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A small but growing number senior Kremlin insiders are quietly questioning Vladimir Putin’s decision to send troops into Ukraine eight weeks ago. With military losses mounting and Russia facing unprecedented international isolation a growing number of them are quietly questioning Putin’s decision to go to war. The number of those who criticize the government’s top positions of power remains small, with most of them spread across state-run businesses and government. According to ten people who have direct knowledge of the situation, they believe that the invasion was a disastrous mistake that will set the country back for many years. All...

On Wednesday, the Financial Times ran an exclusive story on the ongoing peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Those negotiations started only four days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There was little progress until March 10, when Turkey announced it was hosting a “high level” meeting between the two parties. On Monday, I posted how the Russians and Ukrainian peace delegations were making pleasing noises about “progress,” see Russians and Ukrainians Say Peace Talks Show Progress but ‘Getting to Yes’ Seems Very Far Away.Today’s news comes in a story titled Ukraine and Russia explore neutrality plan in peace talks.IMPORTANT...

There are reports in British papers that Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the arrest of at least two senior officers in the Russian Federal Security Service or FSB. The FSB is the successor to the KGB but without the overseas portfolio. However, it does operate within the now-independent states that comprised the former Soviet Union, which by Russian law (lolol) is forbidden territory to the foreign intelligence service or SVR.A Russian spy chief is said to have been placed under house arrest in a sign that President Putin is seeking to blame the security services for the stalled invasion...

Should we be worried?The undead have telepathic powers if Microsoft's latest Windows 10 Insider emission is to be believed.Perhaps stung by cruel criticism that the last batch of bleeding-edge Dev Channel releases have been a little light on features, build 20270 arrived overnight and apparently imbued Microsoft's unloved assistant, Cortana, with mindreading abilities.Assuming one's PC has a mind of its own, of course (and judging by the shenanigans that seem to happen every Patch Tuesday, we're starting to wonder). "You can now use Cortana on your PCs to translate their thoughts into direct actions to open and find files and...

In Brief The Facts: The Russian Ministry of Defense published an article about the existence of military parapsychology in Russian military techniques, which allows one to penetrate into the thoughts of another, hack computer programs, and communicate telepathically. Reflect On: Why is this type of science studied at the highest levels of various governments, yet ridiculed and not studied at all within the mainstream? Is telepathy real? It’s hard to argue against it; in fact, I would say that it’s not really up for debate. That being said, when it comes to topics like these, the field is polluted with...

Communicating through your thoughts alone is possible — with a little technical assistance. Scientists at the University of Washington's Center for Neurotechnology have figured out how to network human minds together to collaborate to move Tetris-like shapes on a computer screen using only thoughts. It works like this: Three players, including one main player, sit in separate rooms and watch game pieces cascade down a computer screen. Using telepathy (and a lot of hardware, including a heavily wired brain cap), two players "tell" the main player which way to move the pieces to clear the bottom row. I know because...

Scientists think they've identified a previously unknown form of neural communication that self-propagates across brain tissue, and can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another – even if they've been surgically severed. The discovery offers some radical new insights about the way neurons might be talking to one another, via a mysterious process unrelated to conventionally understood mechanisms, such as synaptic transmission, axonal transport, and gap junction connections. "We don't know yet the 'So what?' part of this discovery entirely," says neural and biomedical engineer Dominique Durand from Case Western Reserve University. "But we do...

The names of the tech workers in this story have been changed.Ten thousand miles from Silicon Valley, in a room near the Black Sea, Yegor Karpenchekov dreams of money. At night, while the rest of Odessa sleeps and cocaine smugglers drift in and out of the port under cover of darkness, Yegor logs onto FaceTime and talks to a 70-year-old woman in San Francisco. Her name is Sally Faubion, and five months ago she recruited Yegor from the freelancer marketplace UpWork to code her apps. She believes "divine intervention" brought them together; for Yegor, it was likely $20 per hour...

What if you could communicate with another person only using your mind? The concept might sound far-fetched, but a team of neuroscientists and robotics engineers have inched the possibility of brain-to-brain communication away from the science fiction of Star Trek’s Vulcan mind meld and closer to reality. In a recent study published in PLOS ONE, the international team of researchers from Starlab Barcelona in Spain and Strasbourg, France-based Axilum Robotics facilitated computer-mediated brain-to-brain transmissions of simple salutations like “hola” and “ciao” between participants 5,000 miles away from one another. The researchers used electroencephalogram (EEG) and image-guided transcranial magnetic simulation (TMS)...

Team of US-led researchers successfully achieves brain-to-brain communication between humans from India to FranceFor the first time, scientists have been able to send a simple mental message from one person to another without any contact between the two, thousands of miles apart in India and France. Research led by experts at Harvard University shows technology can be used to transmit information from one person's brain to another's even, as in this case, if they are thousands of miles away. "It is kind of technological realisation of the dream of telepathy, but it is definitely not magical," Giulio Ruffini, a theoretical...

Brain-wave sensing machines have been used to ‘telepathically’ control everything from real-life helicopters to characters in a computer game. Now the technology has gone a step further by allowing someone in India to send an email to his colleague in France using nothing but the power of his mind. The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) headsets to record electrical activity from neurons firing in the brain, and convert the words ‘hola’ and ‘ciao’ into binary. In EEG, electrical currents in the brain are linked with different thoughts that are then fed into a computer interface. This computer analyses the signal and...

Telepathy could have been used to compel four young Turkish engineers to kill themselves, it's been suggested. That's one explanation of the deaths of four workers at the defence giant Aselsan contained in a report presented to the PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to reports. All four deaths, within the space of 14 months during 2006 and 2007, were initially recorded as suicides. The men had been undergoing psychological treatment before they died but doubts persisted from their sceptical families, reports newspaper Today's Zaman. And last year the Inspection Board of the Prime Ministry launched a fresh probe.

“Fingers!” Gerwin Schalk sputtered, waving his hands around in the air. “Fingers are made to pick up a hammer.” He prodded the table, mimicking the way we poke at computer keyboards. “It’s totally ridiculous,” he said. I was visiting Schalk, a 40-year-old computer engineer, at his bunkerlike office in the Wads­worth Center, a public-health lab outside Albany that handles many of New York State’s rabies tests. It so happens that his lab is also pioneering a new way to control our computers — with thoughts instead of fingers. Schalk studies people at the Albany Medical Center who have become, not...

Similar technology marketed as a way to control video games by thought Vocal cords were overrated anyway. A new Army grant aims to create email or voice mail and send it by thought alone. No need to type an e-mail, dial a phone or even speak a word. Known as synthetic telepathy, the technology is based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph, or EEG. Similar technology is being marketed as a way to control video games by thought. "I think that this will eventually become just another way of communicating," said Mike D'Zmura, from the University...

DNA has been found to have a bizarre ability to put itself together, even at a distance, when according to known science it shouldn't be able to. Explanation: None, at least not yet. Scientists are reporting evidence that contrary to our current beliefs about what is possible, intact double-stranded DNA has the “amazing” ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. Somehow they are able to identify one another, and the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA. The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by...

NORWICH (Reuters) - Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them -- now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy. Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College, Cambridge, said on Tuesday he had conducted experiments that proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails. Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to...

Empathy allows us to feel the emotions of others, to identify and understand their feelings and motives and see things from their perspective. How we generate empathy remains a subject of intense debate in cognitive science. Some scientists now believe they may have finally discovered its root. We're all essentially mind readers, they say. The idea has been slow to gain acceptance, but evidence is mounting. Mirror neurons In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the premotor cortex, an area of the brain responsible for...

Ok, I can understand the restlessness I've been feeling since yesterday. There's a lot riding on this election, and passions are running high on both sides, so naturally eceryone and their naked brother who has an ounce of Power and no clue about Shielding is leaking energy like a hair dryer in a bathtub. So it's Shields Up for me, but I'm still getting enough bleedover to make me jittery and a little manic if I don't concentrate. That's all to be expected. What wasn't expected was that once I filtered out all that background noise, I started hearing a...

The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short. The bird, a captive African grey called N'kisi, has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour. He invents his own words and phrases if he is confronted with novel ideas with which his existing repertoire cannot cope - just as a human child would do. N'kisi's remarkable abilities, which are said to include telepathy, feature in the latest BBC Wildlife Magazine. N'kisi is believed to be one of the most advanced users of human language...

Parrot's oratory stuns scientists By Alex Kirby BBC News Online environment correspondent The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short. The bird, a captive African grey called N'kisi, has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour. He invents his own words and phrases if he is confronted with novel ideas with which his existing repertoire cannot cope - just as a human child would do. N'kisi's remarkable abilities, which are said to include telepathy, feature in the latest BBC Wildlife Magazine. N'kisi...