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TL;DRThis question reminds me of a call from a US friend about 10 years ago. He had a lovely mansion on the west coast of Florida, with easy access to the sea via a private harbour. It was a property he bought for several million with what was called an Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM, though my friend called his an Auto-Reset Mortgage). The idea of this mortgage is that the mortgagee benefits from a reduced rate for several years but the rate will “reset” back to a more normal rate after that period.Anyway, his call to me was because his ARM mortgage had reset and his mortgage payments have gone up from $7,500 a month to over $55,000 a month. How did it happen? The reset clause had stated that “on reset, the new applicable rate will be reset to a rate unlikely to be higher than the spot US Federal Funds Rate plus 0.75%.” But his new unlikely rate was set at over 11% when the Fed Funds rate was 3%. The problems were (a) my friend had over $1.5M free equity in the house so he had taken a small second mortgage on it to release $500,000 for his business, (b) he never expected such a hike in his mortgage rate, and (c) he cannot afford the new mortgage and wanted to sell as it was just a holiday home.Unfortunately, I did not desire a marine-based house in Florida so I could not help him. But having worked with corporate bankers, I totally understand how he was ensnared by his mortgage bank, who by the way, are rank amateurs compared to some corporate bankers (see below). To be fair, his bank did not lie outright to him about the ARM rate, but they did lead him to believe that he would have very little issues with the new rate when it is reset. If there is any lying, it was done at this point and it would be impossible to pin it down as a lie as the word “unlikely” is not any guarantee it will not happen.This leads back to Brexit where, from what I have seen over the last year or so, all the Brexit “promises” were/are in fact only “fallacies” sold as if they are truths, just like ARM rates are “unlikely” to go above a certain level. I have to introduce an ambiguity about the past and present tenses as there are now “old” Brexit fallacies and “new” Brexit fallacies. And I will explain the difference between the “old” and “new” fallacies - and the lies used when fallacies are not enough.So although I can refer to the slogan on the bus, I prefer not to and use this instead as an example of a very explicit “old” Brexit fallacy:Clearly what is suggested above is impossible, mainly because the UK does not even give £200M a week to the EU. It would be like telling your mum you need her to pay you back for filling in the car tank with 65 litres of fuel even though it can only take 40 litres.A “new” Brexit fallacy going around is that operating under the WTO terms in a No Deal Brexit is a workable manner for the UK to leave the EU, and this is “what the people now want”. The Brexit leaders must be thinking that if they got away unpunished for the NHS fallacy, the UK public will just fall for another fallacy. However, not everyone at Parliament is as gullible as Leave voters and there is justifiably serious resistance to this hare-brained idea. If you wish an impartial “let’s see both sides” analysis, you can review If WTO rules are such a good idea, as proposed by the ERG, then why do nations seek free trade agreements?But that is not my issue with the Brexit campaign. As someone trained and working in a precise field, it is an easy task to take apart fallacies - all that is needed is a good understanding of quantitative maths and qualitative statistics. An example is: What is the logical rational reason for No-Deal Brexit?The issue with Brexit is how fallacies are endemic to the whole cause - creating fallacies and ridiculous assumptions based on them is simply the lifeblood of Brexit.I have been polite to call them fallacies but this following example is of an outright lie, just to get votes from people who trusted Boris and Priti Patel. And tactics like this are pervasive, endemic and systemic throughout BOTH the “old” Brexit campaign and the “new” Brexit campaign - please note: these tactics are what gives life to the fallacies of Brexit.The story starts with how Boris and Priti pushed this ambiguous and fallacious poster to curry houses in the UK before the referendum:I will let the words of Oli Khan (secretary general of the Bangladesh Caterers Association) continue the narrative:“At the time, the Bangladesh Caterers Association was worried about an average of four restaurants closing a week, rising rents and soaring business rates. Both Priti Patel and Boris Johnson approached us to collaborate with and support the Save Our Curry Houses campaign set up by Vote Leave. They said if we were to support the leave campaign, they would ensure we were able to get more chefs from south Asia by relaxing immigration rules with lower salary thresholds to hire staff from outside the EU.And we made the mistake of believing them.We were – and still are – struggling to get chefs to Britain from south Asia as the (newly revised) rules state you have to pay a salary of £35,000 to offer a curry chef’s job to a south Asian: a sum that is simply unthinkable for a large number of smaller restaurants.The gap between the Brexit that was sold and the one being delivered increases by the day. When I talk to my membership, the one thing I hear again and again is people saying that if they were given another chance, they would vote to remain in the EU.Indeed, Brexit is already harming the nation’s curry houses. Many of the estimated 10,000 EU citizens employed in our industry have quit their jobs amid continued uncertainty over their future. The treatment of these workers from other countries and the rise in xenophobia since the referendum should shame us all, particularly those of us from an immigrant background.The Brexit being proposed will damage our businesses and make our communities poorer. Many people in my community feel used. We were taken as fools by the leave campaign who, once they got what they needed, have deserted us.But people in my community are not stupid. If I helped bring about Brexit, I will now work twice as hard to secure a people’s vote so that, together, we can help put this right.”And you might ask, how many people were fooled by the Boris and Priti lies and assurances? As Mr Khan glumly admits: “A majority of voters of south-east Asian heritage supported remain – but more of us voted for Brexit than anyone expected. Not only was I one of them; I also bear some responsibility, as the head of an organisation that urged our 150,000 members and 12,000 restaurants to vote leave.”Now that the lifeblood and tactics of Brexit are exposed, I have to say that it is nothing really new. Shamefully, in my youth, I have often attended celebratory parties when signing on new big clients. At the time, some of these celebrations puzzled me, but I was young and naive enough to listen to certain corporate bankers who regaled everyone with comments about their clients, such as:“It’s not what you know, it’s how you tell it”“We made sure he understood everything we needed him to understand”“They could’ve saved 85 basis but, oops, I forgot to mention it! Haha!”“He got the worst deal ever and he was just eating out of our hands”, etc.The Brexit machine is still continuing with spreading its undiluted hard-core fallacies to a servile press who in turn pumps up the rhetoric and serves it hot to an unsuspecting, unenquiring, trusting public. This is all Brexit ever was and is.Just to be clear, fallacies are "unsubstantiated assertions that are often delivered with a conviction that makes them sound as though they are proven facts". Lies are used when fallacies alone are not enough, as with the Save Our Curry Houses campaign.Based on the above, you should be able to make your own judgement on what Brexit really is.

Here are some Scientific developments this decade:Detecting the first gravitational wavesIn 1916, Albert Einstein proposed that when objects with enough mass accelerate, they can sometimes create waves that move through the fabric of space and time like ripples on a pond’s surface. Though Einstein later doubted their existence, these spacetime wrinkles—called gravitational waves—are a key prediction of relativity, and the search for them captivated researchers for decades. Though compelling hints of the waves first emerged in the 1970s, nobody directly detected them until 2015, when the U.S.-based observatory LIGO felt the aftershock of a distant collision between two black holes. The discovery, announced in 2016, opened up a new way to “hear” the cosmos.In 2017, LIGO and the European observatory Virgo felt another set of tremors, this time made when two ultra-dense objects called neutron stars collided. Telescopes around the world saw the related explosion, making the event the first ever observed in both light and gravitational waves. The landmark data have given scientists an unprecedented look at how gravity works and how elements such as gold and silver form.Shaking up the human family treeWhile primitive in some respects, the face, skull, and teeth (seen in this reconstruction) show enough modern features to justify H. naledi's placement in the genus Homo. Artist John Gurche spent some 700 hours reconstructing the head from bone scans, using bear fur for hair.The decade has seen numerous advances in understanding our complex origin story, including new dates on known fossils, spectacularly complete fossil skulls, and the addition of multiple new branches. In 2010, National Geographic explorer-at-large Lee Berger unveiled a distant ancestor named Australopithecus sediba. Five years later, he announced that South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind cave system contained fossils of a new species: Homo naledi, a hominin whose “mosaic” anatomy resembles that of both modern humans and far more ancient cousins. A follow-up study also showed that H. naledi is surprisingly young, living at least between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago.Other remarkable discoveries piled up in Asia. In 2010, a team announced that DNA pulled from an ancient Siberian pinky bone was unlike any modern human’s, the first evidence of a shadowy lineage now called the Denisovans. In 2018, a site in China yielded 2.1-million-year-old stone tools, confirming that toolmakers spread into Asia hundreds of thousands of years earlier than once thought. In 2019, researchers in the Philippines announced fossils of Homo luzonensis, a new type of hominin similar to Homo floresiensis, the “hobbit” of Flores. And newfound stone tools on Sulawesi predate modern humans’ arrival, which suggests the presence of a third, unidentified island hominin in Southeast Asia.Revolutionizing the study of ancient DNAAs DNA sequencing technologies have improved exponentially, the past decade has seen huge leaps in understanding how our genetic past shapes modern humans. In 2010, researchers published the first near-complete genome from an ancient Homo sapiens, kicking off a revolutionary decade in the study of our ancestors’ DNA. Since then, more than 3,000 ancient genomes have been sequenced, including the DNA of Naia, a girl who died in what is now Mexico 13,000 years ago. Her remains are among the oldest intact human skeletons ever found in the Americas. Also in 2010, researchers announced the first draft of a Neanderthal genome, providing the first solid genetic evidence that one to four percent of all modern non-Africans’ DNA comes from these close relatives.Revealing thousands of new exoplanetsHuman knowledge of planets orbiting distant stars took a giant leap forward in the 2010s, in no small part thanks to NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. From 2009 to 2018, Kepler alone found more than 2,700 confirmed exoplanets, more than half the current total. Among Kepler’s greatest hits: the first confirmed rocky exoplanet. Its successor TESS, launched in 2018, is starting its survey of the night sky and has already bagged 34 confirmed exoplanets.Ground-based surveys were also in on the action. In 2017, researchers announced the discovery of TRAPPIST-1, a star system just 39 light-years away that hosts a whopping seven Earth-size planets, the most found around any star other than the sun. The year before, the Pale Red Dot project announced the discovery of Proxima b, an Earth-size planet that’s orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the sun at a mere 4.25 light-years away.Entering the Crispr eraDNA HACKING TOOL ENABLES SHORTCUT TO EVOLUTIONWatch: Learn—and visualize—how CRISPR technology works in this animated graphic video.The 2010s marked huge advances in our ability to precisely edit DNA, in large part thanks to the identification of the Crispr-Cas9 system. Some bacteria naturally use Crispr-Cas9 as an immune system, since it lets them store snippets of viral DNA, recognize any future matching virus, and then cut the virus’s DNA to ribbons. In 2012, researchers proposed that Crispr-Cas9 could be used as a powerful genetic editing tool, since it precisely cuts DNA in ways that scientists can easily customize. Within months, other teams confirmed that the technique worked on human DNA. Ever since, labs all over the world have raced to identify similar systems, to modify Crispr-Cas9 to make it even more precise, and to experiment with its applications in agriculture and medicine.While Crispr-Cas9’s possible benefits are huge, the ethical quandaries it poses are also staggering. To the horror of the global medical community, Chinese researcher He Jiankui announced in 2018 the birth of two girls whose genomes he had edited with Crispr, the first humans born with heritable edits to their DNA. The announcement sparked calls for a global moratorium on heritable “germline” edits in humans.Seeing the cosmos as never beforeThe Event Horizon Telescope—a planet-scale array of ground-based radio telescopes—unveiled the first image of a supermassive black hole and its shadow in 2019. The image reveals the central black hole of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the Virgo cluster.The 2010s brought with them several major observations that are revolutionizing our study of the universe. In 2013, the European Space Agency launched Gaia, a spacecraft that is collecting distance measurements for more than a billion stars in the Milky Way, as well as velocity data for more than 150 million stars. The dataset helped scientists make a 3D movie of our home galaxy, yielding an unprecedented look at how galaxies form and change over time.In 2018, scientists released the final version of the Planck satellite’s measurements of the early universe’s faint afterglow, which contains vital clues to cosmic ingredients, structure, and rate of expansion. Puzzlingly, the expansion rate Planck saw differs from today’s, a potential "crisis in cosmology" that may require new physics to explain. Also in 2018, the massive Dark Energy Survey released its first batch of data, which will help with searches for hidden patterns in our universe’s structure. And in April 2019, scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope revealed the first-ever image of a black hole’s silhouette, thanks to a massive global effort to peer into the heart of the galaxy M87.Unveiling ancient artA worker takes measurements of stone rings inside Bruniquel Cave in France that may have been constructed by Neanderthals.Discoveries from around the world have reinforced that art—or at least doodling—was an older and more global phenomenon that once thought. In 2014, researchers showed that hand stencils and a “pig-deer” painting in Sulawesi’s Maros cave sites were at least 39,000 years old, making them as old as Europe’s most ancient cave paintings. Then, in 2018, researchers announced the discovery of cave art in Borneo that’s between 40,000 and 52,000 years old, further pushing back the origins of figurative painting. And another 2018 find in South Africa, a stone flake that was cross-hatched some 73,000 years ago, may well be the world’s oldest doodle.Other controversial finds stoked debate over Neanderthals’ artistic skills. In 2018, researchers unveiled pigments and perforated marine shells found in Spain that were 115,000 years old, when only Neanderthals lived in Europe. That same year, another study claimed that some of Spain’s cave paintings are 65,000 years old. Many cave-art specialists have disputed the find, but if it holds, it could be the first evidence of Neanderthal cave paintings. And in 2016, researchers announced that a French cave contained bizarre circles of stalagmites set up about 176,000 years ago. If cave bears didn’t somehow make them, the circles’ age suggests yet more Neanderthal handiwork.Making interstellar firstsFuture historians might look back on the 2010s as the interstellar decade: For the first time, our spacecraft punctured the veil between the sun and interstellar space, and we got our first visits from objects that formed around distant stars.In August 2012, NASA’s Voyager 1 probe crossed the outer boundary of the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles our sun gives off. Voyager 2 joined its twin in the interstellar medium in November 2018 and captured groundbreaking data along the way. But the interstellar road is a two-way street. In October 2017, astronomers found ‘Oumuamua, the first object ever detected that formed in another star system and passed through ours. In August 2019, amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov found the second such interstellar interloper, a highly active comet that now bears his name.Opening doors to ancient civilizationsWHEN WAS THE TOMB OF CHRIST DISCOVERED?Where is the tomb of Jesus Christ? Is the site worshipped today the same one that was discovered during the time of Constantine? Find out how scientists used archaeology and other dating methods to solve one of history's greatest mysteries.Archaeologists made many extraordinary discoveries in the 2010s. In 2013, British researchers finally found the body of King Richard III—beneath what’s now a parking lot. In 2014, researchers announced that Peru’s Castillo de Huarmey temple complex still had an untouched royal tomb. In 2016, archaeologists revealed the first Philistine cemetery, offering an unprecedented window into the lives of the Hebrew Bible’s most notorious, enigmatic people. The following year, researchers announced that Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre dates back more than 1,700 years to Rome's first Christian emperor, appearing to confirm that it's built on the site identified by Rome as the burial place of Christ. And in 2018, teams working in Peru announced the largest mass child sacrifice site ever uncovered, while other scientists scouring Guatemala detected more than 60,000 newly identified ancient Maya buildings with airborne lasers.Big archaeological discoveries also surfaced from deep underwater. In 2014, a Canadian team finally found the H.M.S. Erebus, an ill-fated Arctic research vessel that sank in 1846. Two years later, another expedition located its sister ship, the H.M.S. Terror. In 2017, an effort led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen found the long-lost U.S.S. Indianapolis, which sank in 1945 and became one of the deadliest disasters in U.S. naval history. The Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project has found more than 60 historic shipwrecks at the bottom of the Black Sea—including a pristine 2,400-year-old vessel discovered in 2018. And in 2019, Alabama officials announced the discovery of the long-lost Clotilda, the last ship that ferried enslaved Africans to the United States.Breaking new ground in the solar systemPluto nearly fills the frame in this black and white image from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, taken on July 13, 2015 when the spacecraft was 476,000 miles (768,000 kilometers) from the surface. This is the last and most detailed image sent to Earth before the spacecraft’s closest approach to Pluto on July 14.This dramatic image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows the dark, rugged highlands known as Krun Macula (lower right), which border a section of Pluto’s icy plains. Click on the image and zoom in for maximum detail.Pluto's haze layer shows its blue color in this picture taken by the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The high-altitude haze is thought to be similar in nature to that seen at Saturn’s moon Titan. The source of both hazes likely involves sunlight-initiated chemical reactions of nitrogen and methane, leading to relatively small, soot-like particles (called tholins) that grow as they settle toward the surface. This image was generated by software that combines information from blue, red and near-infrared images to replicate the color a human eye would perceive as closely as possible.NASA's New Horizons captured this high-resolution enhanced color view of Charon, Pluto's moon, just before closest approach on July 14, 2015. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the spacecraft’s Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC); the colors are processed to best highlight the variation of surface properties across Charon. Charon’s color palette is not as diverse as Pluto’s; most striking is the reddish north (top) polar region, informally named Mordor Macula. Charon is 754 miles (1,214 kilometers) across; this image resolves details as small as 1.8 miles (2.9 kilometers).This composite of enhanced color images of Pluto (lower right) and Charon (upper left), was taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it passed through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015.In July 2015, NASA’s New Horizons probe made good on a decades-long quest to visit the icy world Pluto, sending back the first-ever images of the dwarf planet’s shockingly varied surface. And on New Year’s Day 2019, New Horizons pulled off the most distant flyby ever attempted when it snapped the first pictures of the icy body Arrokoth, a primordial leftover from the solar system’s infancy.A little closer to home, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrived at Vesta, the second-biggest body in the asteroid belt, in 2011. After mapping that world, Dawn darted off to orbit the dwarf planet Ceres, the asteroid belt’s largest object—becoming the first mission ever to orbit a dwarf planet, and the first to orbit two different extraterrestrial bodies. Near the decade’s end, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx and JAXA’s Hayabusa2 visited the asteroids Bennu and Ryugu, respectively, with the goal of returning samples back to Earth.Changing the course of diseaseIn response to the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, public health officials and the pharmaceutical company Merck fast-tracked rVSV-ZEBOV, an experimental Ebola vaccine. After a highly successful field trial in 2015, European officials approved the vaccine in 2019—a milestone in the fight against the deadly disease. Several landmark studies also opened new avenues to preventing the spread of HIV. A 2011 trial showed that preventatively taking antiretroviral drugs greatly reduced the spread of HIV among heterosexual couples, a finding confirmed in follow-up studies that included same-sex couples.Pushing reproductive limitsUsing gene editing, two mouse moms birthed this pup, as described in a 2018 study. Grown to adulthood, the mouse born to same-sex parents now has her own babies.In 2016, clinicians announced the birth of a “three-parent baby” grown from the father’s sperm, the mother’s cell nucleus, and a third donor’s egg that had its nucleus removed. The therapy—which remains ethically controversial—aims to correct for disorders in the mother’s mitochondria. One 2018 study made precursors of human sperm or eggs out of reprogrammed skin and blood cells, while another showed that gene editing could let two same-sex mice conceive pups. And in 2018, Chinese scientists announced the birth of two cloned macaques, the first time that a primate had ever been cloned like Dolly the sheep. Though researchers avow that the technique won’t be used on humans, it’s possible that it could work with other primates, including us.Tracking down the Higgs bosonHow does matter get mass? In the 1960s and 1970s, physicists including Peter Higgs and François Englert proposed a solution in the form of a novel energy field that permeates the universe, now called the Higgs field. This theorized field also came with its associated fundamental particle, what’s now called the Higgs boson. In July 2012, a decades-long search ended when two teams at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced the detection of the Higgs boson. The discovery filled in the last missing piece of the Standard Model, the spectacularly successful—albeit incomplete—theory that describes three of the four fundamental forces in physics and all known elementary particles.Rewriting paleontology textbooksThis decade has seen an explosion in our understanding of prehistoric life, as scientists have found stunning new fossils while expanding their analytical toolkits. In 2010, researchers supported by the National Geographic Society published the first full-body color reconstruction for a dinosaur, based on the discovery of fossilized pigments. In the years since, the palette has widened, as paleontologists have found dino-camouflage, feathers that ranged from black to blue to iridescent rainbow, and reddish skin on one of the best-ever fossils of an armored dinosaur. And in a remarkable feat of chemical sleuthing, researchers analyzed preserved fatty molecules and proved in 2018 that Dickinsonia, a primitive creature that lived more than 540 million years ago, was an animal.In 2014, paleontologists also revealed new fossils of the predatory dinosaur Spinosaurus that suggested it was a semiaquatic predator—the first known among dino-kind. A year later, a team in China unveiled the stunning fossil of Yi qi, a truly weird feathered dinosaur with membraned wings like a bat’s. Also in the last decade, scientists’ interest in Myanmar’s 99-million-year-old amber has surged, revealing a feathered dinosaur tail, a primitive baby bird, and all sorts of invertebrates trapped in the fossilized tree resin.Finding life’s building blocks on other worldsIn the last 10 years, space missions have given us a more sophisticated look at other worlds’ carbon-based organic molecules, which are necessary ingredients for life as we know it. The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission orbited and landed on Comet 67P Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The data it collected between 2014 and 2016 gave us an astonishingly close look at the raw materials that ancient impacts might have brought to Earth. Before NASA’s Cassini probe died in 2017, it confirmed that the watery plumes of Saturn’s moon Enceladus contain large organic molecules, a clue that it has the right stuff for life. And in 2018, NASA announced that its Curiosity rover had found organic compounds on Mars, as well as a bizarre seasonal cycle in the red planet’s atmospheric methane levels.Ringing climate alarms louder than everAlexandria Villasenor, 13, skips school on Fridays to strike in the name of climate change. Every week, rain or shine, she sits on a bench in front of the United Nations in New York City with her… Read MorePHOTOGRAPH BY SARAH BLESENER, THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTYThroughout this decade, atmospheric carbon dioxide were reaching levels that are unprecedented in modern times, with record temperatures to match. On May 9, 2013, global CO2 levels reached 400 parts per million for the first time in human history, and by 2016, CO2 levels were staying firmly above this threshold. As a result, the whole world felt an uptick in warming; 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 were the five hottest years on record since 1880. Starting in 2014, warming oceans kicked off a global coral bleaching event. Corals around the world suffered die-offs, including parts of the Great Barrier Reef. In 2019, Australia declared the island-dwelling Bramble Cay melomys extinct from sea level rise, the first known mammal lost to modern climate change.In a series of major reports, the world’s scientists forcefully called attention to Earth’s altered climate, the risks it poses, and the need to respond. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its fifth assessment of climate change’s reality and consequences, and a year later, the world’s nations negotiated the Paris Agreement, the global climate accord that aims to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius—which world leaders and scientists consider a dangerous threshold. In October 2018, the IPCC published another grim report that outlined the huge costs of warming even 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100—which is likely the minimum the planet will face. In the face of such huge challenges, record-breaking climate protests have swept the world, many led by youth activists.Discovering—and rediscovering—speciesModern biologists are identifying new species at a blistering pace, naming 18,000 new species a year on average. In the past decade, scientists described several charismatic mammal species for the first time, such as the Myanmar snub-nosed monkey, the Vangunu giant rat, and the olinguito, the first newfound carnivore in the Western Hemisphere since the late 1970s. The ranks of other animals groups also swelled, as scientists described newfound fish with “hands,” tiny frogs smaller than a dime, a giant Florida salamander, and many others. In addition, some animals, such as Vietnam’s saola and China’s Ili pika, were spotted once again after having gone missing for years.But along with these many finds, scientists have tallied the exponential rate of modern extinctions. In 2019, scientists warned that a quarter of plant and animal groups are threatened with extinction, suggesting that as many as a million species—both known and unknown to science—are now at risk of dying out, some within decades.Kicking off a new spaceflight eraThe 2010s were a pivotal transition period for spaceflight, as access to low-Earth orbit and beyond became a more global—and commercial—enterprise. In 2011, China launched its first space laboratory, Tiangong-1, into orbit. In 2014, India’s Mars Orbiter Mission arrived at the red planet, making India the first country ever to successfully arrive at Mars on its first try. In 2019, Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL attempted the first privately funded lunar landing, and China’s Chang’e-4 mission performed the first soft landing on the lunar farside. The global astronaut corps also grew more diverse: Tim Peake became the first professional British astronaut, Aidyn Aimbetov became the first post-Soviet Kazakh cosmonaut, and the United Arab Emirates and Denmark sent their first astronauts to space. What’s more, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch performed the first all-female spacewalk.In the U.S., after the last space shuttle mission launched in 2011, private companies angled to fill the void. In 2012, SpaceX launched the first commercial resupply mission to the ISS, and in 2015, Blue Origin and SpaceX became the first companies to successfully launch reusable rockets to space and then vertically land them back on Earth, a milestone for cheaper launches to low-Earth orbit.Seeing animals’ unexpected sidesEXCLUSIVE: "GLOWING" SEA TURTLE DISCOVEREDWatch: National Geographic Emerging Explorer David Gruber discovers a biofluorescent sea turtle near the Solomon Islands.The past decade has revealed unusual traits and behaviors across the animal kingdom. In 2015, National Geographic explorer David Gruber found that hawksbill sea turtles fluoresce green and red—the first biofluorescence ever recorded in a reptile. In 2016, researchers showed that the Greenland shark can live at least 272 years, making it the longest-lived vertebrate yet known. Our understanding of animal tool use also improved: One 2019 study showed for the first time that Visayan warty pigs use tools, and several studies showed that Brazil’s capuchins have been using tools for at least 3,000 years, the oldest such non-human record found outside Africa. In an extremely rare 2018 sighting, biologists in Kenya scientifically documented a black leopard in Africa for the first time since 1909.Redefining the units of scienceTo understand the natural world, scientists must measure it—but how do we define our units? Over the decades, scientists have gradually redefined classic units in terms of universal constants, such as using the speed of light to help define the length of a meter. But the scientific unit of mass, the kilogram, remained pegged to “Le Grand K,” a metallic cylinder stored at a facility in France. If that ingot’s mass varied for whatever reason, scientists would have to recalibrate their instruments. No more: In 2019, scientists agreed to adopt a new kilogram definition based on a fundamental factor in physics called Planck’s constant and the improved definitions for the units of electrical current, temperature, and the number of particles in a given substance. For the first time ever, all our scientific units now stem from universal constants—ensuring a more accurate era of measurement.

The short answer is yes as in the modern battle there is a need for IT support on the tactical battle field and armies are quickly ramping up its efforts to integrate cyber operations at the tactical level. According to Jeff Schogol, Cyberspace is an active war zone that requires adept operators capable of both cerebral stamina but also physical endurance to handle future front-line operations alongside infantry and special operators to carry out disinformation campaigns, destructive operations, aid battalion landing teams storming a beach, or hunt down high-value targets in dense urban megacities.The longer answer if you are interested, I leave to Shawn Snow, who describes the impact of cyber and electronics warfare particularly well in an article of Marine Times.Closer to the fight: Inside the Corps’ plan to deploy tech experts alongside gruntsBy: Shawn Snow   March 27, 20181.1KEventually the Corps will see cyber and electronic warfare Marines on equal par with combat arms. “I think we are almost there right now,” said Dakota Wood of the Heritage Foundation. (Sgt. Jessika Braden/Marine Corps)The tip of the spear is not just for grunts anymore.The Marine Corps’ is setting in motion plans to push Marines trained in cyber operations and electronic warfare into forward-deployed combat units.For example, sitting on the commandant’s desk awaiting his signature is a plan to alter the traditional 13-man rifle squad by adding a Marine proficient in drone operations and electronic warfare.In a sign that the Corps is looking to uphold its tradition of “Every Marine a Rifleman” in the era of cyber operations, officials in March issued a statement to shut down a proposal that sought to allow civilians with vital cyber skills to bypass boot camp or The Basic School for officers.Every Marine a rifleman no more?The Corps considers letting people with cyber skills skip boot camp and start out as NCOs.By: Jeff SchogolThe Marine Corps recently created a cyber career field for the first time.And the Corps is quickly ramping up its efforts to integrate cyber operations at the tactical level. For the first time last year, the Marine Forces Cyber ­supported a training exercise in each Marine Expeditionary Force.Collectively, Marine Corps’ changes in recent months are pushing back on the public’s general perception of cyber and intel operators as Mountain Dew ­drinking basement dwellers who operate far from the front and separately from the Corps combat units.“Everyone has this picture in their mind of the pudgy overweight kid sitting on the couch in the dark of the night hacking into someone’s system — that’s not accurate,” said Dakota Wood, a retired Marine officer and researcher at the Heritage Foundation.“You can actually achieve physical effects via cyberattack,” Wood said.Eventually the Corps will see cyber and electronic warfare on equal par with combat arms.“I think we are almost there right now,” he said.As the Corps prepares for the prospect of facing down rising near-peer rivals like Russia and China, the Marines are ­prioritizing the recruitment and retention of top talent in fields like cyber, electronic warfare and Marines with coding and computer skill sets.It’s a change that could have profound impacts across the Corps culturally and operationally. It may change the shape of the Corps and result in a top-heavy force of senior enlisted and warrant officers who undergo extensive — and costly — training. The Corps will not want to let those Marines leave after a single enlistment, as many grunts have historically done.But finding and keeping those Marines will be a challenge as those same skills will be in top demand from high-paying civilian employers.Yet top leaders in the Marine Corps and across the Defense Department believe a key factor to recruit and retain a growing cyber force is offering those unique cyber-trained experts an opportunity to work on missions unlike any found outside the military.Cyberspace is an active war zone that requires adept operators capable of both cerebral stamina but also physical endurance to handle future front-line operations alongside infantry and special operators to carry out disinformation campaigns, destructive operations, aid battalion landing teams storming a beach, or hunt down high-value targets in dense urban megacities.It’s a realization by top Marine officials that a future Marine force will need to be more tech savvy and skilled in intelligence collection, exploiting the ­electromagnetic spectrum, and ­operating in a hostile information environment if the Corps wants to compete with more sophisticated rivals.COMPANY-LEVEL CYBER TEAMSThough some military officials have told Marine Corps Times the Marine cyber force is not quite capable of leveraging cyber for infantry squad sized ­element, the military is certainly ­preparing for tactical level employment.In the fall of 2015 the Army carried out a large-scale exercise involving the infantry, a Stryker brigade and the 201st Expeditionary Military Intelligence Brigade, and the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington.The intent of the exercise was to demonstrate how offensive cyber operations at the tactical level could help grunts on the ground discriminate threats in a region and locate high-value targets.And the Corps has been carrying out similar exercises, Marine officials told Marine Corps Times. The force is currently codifying cyberspace training scenarios across a range of tactical units to include aviation and ground ­pounders, and Marine cyber teams have been participating in joint training exercises, according to Capt. Christopher Harrison, a Marine spokesman.The 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment's Cpl. Jason L. Paul radios his patrol's security element as battalion commander Lt. Col. Patrick Cashman observes a reconnaissance robot's camera feed Sept. 23, 2009. (Master Sgt. Chris W. Cox/Marine Corps)Those cyber teams are already being pushed down all the way to the company level, Lt. Gen. Robert S. Walsh, the commanding general for Marine Corps Combat Development Command, testified before lawmakers in mid-March.Cyber is not just an operator sitting in a room stateside trying to defend the network from hostile actors. There are numerous offensive capabilities.Marines engaged in a future fight with China in the South China Sea could use cyberattacks to place disinformation in enemy ships or guidance systems. ­Attacks could be used to surveil or locate enemy forces.A Marine landing force “might want to confuse the enemy for a period of time so that a ground maneuver element is able to successfully be completed,” Wood said.With the proliferation of ­technology across the globe, even small ragtag ­militias, criminal gangs and terror groups have leveraged technology to carry out nefarious goals and ­objectives from illicit financing ­operations to propaganda.But Marines operating in this new high-threat information environment will need to be able to exploit this information and data to gain tactical superiority on the battlefield. That will require EW operators and cyber specialists who can operate at the tactical level while surveilling the information environment to aid Marines in discriminating hostiles from civilians.“You will see cyber operators right alongside air operations officers, logisticians, and artillery fires coordinators, it’s just going to be another component that a Marine Corps unit would have in the field,” he explained.The new cyber field will help professionalize the cyber operators and build credibility within the Marine community.RETENTION CHALLENGESThe Corps plans to grow by just over 1,000 Marines in the coming year, many of those new Marines will be cyber and intelligence operators.“The Marine Corps Force 2025 ­changes some of the capability sets that we need and some of the skill sets we need,” Gen. Robert B. Neller, the commandant of the Marine Corps, told lawmakers in early March. “So those 1,000 people are already asked for in a number of different ways, whether they be cyber, more intel analysis, more security cooperation, ability people to do advisers and different people here and there, some are civilians.”It’s a tall order for a Corps that hasn’t had a professional cyber occupational field until just a few weeks ago and recruitment pool where 90 percent of the American youth are uninterested in joining the military. Moreover, 60 percent of the Corps is under the age of 25, a push to recruit top educated talent will invariable lead to an older Corps with more senior enlisted and warrant officers, something the force has not seen in its history.U.S. Marines Cpl. David Chung, left, and Lance Cpl. Bryce Moldovan, right, field radio operators with Headquarters Regiment, 1st Marine Logistics Group, work with a Very Small Aperture Terminal-Large antenna during a field exercise at Camp Pendleton, California, March 1. (Staff Sgt. Rubin J. Tan/Marine Corps)And to compound the issue, the ­training pipeline for a basic cyber ­operator whether defense or offense can take nearly three years.A future cyber Marine will need to complete basic training, Marine Combat Training, then attend the six-month ­primary cyber school known as the Joint Cyber Analysis Course aboard Corry Station, Florida. Follow-on schools can take another six months and further on-the-job training required to certify future cyber specialists can take a year or more, military officials told Marine Corps Times.“They’re going to be older. … It’s going to take longer to make these Marines.”“I think it’s intuitive that the training pipeline and the availability to do that, it’s going to take you several years,” Neller said at a National Defense Industrial Association event in early March about the challenges in retaining and recruiting a cyber force. “You’re going to have to stay longer, I’m going to have to have some return on my investment.”Also, not every cyber operator wants to sit behind a desk, especially when looking at a pool of applicants who are interested in a branch of service known for combat and physical prowess.Lt. Gen. Rex C. McMillian, the ­commander of Marine Forces Reserves echoed some of those sentiments before lawmakers on Capitol Hill on March 6 during a readiness hearing.The Corps has been trying to attract former Marines who’ve gone onto civilian cyber and tech school for the Reserves, a lot of those folks are interested in coming back into the Corps as cyber operators with the reserves but with one caveat: “that it’s attached to an operational unit, they’re not so interested in sitting in a command and control center — you know the hub of government — and watching threats come in, they want to be out on the pointy end of the spear so to speak,” McMillian said.The Corps is considering plans to treat its cyber specialists much like they do with aviators. Pilots entering the Corps are required to serve a certain length of time, and that clock doesn’t start until the aviator finishes flight training.The Marines may require cyber folks to serve for a certain period of time after completion of formal training, both Neller and Assistant Commandant Glenn M. Walters have hinted at.But the Corps is pushing hard on cyber as it faces new global challenges and rising peers where a looming fight on the horizon will have Marines once again fighting “to get to the fight,” Neller often says.The Corps is in the process of standing up two new cyber reserve companies on both coasts, the force has bolstered the new Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group, and Marine officials on Capitol Hill have sung praises about new initiatives to turn Marines into better thinkers with tools like 3-D printing.The new 1700 occupational field has 1,100 billets for those Marines interested in defensive and offensive cyber operations. But, some roles will have a mix of contractor and civilian support. Across Marine Forces Cyberspace Command, or MARFORCYBER, including the Marine Corps Cyberspace Warfare Group and the Marine Corps Cyberspace Operations Group, there are 1,200 authorized bullets for Marines and civilians, according to Harrison.And Neller has recently approved growing staff and command personnel at MARFORCYBER by roughly 500.The Corps is amid a massive ­overhaul to retool a force that has been ­entrenched in counterinsurgency operations for the past 16 years. Marines have taken for granted operating in low-tech threat environments but in a future fight, the Corps is likely to be more disbursed with strained logistics trains, and the force will need personnel capable of battling in a multi domain battle space that includes the electromagnetic spectrum and problem solvers that can fix serious issues on the fly.“As we grow the Marine Corps by another fourteen hundred Marines, we will enhance cyber information operations, special operations and ­intelligence, we must ensure steady and consistent funding to ensure we retain the highest quality, most technically-skilled Marines,” Lt. Gen. Brian D. Beaudreault, the deputy commandant Plans, Policies, and Operations, told lawmakers in early March.