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Banks scramble to fix old systems as COBOL language 'cowboys' ride into sunset

Anna Irrera
Reuters
Mon, 10 Apr 2017 23:53 UTC
system 3 computer IBM
© IBM
Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset IBM engineers work with a System 360 mainframe computer using business programs written in an early version of the COBOL language in this undated handout photo.
Bill Hinshaw is not a typical 75-year-old. He divides his time between his family - he has 32 grandchildren and great-grandchildren - and helping U.S. companies avert crippling computer meltdowns.

Hinshaw, who got into programming in the 1960s when computers took up entire rooms and programmers used punch cards, is a member of a dwindling community of IT veterans who specialise in a vintage programming language called COBOL.

The Common Business-Oriented Language was developed nearly 60 years ago and has been gradually replaced by newer, more versatile languages such as Java, C and Python. Although few universities still offer COBOL courses, the language remains crucial to businesses and institutions around the world.

In the United States, the financial sector, major corporations and parts of the federal government still largely rely on it because it underpins powerful systems that were built in the 70s or 80s and never fully replaced.
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Moon

2017's 'Pink Moon' happens tomorrow: Here's what it means


RT
Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:04 UTC
pink moon
© dc2 / Global Look Press
A pink moon is heading our way Tuesday - but those expecting to see a literal pink sphere sailing above us in the sky may be disappointed.

Any full moon that occurs in April is called a 'Pink Moon' simply because of the pink flowers, such as North America's wild ground phlox, which blossom in April and are seen to symbolize new beginnings.

Comment: Lyrid meteor shower to peak April 22

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Book

Hello...Newman: Yet another sting pranks a predatory journal, Seinfeld-style


Retraction Watch
Sun, 09 Apr 2017 21:45 UTC
journals
© Max Pixel
Starting to get bored of stings designed to expose the well-documented flaws in scientific publishing? Yeah, sometimes we are too. But another one just came across our desks, and we couldn't help ourselves.

John McCool is neither a researcher nor a urologist. When received an unsolicited invitation to submit a paper to an open-access urology journal, however, he just couldn't resist: He is the owner of a freelance scientific editing company, and has long been concerned about so-called predatory journals, which often publish sub-par papers as long as authors pay. And he loves the TV show "Seinfeld."

Comment:

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Brain

Computational model of the brain shows what triggers Tourette 'tics'

Ana Sandalou
Medical News Today
Sun, 09 Apr 2017 19:33 UTC
Tourette Model
© Image credit: Beste Ozcan
The new model shows that Tourette 'tics' are triggered by the interplay between key brain areas.
Tourette syndrome is a neurological disease in which patients make a series of repetitive, involuntary movements and sounds that are commonly referred to as 'tics'. A new study uses a computational model to simulate the neurological basis for the illness, which could help researchers to design new therapies in the future.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that in the United States, 1 in 360 children aged between 6 and 17 years receive a Tourette syndrome diagnosis. However, the CDC also suggest that the numbers may be higher than this, as the disease often goes undiagnosed.

The tics that accompany the disease vary in complexity. Some of them can be fairly simple - such as blinking, for instance - while others may involve touching objects, repeating the same words, or making obscene gestures.

Some of the motor tics that occur in the disease - such as sniffing, blinking, grimacing, or shrugging - were, until now, thought to occur in a single area of the brain called the basal ganglia.
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Light Saber

The US military cozies up to laser weapons

Laurent Barthelemy
Yahoo News
Sat, 08 Apr 2017 18:23 UTC
military computers
© AFP Photo/John F. Williams
The Navy has since 2014 been testing a 30-kilowatt laser on one of its warships, the USS Ponce.
A sci-fi staple for decades, laser weapons are finally becoming reality in the US military, albeit with capabilities a little less dramatic than at the movies.

Lightsabers -- the favored weapon of the Jedi in "Star Wars" films -- will remain in the fictional realm for now, but after decades of development, laser weapons are now here and are being deployed on military vehicles and planes.

Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon -- all the big defense players -- are developing prototypes for the Pentagon.

The Navy has since 2014 been testing a 30-kilowatt laser on one of its warships, the USS Ponce.

Lockheed Martin has just announced a 60-kilowatt laser weapon that soon will be installed on an Army truck for operational testing against mortars and small drones.

The weapon can take out a drone from a distance of about 500 yards (meters) by keeping its beam locked onto the target for a few seconds, Jim Murdoch, an international business development director at Lockheed, told reporters this week.

But unlike in the movies, the laser beam is invisible to the naked eye.

Comment: See also:

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Star

Temple Grandin on the kinds of minds science desperately needs

Alison Bert, DMA
Elsevier
Fri, 31 Mar 2017 16:31 UTC
Renowned animal scientist and autism advocate talks about "turning on young students" to science - and not just the obvious candidates

Temple Grandin
© Photo by Alison Bert
Dr. Temple Grandin, Professor of Animal Sciences at Colorado State University, poses in her livestock handling system after teaching a class at the university.
On the opening day of her livestock handling class at Colorado State University, Prof. Temple Grandin opens the gates of the steel maze that would guide the cattle, in single file, to a squeeze chute for examination. Used by livestock facilities around the world, her system is designed to keep the animals calm and prevent accidents.

As the students gather around, Dr. Grandin asks her first question:

"Who here has never touched a cow?"

Comment:

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Magnify

Tiny little bee brains: How do they do so much?

Julia Franz
pri.org
Tue, 04 Apr 2017 14:39 UTC
bees
© USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab
Bombus affinis, the rusty patched bumblebee, is shown here.
Recently, researchers at Queen Mary University of London trained a group of buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) to get little balls into goals — in a soccer-like game — in exchange for sweet treats.

It's not the first time bees have flexed their mental muscle in the lab. In addition to learning games, bees can also recognize human faces in photographs, count to four, and solve computer science's famous "traveling salesman" problem.

"All too often, people will assume that because a bee's brain is little, which it undoubtedly is — it's no larger than perhaps a pinhead — that it might, therefore, be simple or not complex," says Lars Chittka, a professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, and one of the soccer study's co-authors. (He also co-authored the "traveling salesman" study.)

But he explains that while bees pack just a million neurons into their tiny brains, each one may be as complex in structure as a fully grown oak tree. What's more, bee neurons are extraordinarily networked:
"A single one of these nerve cells might make contact with perhaps 10,000 or 100,000 other cells in that same brain."
"So, it's a long way from being a simple brain, but perhaps it's simpler than obviously a human brain with its 85 billion neurons," he says. "And so, therefore, we're hoping that we can use bees as a shortcut to understand integrative brain function and multitasking."
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Powertool

Japanese scientists plan on using giant undersea drill to reach Earth's mantle


RT
Sat, 08 Apr 2017 20:38 UTC
seafloor
© Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology / Reuters
Earth's elusive mantle is too much to resist for a team of Japanese scientists who plan to be the first to reach it. The team will use a giant drill to reach the molten rock, located six kilometers (3.7 miles) beneath the planet's surface.

"If we dig into the mantle we will know the whole Earth history, that's our motivation to search," researcher Natsue Abe, who is involved in the project, told CNN.

Japan's Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) are undertaking the massive project that will see a drill dropped four kilometers into the ocean, before drilling through six kilometers of the planet's crust to reach its destination.

"We don't know the exact (composition) of the mantle yet. We have only seen some mantle materials -- the rock is very beautiful, it's kind of a yellowish green," Abe said.

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Gear

Jonathan Latham: The meaning of life (Part I)

Jonathan Latham, PhD
independentsciencenews.org
Tue, 21 Mar 2017 21:41 UTC
DNA strand
Many people date the DNA revolution to the discovery of its structure by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. But really it began thirty years before, conceived by the mind of John D Rockefeller, Sr. Thus it is fitting that DNA is named after him. DNA stands for DeoxyriboNucleic Acid and ribo stands for Rockefeller Institute of Biochemistry (now Rockefeller University) where the chemical composition of DNA was first discovered in the 1920s. The Rockefeller Foundation had become interested in DNA because its trustees feared a Bolshevik-style revolution. Intense public resentment had already compelled the break-up of their Standard oil Company in 1911; so the Foundation sought ways, said trustee Harry Pratt Judson in 1913, to "reinforce the police power of the state". They intended to find the ultimate key to human behaviour which would allow the resentful and envious mobs to be effectively managed.

The Foundation had two strategies for management that were distinct but complementary: to control human behaviour at the level of social structures: family, work and emotions, which the Foundation referred to by names such as "psychobiology"; and to control human behaviour at the level of molecules.
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Star

Twinkle, twinkle little star: Epic star birth captured in stunning images


RT
Sun, 09 Apr 2017 13:03 UTC
Star explodes
© eso.org
The explosion occurred 1,350 light years away.
Explosions don't just mean the end of a life cycle - they can also signal stellar birth. Spectacular images released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) show the fireworks display that marks the start of a star's life cycle.

Captured 1,350 light years away in the Orion constellation, the images show an active star formation known as Orion Molecular Cloud 1 (OMC-1) which occurred roughly 500 years ago, according to ESO.

What appears on first glance to be the death of a star is revealed to be gravity pulling together newly-ignited stars, resulting in a violent collision reminiscent of a Fourth of July fireworks display.

The explosion, which ultimately leads to the birth of a new star, released as much energy as the Sun emits over 10 million years.
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