The building blocks of life could have their beginnings in the tiny icy grains that make up the gas and dust found between the stars, and those icy grains could be the key to understanding how life can arise on planets. With help from students, researchers have discovered an important pair of prebiotic molecules in the icy particles in interstellar space. The chemicals, found in a giant cloud of gas about 25,000 light-years from Earth may be a precursor to a key component of DNA and another may have a role in the formation of an important amino acid. More »
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The “ultimate” building blocks of life have been found in interstellar space
CowboyRobot writes “In 25 years, an odd thing will happen to some of the no doubt very large number of computing devices in our world: an old, well-known and well-understood bug will cause their calculation of time to fail. The problem springs from the use of a 32-bit signed integer to store a time value, as a number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on Thursday, 1 January 1970, a practice begun in early UNIX systems with the standard C library data structure time_t. On January 19, 2038, at 03:14:08 UTC that integer will overflow. It’s not difficult to come up with cases where the problem could be real today. Imagine a mortgage amortization program projecting payments out into the future for a 30-year mortgage. Or imagine those phony programs politicians use to project government expenditures, or demographic software, and so on. It’s too early for panic, but those of us in the early parts of their careers will be the ones who have to deal with the problem.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
New submitter Nemo the Magnificent writes “Develop in the Cloud has news about what might be a breakthrough out of Microsoft Research. A team there wrote a paper (PDF), now accepted for publication at OOPSLA, that describes how to teach a compiler to auto-thread a program that was written single-threaded in a conventional language like C#. This is the holy grail to take advantage of multiple cores — to get Moore’s Law improvements back on track, after they essentially ran aground in the last decade. (Functional programming, the other great white hope, just isn’t happening.) About 2004 was when Intel et al. ran into a wall and started packing multiple cores into chips instead of cranking the clock speed. The Microsoft team modified a C# compiler to use the new technique, and claim a ‘large project at Microsoft’ have written ‘several million lines of code’ testing out the resulting ‘safe parallelism.'” The paper is a good read if you’re into compilers and functional programming. The key to operation is adding permissions to reference types allowing you to declare normal references, read-only references to mutable objects, references to globally immutable objects, and references to isolated clusters of objects. With that information, the compiler is able to prove that chunks of code can safely be run in parallel. Unlike many other approaches, it doesn’t require that your program be purely functional either. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
