Month: September 2018

Enlarge / DPi and LMP2 cars lead the grid at the start of the 2018 Sahlens Six Hours of the Glen at Watkins Glen in upstate New York. (credit: Brian Cleary/Getty Images)

You don't have to follow sports car racing for too long before noticing its a rather cyclical sport. For a few years, everything will be totally awesome with cool cars and great racing. Then it all goes wrong; a bad economy sucks racing budgets dry, a rules change sends competitors elsewhere, or one of any number of other problems arises and interest and excitement evaporate. CanAm, Group C, GTP, and the American Le Mans Series (ALMS) each blossomed for a while before circumstances conspired against them. We saw it most recently with the World Endurance Championship. For a few brief years it was the best thing in racing, with 1,000hp hybrid prototypes from Audi, Porsche, and Toyota—now in 2018 it's a mere shadow of where things were just two seasons ago.

Meanwhile, here in the US IMSA's WeatherTech Sportscar Championship appears to be in rude health, attracting a healthy mix of factory-backed cars in the DPi and GTLM class was well as pro-am teams running DPi, LMP2, and GTD cars. We've checked in with the IMSA series a couple of times this year—at the season opening Rolex 24 as well as at the Detroit Grand Prix—and we took a look behind the scenes with Mazda and Multimatic. But at Watkins Glen earlier this summer I caught up with IMSA's president Scott Atherton to talk about where American sports car racing is headed.

Atherton's been involved in the sport for several decades, running several different racetracks before heading up the ALMS in 2000. The ALMS' heyday was probably in the late 2000s, but by 2012 it was in a bit of trouble. NASCAR stepped in to buy it, merged the ALMS with its GrandAm series (which always put on a great show but struggled to attract the fans, mainly due to its low-tech and rather ugly Daytona Prototype cars). I put it to Atherton that his series is now very reminiscent of ALMS' glory days.

Enlarge / Populations of RNAs, as in this cartoon, may have helped the first life overcome some limits on complexity. (credit: NASA)

Physics is filled with papers where the authors don't actually do anything—at least not anything empirical. Instead, they explore the math behind a topic and try to gain new theoretical insights, leaving it to someone else to find out whether their insights are actually reflected in the behavior of the real world.

But physics doesn't have a monopoly on this, and there have been plenty of papers in biology that are filled with math and explore how a theoretical population would behave. One area where that's had a big impact on thinking has been in studying the origin of life, where researchers have been struggling to understand how a set of simple self-copying molecules could make their way towards something that looks more like a cell. Now, two Japanese researchers have taken some of these theoretical ideas and shown they can hold in an actual biochemical system.

Overcoming selfishness

We'll go through the theoretical background first. The work focuses on a challenge faced by the Earth's first self-replicating RNA molecules, namely that they probably weren't that great at self-replicating. Modern cells have multiple systems composed of collections of proteins that identify and repair errors in DNA. The earliest self-replicating molecules had none of that, and probably picked up lots of errors that could disable them. This problem gets worse as the self-replicating molecule grows in complexity, since a longer molecule would mean an increased chance for things to go wrong.

Enlarge / A monument in Belgium to Georges Lemaitre that shows his idea of an expanding universe. (credit: Wikimedia/EmDee, CC BY-SA)

Astronomers are engaged in a lively debate over plans to rename one of the laws of physics.

It emerged overnight at the 30^th Meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), in Vienna, where members of the general assembly considered a resolution on amending the name of the Hubble Law to the Hubble-Lemaître Law.

The resolution aims to credit the work of the Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître and his contribution—along with the American astronomer Edwin Hubble—to our understanding of the expansion of the universe.

From a company powerpoint, here's an artist’s impression of the moment when Skype's idea was fostered. (Zennström on the left, next to Friis.) (credit: Malthe Sigurdsson)

This story originally ran on September 2, 2013, when Skype's partnership with Microsoft was still new and before the Redmond company closed its London office. This was also well before a number of big changes to the Internet calling program were announced. Ars Staff, who are observing Labor Day this weekend, take time to remember Skype's birth story.

"I don't care about Skype!" millionaire Jaan Tallinn tells me, taking off his blue sunglasses and finding a seat at a cozy open-air restaurant in the old town of Tallinn, Estonia. "The technology is 10 years old—that's an eternity when it comes to the Internet Age. Besides, I have more important things going on now."

Tallinn has five children, and he calls Skype his sixth. So why does he no longer care about his creation?

Enlarge (credit: Ipsumpix/Corbis via Getty Images)

Dr. Ulrich Kaiser is Professor of Music Theory, Ombudsman for Good Scientific Practice and Head of the Multimedia Department for Teacher Education at the Munich University of Music and Theatre.

This article was originally published by the Wikimedia Foundation and is reprinted here with his permission.

Imagine you are a teacher at a public school and you want to use a free recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in your classroom. As an author of music textbooks and a music theory professor, I am always looking for creative ways to develop teaching materials as Open Educational Resources (oer-musik.de) so that everyone can share and learn from these important recordings. In an effort to develop a set of these materials, I recently began to digitize both my own records as well as records from my employer.

Under German law, the copyright term for recordings which were made prior to January 1, 1963 has expired, meaning they have entered the public domain. Recordings taken after that date were given extended protection in 2013 and thus cannot be digitized. Aware of this rule, I only undertook to upload recordings which were taken before the 1963 date in order to fully comply with the law. Despite that precaution, the process that followed presented a number of unexpected challenges.