New advances are taking automation to the highest end of human endeavors, offering scientists a shot at some of the most intractable problems that have confounded them -- and along the way tipping a global balance to give upstarts like China a more level playing field in the lab. From a report: A combination of artificial intelligence and nimble robots are allowing scientists to do more, and be faster, than they ever could with mere human hands and brains. "We're in the middle of a paradigm shift, a time when the choice of experiments and the execution of experiments are not really things that people do," says Bob Murphy, the head of the computational biology department at Carnegie Mellon University. Automated science is "moving the role of the scientist higher and higher up the food chain," says Murphy. Researchers are focusing their efforts on big-picture problem-solving rather than the nitty-gritty of running experiments. He says it will also allow scientists to take on more problems at once -- and solve big, lingering ones that are too complex to tackle right now. Starting next year, Murphy's department will offer students a master's degree in automated science, the university announced last week.

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The question of what to do with Louis CK was featured today on the Daily podcast. It's a good thing to talk about, and it should be looked at from all sides, esp ones that haven't been challenged yet. It's especially important to challenge people who say LCK should never work again.

They mention the example of Mel Gibson's anti-semitism. I was a fan, but I couldn't understand how Hollywood could ever let him work again after what he did. So I've had the same "nuke him" impulse around another issue. Mel Gibson is making movies. I don't think people are more or less expressive of their anti-semitism because he is. I've gotten over it, I won't go to see his movies. I still object to him as a celebrity, I can never think of him without thinking how he feels about Jews. I don't want to laugh at his jokes. But that's me. He gets to exist, and practice his art.

Noam Dworman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar club in NY made the only important point in all of this. He doesn't object to other owners refusing to let LCK perform on their stages, as long as no one tries to force him to ban him as well. I'm pretty sure this is one of those moral questions that doesn't actually have an answer. Maybe all artists that are great must also be flawed human beings. Maybe the reason why Louis CK is so good is that he is so bad? Maybe he can keep it under control as long as exposure is the penalty although in his case I could see where he might like being exposed.

I don't have the answer, but on the other hand I don't think anyone else does either. I think that's what the owner of the club was trying to say.

Activists and others have longed called for a cut in US military aid to Central American country over rights abuses.

Member of Mohammed bin Salman's security detail walked into consulate before Khashoggi disappeared there, photo shows.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A lot of people are pursuing creative side gigs while they hold down big office jobs. It used to be that many had to choose between their creative aspirations and their commitment to a corporate career, but in the era of the side hustle some manage to do both [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. [...] Doing both comes with trade-offs and tensions. Unlike the aspiring actor waiting tables to pay the bills, true dual professionals have to balance the demands of both their aspirations, and often face a moment of reckoning where they are forced to sacrifice a step forward in one career path for job stability and financial security in the other. The two worlds of Theresa Vu -- also known as the rapper tvu -- often collide. As senior vice president of engineering at New York software firm AppNexus, Ms. Vu runs a team of coders who work on a digital advertising platform. As a vocalist with the band Magnetic North, she rhymes and drops beats, and helped propel the band's "Home: Word" album to No. 2 on the Japanese hip-hop chart.

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The first nine months of 2018 was the fourth-warmest such period on Earth since record-keeping began in 1880, NOAA and NASA said in their analyses this week. From a report: 2016 had the warmest January-September period, according to NOAA, followed by 2017, then 2015. NASA's analysis agreed the Earth was on pace for its fourth-warmest year. NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt said in a tweet that 2018 was "almost guaranteed" to be the fourth-warmest year in its period of record. Record or near-record warmth in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America helped propel the January-September 2018 period to the fourth-warmest on record, NOAA said. With temperatures 3.35 degrees Fahrenheit (1.86 degrees Celsius) above average, Europe had its record-warmest first nine months of the year, exceeding the previous record set in 2014 by more than 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit (0.13 degrees Celsius). Records in the continent date to 1910. Breaking it down a bit further, Africa had its fifth-warmest year-to-date temperature on record, Asia its sixth-warmest and South America its eighth-warmest, according to NOAA. North America experienced its lowest January-September temperature departure from average since 2013. The only notable pocket of cooler-than-average temperatures in 2018's first nine months was over the far North Atlantic Ocean just south of Greenland.

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Saudi Arabia and Kuwait struggle to resume oil production from joint fields amid souring ties over Turkey, Qatar.

Thirty years ago, the ocean waters surrounding British islands in the South Atlantic were near-pristine. But plastic waste has increased a hundredfold since then, and is ten times greater than it was a decade ago. From a report: The islands of the British Overseas Territories in the South Atlantic, including St. Helena, East Falkland, and Ascension Island, are so tiny and remote that most people don't even realize they exist. For centuries, that kept them relative clean and pristine, but in recent decades discarded straws, fishing nets, and millions of bits of degraded plastic have begun washing up on their shores. Now, reports Marlene Cimons at Nexus Media, that pollution is getting even worse. A new study in the journal Current Biology shows that plastic trash on the beaches and in the ocean has increased tenfold in the just the last decade and a hundredfold over the last three decades. During four research cruises between 2013 and 2018, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and nine other organizations aboard the RMS James Clark Ross sought to quantify the plastic around the islands. The crew took samples of marine debris from the water's surface, the water column, the seabed and the beaches. They also investigated plastic ingestion in 2,243 animals comprised of 26 different species ranging across the marine food web from plankton to apex predators, like seabirds; all were found to consume plastic at high rates. What they found was plastic, and lots of it. About 90 percent of all the contaminants they analyzed were made of plastic, which abundant in the ocean, on the beach and inside the animals.

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Bin Salman tried to project himself as a moderniser, but has come under fire after Saudi journalist's disappearance.

Abdulrahman Suwar al-Dahab, who led a coup in 1985 to overthrow Jaafar Nimeiri, died at a military hospital in Riyadh.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says a transparent probe of the alleged killing of Saudi journalist was promised.

Many already marginalised Shia are further disenchanted with the government after a series of ISIL attacks.

Druk Nyamrup Tshogpa party won 30 of 47 national assembly seats, according to provisional results.

Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish, the latest version of Ubuntu, is now available to download. From a report: Under the hood, the Cosmic Cuttlefish boasts the 4.18 Linux Kernel. This updates comes with better support for for AMD and Nvidia GPU, USB Type-C and Thunderbolt, a way for unprivileged users to mount Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) can be mounted by, and CPUfreq performance improvements. On top of this, you'll find the freshest version of GNOME 3.30. You can, of course, use other desktops, but GNOME, since Ubuntu 17.10, is Ubuntu's default desktop. You'll be glad to know that GNOME is faster than it has been for a while. That's because some nasty memory leaks have been patched. Canonical has also added some performance tweaks that didn't make it into the GNOME 3.30 upstream. Ubuntu 18.10 also comes with a new desktop theme, the Yaru Community theme installed by default, for your visual enjoyment. Further reading: Ubuntu 18.10: What's New? [Video]; Ubuntu 18.10 Review; and Ubuntu 18.10 Flavors Released, Ready to Download.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Open plan offices, once the darling of design, are now showing their fault lines. To get a little bit of personal space, we've come up with all sorts of solutions, from phone booths to furniture designed to create a sense of privacy. All of those ideas seem totally, completely normal compared to this new project from Panasonic. The tech company's Future Life Factory design studio partnered with Japanese fashion designer Kunihiko Morinaga to develop an open-plan solution to end all open-plan solutions. Say hello to Wear Space. Wear Space is, for lack of a better description, like equine blinkers for humans. The strip of flexible material wraps around the back of the head and covers the side of the eyes, blocking up to 60 percent of a wearer's peripheral vision, Panasonic says. Think of it as a sign for potential bothersome coworkers that broadcasts, "I'm busy."

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