Новости за 13.01.2018

Jonathan Rydberg, Massive
Anthony Magnabosco has an unusual interest that consumes all the time he can give to it. It's not something he collects, nor is it something he makes. It's something he tries to inspire in others: healthy skepticism. He calls himself a street epistemologist, and in a quest for truth, he's trying to better his understanding of what people believe and why. Epistemology is a philosophically complicated subject, but it's essentially the study of knowledge what it is, and how it's formed.

Steven Corneliussen, Phys Today
America's military needs a space corps, asserted the headline on a 22 December Wall Street Journal op-ed. The National Defense Authorization Act, signed by President Trump on 12 December, had established no such new US military branch. An early version of that annual bill, however, one which passed the House, did call for a space corps. The space-corps concept may be deferred legislatively, but it's drawing media attention.

Lucien Crowder, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Paul Scharre, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, has pretty good credentials when it comes to autonomous weapons. If you've ever heard of Directive 3000.09, which established the Defense Department's guidelines for autonomous weapons, Scharre led the working group that drafted it. And he's got a relevant book due out in April: Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War.

Dan Zukowski, Hakai Magazine
On a small island in the Beaufort Sea, brown muck slides down tall cliffs, oozes into mud pools, and slithers into the ocean. It's summer, and the permafrost is thawing. As the sediment enters the sea, it clouds the coastal waters, releasing organic carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. But that's not all.

Richard Gunderman, The Conversation
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the great influenza pandemic of 1918. Between 50 and 100 million people are thought to have died, representing as much as 5 percent of the world's population. Half a billion people were infected.