Everything you need to know as 10 and only 10 candidates take the stage for the third Democratic debate.

dryriver shares a report from the BBC: People with a fear of small holes have claimed the design of Apple's iPhone 11 Pro is triggering their phobia. At its unveiling on Tuesday, many found their attention drawn to its "ultra-wide" rear camera, with three high-powered lenses packed closely together. The lenses sit alongside the handset's torch and "audio zoom" microphone. And hundreds of smartphone users now claim the new design has triggered their "trypophobia," an aversion to the sight of clusters of small holes. The term "trypophobia" was first coined in 2005 in online forum Reddit and it has since become widely talked about on social media. American Horror Story actress Sarah Paulson and model Kendall Jenner are among those who say they have the condition. Vision scientist Dr Geoff Cole, at the University of Essex, was part of the first full scientific study of trypophobia, working with his colleague, Prof Arnold Wilkins. "We have all got it, it's just a matter of degree," Dr Cole told BBC News earlier this year. The response to seeing small holes can be very extreme, their study suggests. Dr Cole and Prof Wilkins reported testimonies from some people who vomited and others who said they could not go to work for several days. "It can be quite disabling," Prof Wilkins added.

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dryriver shares a report from the BBC: People with a fear of small holes have claimed the design of Apple's iPhone 11 Pro is triggering their phobia. At its unveiling on Tuesday, many found their attention drawn to its "ultra-wide" rear camera, with three high-powered lenses packed closely together. The lenses sit alongside the handset's torch and "audio zoom" microphone. And hundreds of smartphone users now claim the new design has triggered their "trypophobia," an aversion to the sight of clusters of small holes. The term "trypophobia" was first coined in 2005 in online forum Reddit and it has since become widely talked about on social media. American Horror Story actress Sarah Paulson and model Kendall Jenner are among those who say they have the condition. Vision scientist Dr Geoff Cole, at the University of Essex, was part of the first full scientific study of trypophobia, working with his colleague, Prof Arnold Wilkins. "We have all got it, it's just a matter of degree," Dr Cole told BBC News earlier this year. The response to seeing small holes can be very extreme, their study suggests. Dr Cole and Prof Wilkins reported testimonies from some people who vomited and others who said they could not go to work for several days. "It can be quite disabling," Prof Wilkins added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Australia is once again deciding to follow in the tracks of the United Kingdom, with the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs to look into age verification for online pornography and online wagering. The matter was referred to the committee by the Minister for Families and Social Services, Senator Anne Ruston and Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety, and the Arts, Paul Fletcher. The terms of reference for the inquiry state that it will be looking into age verification under the auspices of protecting children online. The committee will look into "the potential benefits of further online age verification requirements, including to protect children from potential harm, and business and non-government organizations from reputation, operational and legal risks," the terms state. Potential risks and unintended consequences for age verification will be looked into as well, the terms state, including privacy breaches, freedom of expression, false assurance, and whether adults are pushing into "unregulated/illegal environments or to other legal forms of these activities." The committee will also examine the economic impact of age verification, and the impact on "eSafety resourcing, education, and messaging." The UK's age verification system for online pornography became mandatory on July 15.

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Defeat for the main opposition People's Democratic Party was widely anticipated and judges dismissed all its claims.

Turkish midfielder handed a 32-month suspended sentence for firing a weapon after nightclub fight with a singer.

dcblogs writes: MyPayRollHR, a payroll processing provider with about 4,000 small to mid-sized business customers, suddenly closed late last week. In response, the banking system went haywire and began taking funds from employees at many of these firms. Previously deposited pay was removed from their personal banking accounts, or 'reversed.' Not once, but twice and there are reports that these withdrawals happened continuously. The checking account of one employee of an animal rescue facility was pinged for nearly $1 million. Her account shows a negative $999,193.75.

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I was reminded with a note from a Boston friend that Radio Woodstock is pretty great. It is. It might be a good substitute for disappointed KFOG fans, of which I know at least a couple. "Acoustic Saturday mornings now part of my weekends!" If you have an Echo, you can listen by saying "Alexa WDST please." Easy.

Wael Ghonim says the president should apologise to widow of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected leader.

US National Security Advisor John Bolton has been sacked after repeatedly clashing with Donald Trump on foreign policy.

Ayman al-Zawahiri calls on Muslims to strike Western targets on the day when nearly 3,000 people died 18 years ago.

For the first time in 185 years, there will be no fall semester at Green Mountain College in western Vermont. The college, which closed this year, isn't alone: Southern Vermont College, the College of St. Joseph, and Atlantic Union College, among others, have shuttered their doors, too. The schools fell victim to trends in higher education -- trends that lead one expert to believe that more schools will soon follow. From a report, shared by a reader: "I think 25% of schools will fail in the next two decades," said Michael Horn, who studies education at Harvard University. "They're going to close, they're going to merge, some will declare some form of bankruptcy to reinvent themselves. It's going to be brutal across American higher education." Part of the problem, Horn explained, is that families had fewer kids after the 2008 recession, meaning that there will be fewer high school graduates and fewer college students. "Fundamentally, these schools' business models are just breaking at the seams," he said. That's what happened to Green Mountain College. When Robert Allen became president of the school in 2016, he realized "very quickly" that the school had a problem. "I'm a mathematician by training, a financial person," he said. "And I realized that we were going to come up short." The main problem was shrinking enrollment. By last year, just 427 students remained on campus, leaving the school broke. "At Green Mountain College this past year, we didn't have one full paid student," Allen said, adding, "Our published tuition was $36,500, and the average student paid just a little over $12,000." Unable to find a school with which to merge, Allen announced in January that the school's 184th graduation would be its last. "I've had a long professional career, not all of it in education, and it was the hardest thing I've ever had to do," Allen said. "As you can imagine, many parents were really angry."

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Scientists from University College London have detected water vapour in the atmosphere of another world more than twice the size of Earth.

For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake. From a report: The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people's brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists' lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit. The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants' brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world -- when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph -- but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone's brain actually initiating an action The experiment's results came in squiggly, dotted lines, a representation of changing brain waves. In the milliseconds leading up to the finger taps, the lines showed an almost undetectably faint uptick: a wave that rose for about a second, like a drumroll of firing neurons, then ended in an abrupt crash. This flurry of neuronal activity, which the scientists called the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential, was like a gift of infinitesimal time travel. For the first time, they could see the brain readying itself to create a voluntary movement. This momentous discovery was the beginning of a lot of trouble in neuroscience. Twenty years later, the American physiologist Benjamin Libet used the Bereitschaftspotential to make the case not only that the brain shows signs of a decision before a person acts, but that, incredibly, the brain's wheels start turning before the person even consciously intends to do something. Suddenly, people's choices -- even a basic finger tap -- appeared to be determined by something outside of their own perceived volition.

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Trump's comments follow his sacking of John Bolton - chief architect of the US president's strident stance against Iran.