it. That might be at least one step too far.

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AnonTechie writes:

The collaboration has observed a new kind of "pentaquark" and the first-ever pair of "tetraquarks":

The international LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has observed three never-before-seen particles: a new kind of "pentaquark" and the first-ever pair of "tetraquarks", which includes a new type of tetraquark. The findings, presented today at a CERN seminar, add three new exotic members to the growing list of new hadrons found at the LHC. They will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles.

Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. More rarely, however, they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, or "tetraquarks" and "pentaquarks". These exotic hadrons were predicted by theorists at the same time as conventional hadrons, about six decades ago, but only relatively recently, in the past 20 years, have they been observed by LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment) and other experiments.

[...] The discoveries announced today by the LHCb collaboration include new kinds of exotic hadrons. The first kind, observed in an analysis of "decays" of negatively charged B mesons, is a pentaquark made up of a charm quark and a charm antiquark and an up, a down and a strange quark. It is the first pentaquark found to contain a strange quark. The finding has a whopping statistical significance of 15 standard deviations, far beyond the 5 standard deviations that are required to claim the observation of a particle in particle physics.

[...] While some theoretical models describe exotic hadrons as single units of tightly bound quarks, other models envisage them as pairs of standard hadrons loosely bound in a molecule-like structure. Only time and more studies of exotic hadrons will tell if these particles are one, the other or both.

CERN seminar presentation: "Particle Zoo 2.0: New tetra- and pentaquarks at LHCb" with video.

Additional Information: Observation of a strange pentaquark

See also: Gizmodo

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upstart writes:

Major crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital files for bankruptcy and fires 25% of workforce as crypto implosion spreads:

The news for cryptocurrencies keeps getting worse as Three Arrows Capital (3AC), a major cryptocurrency hedge fund, plunges into bankruptcy and fires 25% of its workforce.

Rumors that the embattled fund was in trouble started gaining steam early last month, and it was hit hard by the collapse of the Terra crypto and other issues. A court order in the British Virgin Islands ordered their liquidation after they defaulted on a loan worth $660 million to crypto brokerage Voyager Digital.

[...] 3AC is one of the most prominent cryptocurrency hedge funds, focusing on investments in digital assets, and it is known for bullish views on bitcoin and highly leveraged bets. It was founded by Kyle Davies and Zhu Su, who is now trying to sell the $35 million mansion he bought in December.

The collapse of Three Arrows Capital has sent shockwaves throughout the crypto lending market, with countless firms now racking up significant losses as a result of their exposure to the fund.

[...] The conditions have led experts to conclude the crypto space is dealing with its first wide-scale credit crisis. IntoTheBlock Head of Research Lucas Outumoro wrote: "Institutions led by their risky practices thrived during the bull market, but were exposed as prices crashed and took down the rest of the crypto space with them. Ultimately, as an industry, crypto ended up learning the same lessons from traditional finance from its first debt crisis." Are you jumping in when it bottoms out?

Having a need for a $660M loan is surprising in itself, but more surprising to me is having another crypto fund step up and loaning them that much and putting their own business at risk. Is this the start of a major collapse, or just a "market correction," as the economists like to say?

See previously: Crypto Hedge Fund Three Arrows Capital Plunges Into Liquidation

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DannyB writes:

NASA Loses Contact With Just-Launched Spacecraft Headed Toward Moon

NASA has encountered "communication issues" and is attempting to "re-establish contact" with its Moon-bound CAPSTONE satellite, which successfully broke free of Earth's orbit on Monday after launching atop a Rocket Lab Electron rocket.

Though more info is needed, it's a serious problem that could jeopardize the entire mission.

[ . . . . ] Fortunately, not all is lost. The CAPSTONE team has "good trajectory data for the spacecraft based on the first full and second partial ground station pass with the Deep Space Network," according to the update, meaning that scientists will at least know where to look in their attempts to regain communication with the spacecraft.

The spacecraft also has the ability to delay its "trajectory correction maneuver" towards the Moon according to NASA, buying the team "several days" of time.

NASA loses contact with moon-bound CAPSTONE spacecraft

Flight controllers have lost contact with a small pathfinder spacecraft launched last week to test an unusual lunar orbit planned for NASA's Artemis moon program, the agency said Tuesday. Engineers are troubleshooting and attempting to re-establish communications.

Launched last Tuesday from New Zealand atop a Rocketlab Electron rocket, the CAPSTONE spacecraft relied on a compact-but-sophisticated upper stage for thruster firings to repeatedly "pump up" the high point of an increasingly elliptical orbit to the point where it could break free of Earth's gravity and head for the moon.

Those maneuvers went well and CAPSTONE was released from Rocketlab's Photon upper stage early Monday to fly on its own. NASA confirmed successful solar array deployment and an initial communications session. But a second session apparently was cut short for some reason and flight controllers lost contact.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/forget-smart-glasses-this-smart-contact-lens-prototype-has-a-new-vision-for-ar/

Since 2015, a California-based company called Mojo Vision has been developing smart contact lenses. Like smart glasses, the idea is to put helpful AR graphics in front of your eyes to help accomplish daily tasks. Now, a functioning prototype brings us closer to seeing a final product.

In a blog post this week, Drew Perkins, the CEO of Mojo Vision, said he was the first to have an "on-eye demonstration of a feature-complete augmented reality smart contact lens." In an interview with CNET, he said he's been wearing only one contact at a time for hour-long durations. Eventually, Mojo Vision would like users to be able to wear two Mojo Lens simultaneously and create 3D visual overlays, the publication said.

According to his blog, the CEO could see a compass through the contact and an on-screen teleprompter with a quote written on it. He also recalled viewing a green, monochromatic image of Albert Einstein to CNET.

[...] At the heart of the lens is an Arm M0 processor and a Micro LED display with 14,000 pixels per inch. It's just 0.02 inches (0.5 mm) in diameter with a 1.8-micron pixel pitch. Perkins claimed it's the "smallest and densest display ever created for dynamic content."

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chr writes:

Finnish researchers installed first working 'sand battery' that can store energy as heat for months. See article in BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520

In short:

1. Use excess/cheap electricity to heat up sand.
2. Store the hot sand and thus the energy for later use. Article says it can be done for up to several months.
3. Later use the warm sand as a heat source for district heating, i.e. heat up water that's transported to e.g. residences.

The BBC article is light on technical details: The installation in Kankaanpää in Finland uses about a 100 tonnes of sand heated to 500 deg C.

Their company is called Polar Night Energy: https://polarnightenergy.fi/ Extracting information from there; the unit in Kankaanpää has 100 kW heating power and 8 MWh capacity.

Didn't see details of cost. Seems like it could scale well in principle. However, IIRC, construction sand might become a scarce resource in the future, so I hope their solution works with other types of "sand".

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upstart writes:

8,000 kilometers per second: Star with the shortest orbital period around black hole discovered:

Researchers at the University of Cologne and Masaryk University in Brno (Czech Republic) have discovered the fastest known star, which travels around a black hole in record time. The star, S4716, orbits Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the center of our Milky Way, in four years and reaches a speed of around 8,000 kilometers per second. S4716 comes as close as 100 AU (astronomical unit) to the black hole—a small distance by astronomical standards. One AU corresponds to 149,597,870 kilometers. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

[...] By means of continuously refining methods of analysis, together with observations covering almost twenty years, the scientist now identified without a doubt a star that travels around the central supermassive black hole in just four years. A total of five telescopes observed the star, with four of these five being combined into one large telescope to allow even more accurate and detailed observations. "For a star to be in a stable orbit so close and fast in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole was completely unexpected and marks the limit that can be observed with traditional telescopes," said Peissker.

Journal Reference:
Florian Peißker, Andreas Eckart, Michal Zajaček, and Silke Britzen. Observation of S4716—a Star with a 4 yr Orbit around Sgr A* - IOPscience, [open access] The Astrophysical Journal (DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac752f)

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hubie writes:

By identifying clouds in data collected by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the public can increase scientists' understanding of the Red Planet's atmosphere:

NASA scientists hope to solve a fundamental mystery about Mars' atmosphere, and you can help. They've organized a project called Cloudspotting on Mars that invites the public to identify Martian clouds using the citizen science platform Zooniverse. The information may help researchers figure out why the planet's atmosphere is just 1% as dense as Earth's even though ample evidence suggests the planet used to have a much thicker atmosphere.

The air pressure is so low that liquid water simply vaporizes from the planet's surface into the atmosphere. But billions of years ago, lakes and rivers covered Mars, suggesting the atmosphere must have been thicker then.

[...] "We want to learn what triggers the formation of clouds – especially water ice clouds, which could teach us how high water vapor gets in the atmosphere – and during which seasons," said Marek Slipski, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

That's where Cloudspotting on Mars comes in. The project revolves around a 16-year record of data from the agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been studying the Red Planet since 2006. The spacecraft's Mars Climate Sounder instrument studies the atmosphere in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. In measurements taken by the instrument as MRO orbits Mars, clouds appear as arches. The team needs help sifting through that data on Zooniverse, marking the arches so that the scientists can more efficiently study where in the atmosphere they occur.

[...] While scientists have experimented with algorithms to identify the arches in Mars Climate Sounder data, it's much easier for humans to spot them by eye. But Kleinboehl said the Cloudspotting project may also help train better algorithms that could do this work in the future. In addition, the project includes occasional webinars in which participants can hear from scientists about how the data will be used.

Cloudspotting on Mars is the first planetary science project to be funded by NASA's Citizen Science Seed Funding program. The project is conducted in collaboration with the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences. For more NASA citizen science opportunities, go to science.nasa.gov/citizenscience.

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