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'Masquerading refers to a person in a given context being unable to tell whether the machine is human', explain the researchers -- this is the very essence of the Turing Test. This type of deception increases "metaphysical entropy," meaning any corruption of entities and impoverishment of being; since this leads to a lack of good in the environment -- or infosphere -- it is regarded as the fundamental evil by Floridi. Following this premise, the team set out to ascertain where 'the locus of moral responsibility and moral accountability' lie in relationships with masquerading machines, and try to establish whether...

More than 2,000 years ago, pieces of an Iron Age chariot were burnt and buried, perhaps as a religious offering. Now, archaeologists have discovered the bronze remains of this sacrifice. The remains were discovered at the Burrough Hill Iron Age Hillfort, a fortified hilltop structure that was once surrounded by farms and settlements, used most heavily between about 100 B.C. and A.D. 50.

Most people assume that the fourteenth-century Black Death that quickly ravaged the western world was a bacterial bubonic plague epidemic caused by flea bites and spread by rats. But the Black Death killed a high proportion of Scandinavians where it was too cold for fleas to survive. Biology of Plagues. Evidence from Historical Populations published by Cambridge University Press, analyzed 2,500 years of plagues and concluded that the Black Death was caused by a viral hemorrhagic fever pandemic similar to Ebola. If this is correct, the future medical and economic impacts from Ebola have been vastly underestimated.  Authors Dr. Susan Scott, a demographer,...

Republican lawmakers say the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency enjoys a “beyond cozy” relationship with a liberal environmental action group that seeks to reshape national energy policies in a way that would hurt American businesses and families. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, told The Daily Signal that the Natural Resources Defense Council played an “absolutely inappropriate” role in drafting the EPA’s new carbon emissions plan. “The EPA has been one of the least transparent agencies I have ever seen, but it’s become apparent that their lack of transparency is to hide the...

One of the STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) spacecraft stopped phoning home to Earth on Oct. 1 “immediately after a planned reset of the spacecraft”, NASA said in an update last week. .... NASA didn’t say how badly solar weather forecasts are affected, but in other materials they have said both STEREO spacecraft are a crucial part of this work. STEREO’s pair of satellites ... aim to better map Sun eruptions ( “coronal mass ejections”) whose charged particles can disrupt satellite communications during solar storms. The mission has been ongoing since 2006 and they’ve viewed the far side of the...

Archaeologists digging through a vast ancient tomb in Amphipolis in northern Greece have uncovered a floor mosaic that covers the whole area of a room seen as the antechamber to the main burial ground. The mosaic, 3 meters (10 feet) long and 4.5 meters (15 feet) wide, depicts a horseman with a laurel wreath driving a chariot drawn by two horses and preceded by the god Hermes. According to a Culture Ministry announcement on Sunday, Hermes is depicted here as the conductor of souls to the afterlife. The mosaic is made up of pebbles in many colors: white, black, gray,...

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is delisting and relinquishing management of their imported Canadian gray wolves back to state wildlife officials while simultaneously proposing “new rules”1 to “save” the Mexican gray wolf. These proposals include: Keeping the Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) on the endangered list as a subspecies. A conundrum. The Mexican wolf is a gray wolf that breeds with other gray wolves and is not a subspecies. A grizzly and a black bear are subspecies. Issuing permits to private landowners to kill wolves killing livestock on their property based on the number of Mexican gray...

Explanation: How did a star create the Helix nebula? The shapes of planetary nebula like the Helix are important because they likely hold clues to how stars like the Sun end their lives. Observations by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope and the 4-meter Blanco Telescope in Chile, however, have shown the Helix is not really a simple helix. Rather, it incorporates two nearly perpendicular disks as well as arcs, shocks, and even features not well understood. Even so, many strikingly geometric symmetries remain. How a single Sun-like star created such beautiful yet geometric complexity is a topic of research. The...

Pre neanderthal bones 200,000 years old have been discovered on a building site, and could shed light on every day behaviour of our extinct relatives It is thought that these pre neanderthal bones could shed light on the everyday behaviour of our closest extinct relative. They were discovered in Northern France by chance on a building site and it is though the arm bones could be as much as 200,000 years old. It is a rare find, only 12 other sites in Europe have discovered such significant archeological remains. The bones are of particular scientific interest because they hint at...

The Ebola outbreak continues to spiral out of control. Near the epicenter of the epidemic in West Africa, more than 3,400 people have died and more than 7,000 people have been infected with the virus. Officials are scrambling to contain the outbreak at its source and keep it from spreading. The World Health Organization is sending doctors to countries where the virus is most prevalent — Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Fusion’s Jorge Ramos spoke to one of the doctors, Dr. Aileen Marty, who recently returned home to Miami after spending 31 days in Nigeria. She says she was...

Explanation: As the Moon rose and the Sun set on October 8, a lunar eclipse was in progress seen from Chongqing, China. Trailing through this composite time exposure, the rising Moon began as a dark reddened disk in total eclipse near the eastern horizon. Steadily climbing above the populous city's colorful lights along the Yangtze River, the moontrail grows brighter and broader, until a bright Full Moon emerged from the Earth's shadow in evening skies. Although lunar eclipses are not always total ones, this eclipse, along with last April's lunar eclipse, were the first two of four consecutive total lunar...

Explanation: From the early hours of October 8, over the Santa Cruz Mountains near Los Gatos, California, the totally eclipsed Moon shows a range of color across this well-exposed telescopic view of the lunar eclipse. Of course, a lunar eclipse can only occur when the Moon is opposite the Sun in Earth's sky and gliding through the planet's shadow. But also near opposition during this eclipse, and remarkably only half a degree or so from the lunar limb, distant Uranus is faint but easy to spot at the lower right. Fainter still are the ice giant's moons. To find them,...

Explanation: The Pacific Ocean and Chilean coast lie below this sea of clouds. Seen through the subtle colors of the predawn sky a lunar eclipse is in progress above, the partially eclipsed Moon growing dark. The curved edge of planet Earth's shadow still cuts across the middle of the lunar disk as the Moon sinks lower toward the western horizon. In fact, from this southern hemisphere location as well as much of eastern North America totality, the Moon completely immersed within Earth's shadow, began near the time of moonset and sunrise on October 8. From farther west the total phase...

Health Minister Rona Ambrose is urging Canadians in three countries in West Africa where the Ebola virus is raging to consider leaving now. The federal government issued a travel advisory Friday aimed at 216 Canadians who live in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. "Today we are asking Canadians living in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia to consider leaving by commercial means while they are still available," Ambrosa said in Edmonton Friday.

Mary, as for yo¯ hono¯s metaphysick mistresses, beatificall bona robas, hyper-uranian whoores, and transcendentall trulls, not oonlie my complexioun little delighteth in them but my ripe and more constant ivdgement reiecteth, esteeming them in truth no more but what Geo: Macdonald bringeth us in as Lilith in his nobly inuented but ill-languaged romans of the same name, or David Lyndesay of late, under the name Sullenbode, in his notable Voiage and Travell to Arctur¯.

New research from the University of Western Australia reveals that the amount of dark matter in the Milky Way is half as much as previously thought. Australian astronomers used a method developed almost 100 years ago to discover that the weight of dark matter in our own galaxy is 800,000,000,000 (or 8 x 1011) times the mass of the Sun. They probed the edge of the Milky Way, looking closely, for the first time, at the fringes of the galaxy about 5 million billion kilometers from Earth. Astrophysicist Dr Prajwal Kafle, from The University of Western Australia node of the...

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a ribeye, extra rare, and the chef or the waiter or somebody messed it up. I sent it back to the kitchen. A lesbian couple near Uniontown, Ohio, ordered a baby, extra white, and their order got messed up — the sperm bank mistakenly gave them the product of a black man, with the result that their daughter, Payton, is half black. And that’s the problem with treating children as consumer products: You cannot send them back to the kitchen. Good thing fertility doctors don’t work for tips. Naturally, there is a lawsuit...

Researchers from QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute have made an exciting discovery for cancer patients everywhere. A chemical found in a rare plant from Australia has the ability to "eat" cancerous tumors and completely eradicate them within days. The tumor-eating chemical is found in the seeds of berries of the Blushwood plant. The chemical, which is being called EBC-46, takes three weeks to extract and the process is quite difficult. Experts are even saying that they still don't completely understand why the chemical is in the seed of the Blushwood berry in the first place. Farming Blushwood in large quantities...

On November 15, open enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges begins again. Before the second act of our national healthcare drama commences, let’s review what we’ve learned in Act I. For starters, everyone now knows that federal officials are challenged when it comes to setting up a website. But they’ve demonstrated the ability to dole out a huge amount of taxpayers’ money for millions of people signing up for Medicaid, a welfare program. And they’ve proved they can send hundreds of millions of federal taxpayers’ dollars to their bureaucratic counterparts in states, like Maryland and Oregon, that can’t manage their own...

TWELVE MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS TO TEST HOW GOOD YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF EBOLA IS. Click above link to start the quiz...