Five years after CBS publicized the fact that the Air Force still used eight-inch floppy disks to store data critical to operating the Air Force's intercontinental ballistic missile command, the aerial and space warfare service branch decided it was time to officially retire them. Ars Technica reports: The system, once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), relied on IBM Series/1 computers installed by the Air Force at Minuteman II missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the contention by the Air Force at the time of the 60 Minutes report that the archaic hardware offered a cybersecurity advantage, the service has completed an upgrade to what is now known as the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS), as Defense News reports. SAACS is an upgrade that swaps the floppy disk system for what Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force's 595th Strategic Communications Squadron, described as a "highly secure solid state digital storage solution." The floppy drives were fully retired in June.

But the IBM Series/1 computers remain, in part because of their reliability and security. And it's not clear whether other upgrades to "modernize" the system have been completed. Air Force officials have acknowledged network upgrades that have enhanced the speed and capacity of SACCS' communications systems, and a Government Accountability Office report in 2016 noted that the Air Force planned to "update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017." But it's not clear how much of that has been completed.

"Red Hat Inc.'s finance chief Eric Shander has been dismissed from the company, forfeiting a $4 million retention award that was agreed to ahead of Red Hat's acquisition by IBM," reports the Wall Street Journal: The Raleigh, N.C.-based software company confirmed late Thursday that Mr. Shander was no longer working at Red Hat. "Eric was dismissed without pay in connection with Red Hat's workplace standards," a company spokeswoman said in a statement. The company, which said that its accounting and control functions remain healthy, on Friday declined to provide specifics about what led to Mr. Shander's dismissal. Mr. Shander didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Shander was named Red Hat's permanent chief financial officer in April 2017 after a stint as acting CFO, according to the spokeswoman. He had served in various finance roles at IBM and Lenovo Group Ltd. before joining Red Hat in 2015...

His departure puts Red Hat in a difficult spot, said Ivan Feinseth, director of research at Tigress Financial Partners LLC, an investment banking firm. "The fallout for companies in these situations is not only the dismissal of an executive but also the litigation risk," Mr. Feinseth said. "Companies could be held responsible for not creating and maintaining a proper workplace environment."

IBM said it supports Red Hat's decision to dismiss Mr. Shander. "Our values are fully aligned in this area," a spokesman said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: At the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference, I talked to Linus Torvalds and several other of the Linux kernel's top programmers. They universally agreed Microsoft wants to control Linux, but they're not worried about it. That's because Linux, by its very nature and its GPL2 open-source licensing, can't be controlled by any single third-party. Torvalds said: "The whole anti-Microsoft thing was sometimes funny as a joke, but not really. Today, they're actually much friendlier. I talk to Microsoft engineers at various conferences, and I feel like, yes, they have changed, and the engineers are happy. And they're like really happy working on Linux. So I completely dismissed all the anti-Microsoft stuff."

But that doesn't mean the Microsoft leopard can't change its spots. Sure, he hears, "This is the old Microsoft, and they're just biding their time." But, Torvalds said, "I don't think that's true. I mean, there will be tension. But that's true with any company that comes into Linux; they have their own objectives. And they want to do things their way because they have a reason for it." So, with Linux, "Microsoft tends to be mainly about Azure and doing all the stuff to make Linux work well for them," he explained. Torvalds emphasized this is normal: "I mean, that's just being part of the community." James Bottomley, an IBM Research Distinguished Engineer and top Linux kernel developer, sees Microsoft as going through the same process as all other corporate Linux supporters: "This is a thread that runs through Linux. You can't work on the kernel to your own proprietary advantage. A lot of companies, as they came in with the proprietary business model, assumed they could. They have to be persuaded that, if you want something in Linux, that will assist your business -- absolutely fine. But it has to go through an open development process. And if someone else finds it useful, you end up cooperating or collaborating with them to produce this feature." That means, to get things done, even Microsoft is "eventually forced to collaborate with others."

Bottomley concluded: "So it doesn't matter if Microsoft has a competing agenda to Red Hat or IBM or anybody else. Developers are still expected to work together in the Linux kernel with a transparent agenda."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's cloud business alone is now worth $225 billion, Deutsche Bank analysts led by Lloyd Walmsley wrote in a note. The unit could report compound annual growth of 55% between 2018 and 2022, and reach annual sales of about $38 billion by 2025, the analysts wrote. The value ascribed by Deutsche Bank to Google Cloud is nearly twice the market value of IBM, which reported cloud revenue of $19.2 billion in 2018, at the close of trading on Wednesday, Bloomberg data show.

VC fund A16z's Benedict Evans writes: We are in the middle of a wave of interesting new productivity software startups -- there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing. All of these things are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email and file shares. Instead of a flat grid of cells, a dumb list of files, and a dumb list of little text files (which is what email really is), we get some kind of richer canvas that mixes all of these together in ways that are native to the web and collaboration. Then, we have another new wave of productivity company that addresses a particular profession and bundles all of the tasks that were spread across spreadsheets, email and file shares into some new structured flow.

[...] A few years ago a consultant told me that for half of their jobs they told people using Excel to use a database, and for the other half they told people using a database to use Excel. There's clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io. But when that tool is managing a thousand people, you might want to move it into a dedicated service. After all, even Craigslist started as an actual email list and ended up moving to a database. But then, at a certain point, if that task is specific to your company and central to what you do, you might well end up unbundling Salesforce or SAP or whatever that vertical is and go back to the beginning. Of course, this is the cycle of life of enterprise software. IBM mainframes bundled the adding machines you see Jack Lemmon using below, and also bundled up filing cabinets and telephones. SAP unbundled IBM. But I'd suggest there are two specific sets of things that are happening now.

First, every application category is getting rebuilt as a web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration. As Frame.io (video!) and OnShape (3D CAD!) show, there's almost no native PC application that can't be rebuilt as a web app. In parallel, everything now has to be native to collaboration, and so the model of a binary file saved to a file share will generally go away over time (this could be done with a native PC app, but in practice generally won't be). So, we have some generational changes, and that also tends to create new companies. But second, and much more important -- everyone is online now. The reason we're looking at nursing or truck drivers or oil workers is that an entire generation now grew up after the web, and grew up with smartphones, and assumes without question that every part of their life can be done with a smartphone. In 1999 hiring 'roughnecks' in a mobile app would have sounded absurd -- now it sounds absurd if you're not. And that means that a lot of tasks will get shifted into software that were never really in software at all before.

Security researchers at IBM have found evidence that hackers have been working on creating malicious scripts they can deploy on commercial-grade "Layer 7" routers to steal payment card details. From a report: This discovery is a game-changer in what researchers call Magecart attacks, also known as web skimming. These are attacks where hackers plant malicious code on an online store that records and steals payment card details. Until now, Magecart-specific code was only delivered at the website level, hidden inside JavaScript or PHP files. However, this new discovery is an escalation of Magecart attacks to a new level, where the malicious code is injected at the router level, rather than being added by hackers on outdated websites.

Layer 7, or L7, routers are a type of commercial, heavy-duty router that's usually installed on large networks, such as hotels, malls, airports, casinos, government networks, public spaces, and others. They work like any other router, except with the added benefit of being able to manipulate traffic at the seventh layer (application level) of the OSI networking model -- meaning they can react to traffic based on more than just IP addresses, such as cookies, domain names, browser types, and more. In a report published today, researchers with the IBM X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS) team said they found evidence that a well-known hacker group has been testing Magecart scripts to deploy on L7 routers.

New submitter Bioblaze shares a report from CNET: Google has reportedly built a quantum computer more powerful than the world's top supercomputers. A Google research paper was temporarily posted online this week, the Financial Times reported Friday, and said the quantum computer's processor allowed a calculation to be performed in just over 3 minutes. That calculation would take 10,000 years on IBM's Summit, the world's most powerful commercial computer, Google reportedly said. Google researchers are throwing around the term "quantum supremacy" as a result, the FT said, because their computer can solve tasks that can't otherwise be solved. "To our knowledge, this experiment marks the first computation that can only be performed on a quantum processor," the research paper reportedly said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Silicon Valley is terrified. In a little over three months, California will see the widest-sweeping state-wide changes to its privacy law in years. California's Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) kicks in on January 1 and rolls out sweeping new privacy benefits to the state's 40 million residents -- and every tech company in Silicon Valley. California's law is similar to Europe's GDPR. It grants state consumers a right to know what information companies have on them, a right to have that information deleted and the right to opt-out of the sale of that information.

Since the law passed, tech giants have pulled out their last card: pushing for an overarching federal bill. In doing so, the companies would be able to control their messaging through their extensive lobbying efforts, allowing them to push for a weaker statute that would nullify some of the provisions in California's new privacy law. In doing so, companies wouldn't have to spend a ton on more resources to ensure their compliance with a variety of statutes in multiple states. Just this month, a group of 51 chief executives -- including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, IBM's Ginni Rometty and SAP's Bill McDermott -- signed an open letter to senior lawmakers asking for a federal privacy bill, arguing that consumers aren't clever enough to "understand rules that may change depending upon the state in which they reside." Then, the Internet Association, which counts Dropbox, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Uber (and just today ZipRecruiter) as members, also pushed for a federal privacy law. "The time to act is now," said the industry group. If the group gets its wish before the end of the year, the California privacy law could be sunk before it kicks in. TechNet, a "national, bipartisan network of technology CEOs and senior executives," also demanded a federal privacy law, claiming -- and without providing evidence -- that any privacy law should ensure "businesses can comply with the law while continuing to innovate." Its members include major venture capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins and JC2 Ventures, as well as other big tech giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Verizon

"It's no accident that the tech industry launched this campaign right after the California legislature rejected their attempts to undermine the California Consumer Privacy Act," Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, told TechCrunch. "Instead of pushing for federal legislation that wipes away state privacy law, technology companies should ensure that Californians can fully exercise their privacy rights under the CCPA on January 1, 2020, as the law requires."

IBM's 14th quantum computer is its most powerful so far, a model with 53 of the qubits that form the fundamental data-processing element at the heart of the system. From a report: The system, available online to quantum computing customers in October, is a big step up from the last IBM Q machine with 20 qubits and should help advance the marriage of classical computers with the crazy realm of quantum physics. Quantum computing remains a highly experimental field, limited by the difficult physics of the ultra-small and by the need to keep the machines refrigerated to within a hair's breadth of absolute zero to keep outside disturbances from ruining any calculations.

But if engineers and scientists can continue the progress, quantum computers could help solve computing problems that are, in practice, impossible on today's classical computers. That includes things like simulating the complexities of real-world molecules used in medical drugs and materials science, optimizing financial investment performance, and delivering packages with a minimum of time and fuel.

A growing number of countries are following China's lead in deploying artificial intelligence to track citizens, according to a research group's report published Tuesday. From a report: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says at least 75 countries are actively using AI tools such as facial recognition for surveillance. The index of countries where some form of AI surveillance is used includes liberal democracies such as the United States and France as well as more autocratic regimes. Relying on a survey of public records and media reports, the report says Chinese tech companies led by Huawei and Hikvision are supplying much of the AI surveillance technology to countries around the world. Other companies such as Japan's NEC and U.S.-based IBM, Palantir and Cisco are also major international providers of AI surveillance tools.

Hikvision declined comment Tuesday. The other companies mentioned in the report didn't immediately return requests for comment. The report encompasses a broad range of AI tools that have some public safety component. The group's index doesn't distinguish between legitimate public safety tools and unlawful or harmful uses such as spying on political opponents. "I hope citizens will ask tougher questions about how this type of technology is used and what type of impacts it will have," said the report's author, Steven Feldstein, a Carnegie Endowment fellow and associate professor at Boise State University. Many of the projects cited in Feldstein's report are "smart city" systems in which a municipal government installs an array of sensors, cameras and other internet-connected devices to gather information and communicate with one another.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: While Sun open-sourced some of Java as long ago as November 2006, actually using Java in an open-source way was... troublesome. Just ask Google about Android and Java. But for Java in the enterprise things have changed. On September 10, The Eclipse Foundation announced the full open-source release of the Jakarta EE 8 Full Platform and Web Profile specifications and related Technology Compatibility Kits (TCKs).

This comes after Oracle let go of most of Java Enterprise Edition's (JEE) intellectual property. Oracle retains Java's trademarks though -- thus Java EE's naming convention has been changed to Jakarta EE. But for practical programming and production purposes Jakarta EE 8 is the next generation of enterprise Java.... Jakarta EE 8 also includes the same APIs and Javadoc using the same programming model Java developers have always used. The Jakarta EE 8 TCKs are based on and fully compatible with Java EE 8 TCKs. All of this means enterprise customers will be able to migrate to Jakarta EE 8 without any changes to Java EE 8 applications.

Eclipse hasn't been doing this in a vacuum. Fujitsu, IBM, Oracle, Payara, Red Hat, Tomitribe, and other members of what was once the Java community have been working on Jakarta EE... All of the Jakarta EE Working Group vendors intend to certify their Java EE 8 compatible implementations as Jakarta EE 8 compatible. In other words, Jakarta is the future for Java EE.
Oracle is now working on delivering a Java EE 8 and Jakarta EE 8 compatible implementation of their WebLogic Server.

The Eclipse Foundation says Jakarta EE 8's release "provides a new baseline for the evolution and innovation of enterprise Java technologies under an open, vendor-neutral, community-driven process."

The chief executive officers (CEOs) of 51 tech companies have signed and sent an open letter to Congress leaders today, asking for a federal law on user data privacy to supersede the rising number of privacy laws that are cropping up at the state level. From a report: The open-letter was sent on behalf of Business Roundtable, an association made up of the CEOs of America's largest companies. The CEOs of Amazon, AT&T, Dell, IBM, Qualcomm, SAP, Salesforce, Visa, Mastercard, JP Morgan Chase, State Farm, and Walmart, are just some of the execs who put their name on the dotted line. CEOs blamed a patchwork of differing privacy regulations that are currently being passed in multiple US states, and by several US agencies, as one of the reasons why consumer privacy is a mess in the US.

This patchwork of privacy regulations is creating problems for their companies, which have to comply with an ever-increasing number of laws across different states and jurisdictions. Instead, the 51 CEOs would like one law that governs all user privacy and data protection across the US, which would simplify product design, compliance, and data management. "There is now widespread agreement among companies across all sectors of the economy, policymakers and consumer groups about the need for a comprehensive federal consumer data privacy law that provides strong, consistent protections for American consumers," the open letter said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: With less than two weeks until the global climate strikes, 930 tech and corporate Amazon employees have pledged to walk out of the company's offices on September 20, demanding zero emissions by 2030. The climate action, which follows strikes at Amazon warehouses, most recently on Amazon Prime Day, marks the first time white collar Amazon employees have staged a walkout.

Workers with the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice are demanding that the company adopt a resolution to eliminate its massive carbon footprint by 2030. Compared to other tech giants, Amazon, which ships billions of packages each year and controls a huge portion of the cloud computing market, has come under particular scrutiny for its carbon emissions. On September 20, the biggest day of the weeklong climate strike taking place in 117 countries, Amazon employees in Seattle will walk out of their offices at 11:30 a.m., gather at the giant glass spheres at the center of Amazon's corporate campus, then march to city hall to rally with youth climate activists. An internal call for action that began circulating among employees on September 4 received around 930 pledges as of September 8, Read said. "Playing a significant role in helping to reduce the sources of human-induced climate change is an important commitment for Amazon," an Amazon spokesperson told Motherboard in response to news of the walkout. "We have dedicated sustainability teams who have been working for years on initiatives to reduce our environmental impact. Earlier this year, we announced Shipment Zero - Amazon's vision to make all Amazon shipments net zero carbon, with 50% of all shipments net zero by 2030."

"Over the past decade through our sustainable packaging programs, we've eliminated more than 244,000 tons of packaging materials and avoided 500 million shipping boxes," the Amazon spokesperson continued. "To track our progress on this journey and as part of an overall commitment to sharing our sustainability goals, we plan to share Amazon's company-wide carbon footprint, along with related goals and programs, later this year. This follows an extensive project over the past few years to develop an advanced scientific model to carefully map our carbon footprint to provide our business teams with detailed information helping them identify ways to reduce carbon use in their businesses."

Microsoft workers in Seattle will also participate in the walkout. Google workers could join too.

On Tuesday the University of Texas at Texas launched the fastest supercomputer at any academic facility in the world.

The computer -- named "Frontera" -- is also the fifth most-powerful supercomputer on earth. Slashdot reader aarondubrow quotes their announcement: The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas is also home to Stampede2, the second fastest supercomputer at any American university. The launch of Frontera solidifies UT Austin among the world's academic leaders in this realm...

Joined by representatives from the National Science Foundation (NSF) -- which funded the system with a $60 million award -- UT Austin, and technology partners Dell Technologies, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, DataDirect Networks, NVIDIA, IBM, CoolIT and Green Revolution Cooling, TACC inaugurated a new era of academic supercomputing with a resource that will help the nation's top researchers explore science at the largest scale and make the next generation of discoveries.

"Scientific challenges demand computing and data at the largest and most complex scales possible. That's what Frontera is all about," said Jim Kurose, assistant director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at NSF. "Frontera's leadership-class computing capability will support the most computationally challenging science applications that U.S. scientists are working on today."

Frontera has been supporting science applications since June and has already enabled more than three dozen teams to conduct research on a range of topics from black hole physics to climate modeling to drug design, employing simulation, data analysis, and artificial intelligence at a scale not previously possible.
Here's more technical details from the announcement about just how fast this supercomputer really is.

dryriver writes: The Amiga was a remarkable machine at the time it was released -- 1985. It had a multitasking capable GUI-driven OS and a mouse. It had a number of cleverly designed custom chips that gave the Amiga amazing graphics and sound capabilities far beyond the typical IBM/DOS PCs of its time. The Amiga was the multimedia beast of its time -- you could create animated and still 2D or 3D graphics on it, compose sophisticated electronic music, develop 2D or 3D 16-Bit games, edit and process digital video (using Video Toaster), and of course, play some amazing games. And after the Amiga -- as well as the Atari ST, Archimedes and so on -- died, everybody pretty much had to migrate to either the PC or Mac platforms. If Commodore and the Amiga had survived and thrived, there might have been four major desktop platforms in use today: Windows, OSX, AmigaOS and Linux. And who knows what the custom chips (ASICs? FPGAs?) of an Amiga in 2019 might have been capable of -- Amiga could possibly have been the platform that makes nearly life-like games and VR/AR a reality, and given Nvidia and AMD's GPUs a run for their money.

What do you think the computing landscape in 2019 would have looked like if the Amiga and AmigaOS as a platform had survived? Would Macs be as popular with digital content creators as they are today? Would AAA games target Windows 7/8/10 by default or tilt more towards the Amiga? Could there have been an Amiga hardware-based game console? Might AmigaOS and Linux have had a symbiotic existence of sorts, with AmigOS co-existing with Linux on many enthusiast's Amigas, or even becoming compatible with each other over time?

Software company VMware on Thursday said it's acquiring Carbon Black at an enterprise value of $2.1 billion and Pivotal at an enterprise value of $2.7 billion. The deals are expected to close by the end of January 2020. From a report: These are VMware's largest acquisitions yet. The deals build on VMware's strength helping companies run their software in their own data centers. They could help VMware compete better in the security market and hybrid-cloud infrastructure operations. VMware isn't talking about cost synergies that could come out of buying two other enterprise-focused companies. However, CEO Pat Gelsinger told CNBC the companies will be operating profitably under VMware next year. Gelsinger said that by year two, Carbon Black and Pivotal will have contributed more than $1 billion in revenue incrementally, which will mean VMware will have more than $3 billion in hybrid cloud and software-as-a-service revenue.

Carbon Black was founded in 2002 and debuted on the Nasdaq under the symbol "CBLK" in May 2018. The company provides anti-malware and endpoint protection products that can see into many of a company's devices and tell if they have been hacked. [...] Pivotal and VMware go way back: The company was created from assets spun out of VMware and Dell (VMware's controlling owner) in 2013. Its products help companies build and deploy their software across different server infrastructure, including public clouds. Competitors include IBM, Oracle and SAP, among others, as well as cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft. Pivotal's customers include Boeing, Citi, Ford and Home Depot, according to its website.

Major tech companies including Alibaba, Arm, Baidu, IBM, Intel, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Red Hat today announced intent to form the Confidential Computing Consortium to improve security for data in use. From a report: Established by the Linux Foundation, the organization plans to bring together hardware vendors, developers, open source experts, and others to promote the use of confidential computing, advance common open source standards, and better protect data. "Confidential computing focuses on securing data in use. Current approaches to securing data often address data at rest (storage) and in transit (network), but encrypting data in use is possibly the most challenging step to providing a fully encrypted lifecycle for sensitive data," the Linux Foundation said today in a joint statement. "Confidential computing will enable encrypted data to be processed in memory without exposing it to the rest of the system and reduce exposure for sensitive data and provide greater control and transparency for users."

The consortium also said the group was formed because confidential computing will become more important as more enterprise organizations move between different compute environments like the public cloud, on-premises servers, or the edge. To get things started, companies made a series of open source project contributions including Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX), an SDK for code protection at the hardware layer.

IBM makes the Power Series chips, and as part of that has open sourced some of the underlying technologies to encourage wider use of these chips. The open source pieces have been part of the OpenPower Foundation. Today, the company announced it was moving the foundation under The Linux Foundation, and while it was at it, announced it was open sourcing several other important bits. From a report: Ken King, general manager for OpenPower at IBM, says that at this point in his organization's evolution, they wanted to move it under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. But IBM didn't stop there. It also announced that it was open sourcing some of the technical underpinnings of the Power Series chip to make it easier for developers and engineers to build on top of the technology. Perhaps most importantly, the company is open sourcing the Power Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). These are "the definitions developers use for ensuring hardware and software work together on Power," the company explained.

King sees open sourcing this technology as an important step for a number of reasons around licensing and governance. "The first thing is that we are taking the ability to be able to implement what we're licensing, the ISA instruction set architecture, for others to be able to implement on top of that instruction set royalty free with patent rights," he explained. The company is also putting this under an open governance workgroup at the OpenPower Foundation.

option8 ((Slashdot reader #16,509) writes: TL;DR: Mining Bitcoin on a 1MHz 8-bit processor will cost you more than the world's combined economies, and take roughly 256 trillion years.
"But it could happen tomorrow. It's a lottery, after all," explains the blog post (describing this mad scientist as a hardware hacker and "self-taught maker", determined to mine bitcoin "in what must be the slowest possible way. I call it 8BITCOIN....")

There's also a Twitch.TV stream, with some appropriate 8-bit music, and the blog post ends by including his own bitcoin address, "If you feel like you absolutely must throw some money at me and this project."

"Upon doing some research, I found that, not only were other 8-bit platforms being put to the task, but other, even more obscure and outdated hardware. An IBM 1401 from the 1960s, a rebuilt Apollo Guidance Computer, and even one deranged individual who demonstrated the hashing algorithm by hand. It turns out, those examples all come from the same deranged individual, Ken Shirriff."

A team of researchers has synthesized the first ring-shaped molecule of pure carbon -- a circle of 18 atoms. Nature reports: The chemists started with a triangular molecule of carbon and oxygen, which they manipulated with electric currents to create the carbon-18 ring. Initial studies of the properties of the molecule, called a cyclocarbon, suggest that it acts as a semiconductor, which could make similar straight carbon chains useful as molecular-scale electronic components.

Chemist Przemyslaw Gawel of the University of Oxford, UK, and his collaborators have now created and imaged the long-sought ring molecule carbon-18. Using standard 'wet' chemistry, his collaborator Lorel Scriven, an Oxford chemist, first synthesized molecules that included four-carbon squares coming off the ring with oxygen atoms attached to squares. The team then sent their samples to IBM laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland, where collaborators put the oxygen -- carbon molecules on a layer of sodium chloride, inside a high-vacuum chamber. They manipulated the rings one at a time with electric currents (using an atomic-force microscope that can also act as a scanning-transmission microscope), to remove the extraneous, oxygen-containing parts. After much trial-and-error, micrograph scans revealed the 18-carbon structure. "I never thought I would see this," says Scriven. Alternating bond types are interesting because they are supposed to give carbon chains and rings the properties of semiconductors. The results suggest that long, straight carbon chains might be semiconductors, too, Gawel says, which could make them useful as components of future molecular-sized transistors. The paper has been published in the journal Science.