Month: June 2024

Enlarge / Preparing to install the floppy disk edition of FreeDOS 1.3 in a virtual machine. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Two big things happened in the world of text-based disk operating systems in June 1994.

The first is that Microsoft released MS-DOS version 6.22, the last version of its long-running operating system that would be sold to consumers as a standalone product. MS-DOS would continue to evolve for a few years after this, but only as an increasingly invisible loading mechanism for Windows.

The second was that a developer named Jim Hall wrote a post announcing something called “PD-DOS.” Unhappy with Windows 3.x and unexcited by the project we would come to know as Windows 95, Hall wanted to break ground on a new “public domain” version of DOS that could keep the traditional command-line interface alive as most of the world left it behind for more user-friendly but resource-intensive graphical user interfaces.

Enlarge / An artist's conception of one of the last mammoths of Wrangel Island. (credit: Beth Zaiken)

A small group of woolly mammoths became trapped on Wrangel Island around 10,000 years ago when rising sea levels separated the island from mainland Siberia. Small, isolated populations of animals lead to inbreeding and genetic defects, and it has long been thought that the Wrangel Island mammoths ultimately succumbed to this problem about 4,000 years ago.

A paper in Cell on Thursday, however, compared 50,000 years of genomes from mainland and isolated Wrangel Island mammoths and found that this was not the case. What the authors of the paper discovered not only challenges our understanding of this isolated group of mammoths and the evolution of small populations, it also has important implications for conservation efforts today.

A severe bottleneck

It’s the culmination of years of genetic sequencing by members of the international team behind this new paper. They studied 21 mammoth genomes—13 of which were newly sequenced by lead author Marianne Dehasque; others had been sequenced years prior by co-authors Patrícia Pečnerová, Foteini Kanellidou, and Héloïse Muller. The genomes were obtained from Siberian woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), both from the mainland and the island before and after it became isolated. The oldest genome was from a female Siberian mammoth who died about 52,300 years ago. The youngest were from Wrangel Island male mammoths who perished right around the time the last of these mammoths died out (one of them died just 4,333 years ago).

Enlarge (credit: Malte Mueller / Getty)

Cryptocurrency has always made a ripe target for theft—and not just hacking, but the old-fashioned, up-close-and-personal kind, too. Given that it can be irreversibly transferred in seconds with little more than a password, it's perhaps no surprise that thieves have occasionally sought to steal crypto in home-invasion burglaries and even kidnappings. But rarely do those thieves leave a trail of violence in their wake as disturbing as that of one recent, ruthless, and particularly prolific gang of crypto extortionists.

The United States Justice Department earlier this week announced the conviction of Remy Ra St. Felix, a 24-year-old Florida man who led a group of men behind a violent crime spree designed to compel victims to hand over access to their cryptocurrency savings. That announcement and the criminal complaint laying out charges against St. Felix focused largely on a single theft of cryptocurrency from an elderly North Carolina couple, whose home St. Felix and one of his accomplices broke into before physically assaulting the two victims—both in their seventies—and forcing them to transfer more than $150,000 in bitcoin and ether to the thieves' crypto wallets.

In fact, that six-figure sum appears to have been the gang’s only confirmed haul from its physical crypto thefts—although the burglars and their associates made millions in total, mostly through more traditional crypto hacking as well as stealing other assets. A deeper look into court documents from the St. Felix case, however, reveals that the relatively small profit St. Felix’s gang made from its burglaries doesn’t capture the full scope of the harm they inflicted: In total, those court filings and DOJ officials describe how more than a dozen convicted and alleged members of the crypto-focused gang broke into the homes of 11 victims, carrying out a brutal spree of armed robberies, death threats, beatings, torture sessions, and even one kidnapping in a campaign that spanned four US states.