Just 11 months before his death in 2001, famous author Douglas Adams answered questions from Slashdot readers.

And Slashdot reader Informativity still remembers how Adams (also a Doctor Who script editor) had included a supercomputer named Deep Thought in his first book which spent 7.5 million years to determine that the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, was…the number 42:

Turns out the entire universe is a product of the number 42, specifically 42 times the collection of lm/2t, such that l, m and t are the Planck Units. In a newly published paper, Measurement Quantization Describes the Physical Constants , both the constants and laws of nature are resolved from a simple geometry between two frames of reference, the non-discrete Target Frame of the universe and the discrete Measurement Frame of the observer. Its only and primary connection to our physical reality is a scalar, 42. Forty-two is what defines our universe from say any other version of our universe. So, while Douglas Adams may have just been picking numbers out of the sky when writing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it turns out he picked the right number, the one that defines … well … everything.

In addition to presenting new descriptions for most of the physical constants (descriptions that don’t reference other physical constants), the paper is also noted for presenting a classical unification of gravity and electromagnetism.

One more interesting piece of trivia. Wikipedia reminds us that in January 2004, asteroid 2001 DA42 was given the permanent name 25924 Douglasadams… Brian G. Marsden, the director of the Minor Planet Center and the secretary for the naming committee, remarked that, with even his initials in the provisional designation, “This was sort of made for him, wasn’t it?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy: New Research Says #42 Really Is Our Number

A new research study at the University of Missouri is using CRISPR gene-editing technology to produce mosquitoes that are unable to replicate Zika virus and therefore cannot infect a human through biting. Slashdot reader wooloohoo shared an announcement from Cornell’s Alliance for Science:

Alexander Franz, an associate professor in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, collaborated with researchers at Colorado State University… Their work was recently published in the journal Viruses. Franz added that the genetic modification is inheritable, so future generations of the altered mosquitoes would be resistant to Zika virus as well… “[W]e are simply trying to expand the toolbox and provide a solution by genetically modifying the mosquitoes to become Zika-resistant while keeping them alive at the same time.”

Franz’ research is designed to help prevent another outbreak of Zika virus disease from occurring while also addressing concerns that have some have raised about reducing populations of mosquitoes, which are a food source for some animals…

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Researchers Try Using CRISPR To Genetically Engineer Zika-Resistant Mosquitoes

An anonymous Slashdot reader warns of a possible miscalculation: 20 years ago today, cobolreport.com published
an article,
according to which there are 30 billion Customer Information Control System/COBOL transactions per day. This number has since been cited countless times… [T]his number is
still to be found in the marketing of most COBOL service providers, compiler vendors
(IBM,
Micro-Focus and others) and countless articles about how relevant COBOL supposedly still was.
The article originally reported 30 billion “CICS transactions”, but within 2 years it had already been turned into “COBOL transactions”…

The “30 billion” likely originates from a
DataPro survey in 1997, in which they still reported 20 billion transactions per day.
Only 421 companies participated in that survey. They actually scaled the results from such a small survey up to the IT-market
of the entire world!

That same survey is also the source of many other numbers that are still to be found in the marketing of COBOL compiler vendors and
articles:

– There are 200 billion lines of COBOL Code

– That’s 60-80% of all the source codes in the world [sic]

– 5 billion lines of COBOL code are newly written each year

– There are 2 million COBOL developers in the world

– COBOL processes 95% of all “in person transactions”, “ATM swipes” or similar

DataPro was bought by Gartner Inc. in 1997. Since then, all the numbers are reported to come “from Gartner”. Only very early
sources quote DataPro as their source.

Some of these numbers are obvious nonsense. The explanation for this is that DataPro had only surveyed mainframe owners.
So it only says that 60-80% of all the source codes on mainframes are written in COBOL (which is plausible at least
for 1997). And only 95% of all credit companies that have mainframes use their mainframes for processing credit card
transactions. Considering the low participation, we are probably talking about 19 of 20 credit companies here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Are We Overestimating the Number of COBOL Transactions Each Day?