Losing a sense of autonomy or control of your day is a huge fear for most people. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is tapping into that horror with what could be its weirdest experiment ever.

MIT's brilliant engineering teams and developers never shy away from complex problems or radically new ideas. However, this one sounds like it's fresh off the pages of a Black Mirror script.

Controlling one man to save the world

The new program is called BeeMe, and it gives those watching the ability to completely control every aspect of a person's day. The project's slogan doesn't exactly give a sense of ease, either: "See what I see. Hear what I hear. Control my actions. Take my will. Be me."

"BeeMe is the first reality augmented game. In times where algorithms make most of our decisions for us, one individual will entirely give up their free will for a day, to be guided by a large crowd of users through an epic quest to defeat an evil AI. Who is in charge? Who is responsible for one's actions? Where does the individual end and others begin?

Today, a Soyuz 2-1B carrier rocket lifted off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. The launch went as planned. The rocket delivered a Ministry of Defense satellite. The entire process was supervised by the high command of the Russian Space Forces.

FRN has been following the development of Russia's high-tech military and arms industry, and has been reporting the increasing gap developing between Russia's capabilities and those of the U.S. This appears to be due in part to mismanagement on the part of the U.S's MIC, or military industrial complex. The American system is speculative, promise based, whereas the Russian system appears to be results based.

As we approach the third decade of the 21st century, the battle over space will feature prominently. We recall back in the 1980's, the infamous war-hawk U.S president, Reagan, promised that the Americans would be able to produce a 'Star Wars' weapons system, and the program was based on the use of lasers.

But it's Russia that has made leaps and bounds in the development of space weapons, and weapons that can reach space. The S-500 for example, can reach those objects in near earth orbit which we casually refer to as 'space'.

Infant lost its mother but 43,500 years later gives remarkable evidence that cavemen in prehistoric Europe were RIGHT to draw the species with spots.

Scientists examining recently found cave lion cub Spartak, dug from the permafrost, say they have made an unexpected discovery about the extinct species.

Dr Alexei Tikhonov, head of the Zoological Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said: 'We see that this lion cub is spotted.

'And we know that in ancient cave drawings some ancient lions were depicted with spots.

'It used to be thought that the Palaeolithic artists decided to simply put on these spots.

'Now it can be argued that, at least in the fur of cubs, they really were.'

Why does the sun shine?

Our local star constantly smashes atoms together deep inside its fiery belly to produce its blazing light. But because this internal commotion lies hidden beneath the sun's thick outer layers, scientists have few ways to learn about what goes on at the star's core.

But by collecting neutrinos - tiny, ghostly particles that barely interact with other matter and so can fly directly out from the sun's center- researchers have produced one of the most detailed snapshots ever compiled of the sun's mysterious interior.

"We're basically staring at the sun in the heart," study co-author Andrea Pocar, a physicist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Live Science. The results, which appeared today (Oct. 24) in the journal Nature, will help solar physicists gain a better understanding of our parent star.

Guest humor by David Middleton

I ran across this interesting article on Real Clear Science today:

Is That Science? The Wide World of Science

Jamie Hale
October 24, 2018

Science is persuasive, and it should be; science is the great reality detector. What appears to be a scientific claim often isn't. Promoters of pseudoscience (claims disguised as science that have little scientific value) are aware of the strong value placed on science. Attach the term science, or make it sound like science, and the value of a claim, product, or service is instantly enhanced. This can also be problematic because attaching the word science to a claim doesn't make it science.

Pseudoscience is a major roadblock to rationality. Pseudoscientific beliefs are more costly than people think. Time and money spent on pseudoscience is time and money that could have been spent on beneficial activities. We live in an interconnected society, so the pseudoscientific beliefs of a few people may influence outcomes for many people. As an example, the false belief that autism is caused or associated with early vaccination has led to decreased immunization rates, more children being hospitalized, and in some cases death (Stanovich et al. 2016). As another example, consider the strange activity of Steve Jobs, who "ignored his doctors after being told of his pancreatic cancer and delayed surgery for nine months while he pursued unproven fruit diets, consulted a psychic, and received bogus hydrotherapy" (Stanovich et al. 2016,192).

Comment: Too bad the quoted author gets it wrong right off the bat regarding autism!

The Nonsense Detection Kit

The impetus for writing the Nonsense Detection Kit was previous suggestions made by Sagan (1996), Lilienfeld et al. (2012) and Shermer (2001). The Nonsense Detection Kit is referring to nonsense in terms of "scientific nonsense." Nonsense as it is used here is synonymous with pseudoscience. There is no single criterion for distinguishing science from pseudoscience, but it is possible to identify indicators, or warning signs. The more warnings signs that appear, the more likely the claim is nonsense.

[...]

Jamie Hale is a college instructor, and he is associated with Eastern Kentucky University's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab and Perception & Cognition Lab. He has published articles and books on a wide range of topics. Jamie is the director of www.knowledgesummit.net and author of In Evidence We Trust: The need for science, rationality and statistics. His future articles will address models for improved scientific thinking, popular myths, and rationality in terms of cognitive science.

Skeptical Inquirer

Mr. Hale provided six nonsense indicators... Which apply amazingly well to Gorebal Warming!

A new study from The Australian National University (ANU) indicates the most likely route the ancestors of Aboriginal people took to enter Australia for the first time tens of thousands of years ago.

Co-lead researcher Shimona Kealy said these people probably travelled through Indonesia's northern islands, into New Guinea and then Australia, which were part of a single continent between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, when sea levels were 25-50 metres below the current level.

"We've created a treasure map of sorts with the likely route across land and water that these incredible people took to reach Australia," said Ms Kealy, a PhD scholar at the School of Culture, History and Language and an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage at ANU.

"We've circled all of the islands that we want to explore further to find archaeological evidence to test if this is in fact the path that they took.

"Archaeologists have yet to explore most of Indonesia's northern islands for human settlements predating the oldest sites found in Australia. These islands could hold the key to the mystery of how the first humans made it to Australia's shores."

The findings challenge a popular theory that these early adventurers travelled from Southeast Asia, through Indonesia and Timor and then across sea to reach Australia's shores and land that is part of the Northern Territory today.

The study modelled the least-cost path from Southeast Asia to Australia, by considering factors such as difficulty to travel up slopes, visibility at sea, access to fresh water along the many potential pathways and the sophistication of maritime technology at the time.

Russia is likely to use the Topol-M nuclear-tipped missiles, which are due to be phased out of service, as launch vehicles for civilian space missions. Many of their predecessors were repurposed in a similar way.

The conversion program is likely to begin in about two years, according to one of the developers of Topol ICBMs, Yury Solomonov. He is currently involved with the diversification department of the United Rocket and Space Corporation, a state-run corporation that serves as an umbrella for several leading Russian space industries.

"What we need is greenlight from the President, which we expect in November. Then we can prepare a launch in two years," Solomonov told reporters. The proposed conversion program, which has already been approved by the Russian government, will deliver competitive launch vehicles from outdated ICBMs and will also support jobs in the Russian space industry thanks to new contracts.

More than eight decades after they were predicted to exist, physicists have found evidence of discrete units of matter that could help us better understand the electrical equivalent of ferromagnetism.

What does that mean? While some materials are permanent magnets that produce their own magnetic field, other materials, such as iron, are ferromagnets. They become attracted to magnets under the influence of a magnetic field.

Ferroelectrics, in theory, work in the same way. But it's the electrical component of an electromagnetic field, not the magnetic one, that changes them.

That doesn't sound too exciting, but unlocking the power of ferroelectrics could lead to advanced data storage technology that would allow us to fit a whole lot more on our devices.

Transkribus system makes breakthrough in understanding medieval texts

How do you find a text in ancient manuscripts, and do it fast? Until recently, computers weren't very good in reading handwritten scripts - but now artificial intelligence has produced a breakthrough.

The Tyrolean State Archive in Innsbruck stores countless documents dating from the 11th century onwards - mostly official records, legal documents and other important handwritten documents from the past. Transcribing these books isn't easy. But this archive is working with scientists to automate the transcription using cutting-edge computer technologies.

"With difficult scripts I believe the new technique will have problems. But with relatively nice calligraphy, the new system has great advantages and helps us a lot," says the Director of the archive, Christoph Haidacher.