I think the ability to put something into orbit would be a good benchmark for saying if a nation is any sort of space power.

The Raketenflugplatz crew were only a space proto-power before they started spending U.S. money.

If you are truly interested in this subject I suggest reading up on it. Here is a good place to start.

The number of reasons for knowing that this is not baryonic matter now numbers at least a dozen, but here is a starting point: good summary can be found here which I will quote from:

The is no place for "baryonic dark matter" to hide in the early universe: the temperature and density are high enough that all baryons are strongly coupled, and so all baryonic matter is the same.

Inferences based on early-universe physics are consistent with baryons comprising about 5% of the energy density within the present-day universe and nonbaryonic dark matter comprising about 26%. If the abundance of baryonic matter were much higher than that, then:

1. 1. The relative abundances of light elements/isotopes that emerged from primordial nucleosynthesis would be very different. For example, the fractional abundance of deuterium would be a lot lower, because with more baryons, there is more time for the deuterium to fuse into helium before the density of baryons drops too low.
2. 2. Sound waves in the primordial plasma would have much higher amplitudes, since sound can transmit through baryons but not through nonbaryonic dark matter. That would leave a clear imprint in the pattern of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.

If you don't own mineral rights you don't even own the land fairly close to the surface. And even if you do there is in fact no legal basis that gives unlimited ownership to the center of the earth -- at best U.S. courts have been inconsistent. There is definitely no basis in law establishing ownership below the depth of two miles, and between the surface and that two mile depth there are plenty of carve-outs that limit what you can do. Usually local governments can tunnel under your property without recourse to you, provided you do not suffer surface damages.

CNN / AP.

In Communist-Capitalist China VPNs tunnel you.

The topic is very poorly framed here. There are 3500 known mosquito species. Just 12 are known to cause human disease. Eliminating these 12 that have become evolutionarily co-adapted with pathogens to propagate human (and other mammalian) disease seems unlikely to cause any sort of ecological catastrophe, but certainly this must be thoroughly examined before we try to do it. It will also be essential that we know our methods only target the specific mosquito species.

Reading the paper's abstract (can't get the full article yet), not just the press release, I see that this is NOT the first time that an ergot producing fungus had been recovered from morning glory seeds, despite what the misleading headline would have us believe. This was the third such recovery from a morning glory species, and as we expect from co-evolution each is a different fungal species. Now we need to get the A. nervosa fungus isolated!

After the isolation and identification of the ergot alkaloids from the ergot fungi in the early 20th century the discovery of these same complex and delicate chemical structures in the Convolvulaceae (morning glories) was quite a surprise as they appeared to have evolved no where else in any of the plant kingdom (or elsewhere in the fungal kingdom for that matter).

So the theory was proposed that this was the result of a fungus that had long ago become an obligate parasite or endosymbiont in that plant family, and then had descended and co-evolved as the parent infection radiated out phylogenetically. The highest concentrations for example for found in Argyreia nervosa (the Hawaiian Baby Woodrose, actually from India). Later genomics succeeded in recovering evidence of a fungal genome in the morning glories that had traces of ergot alkaloids.

A surprising thing here is that, from the linked article:

This fungus was found just growing on a seed coat. Mycologists and botanists have been trying to identify the fungus that infects these genuses and species for more than half a century without success and they have failed to be isolated through many, many investigations. No one has seen the fungus emerge and grown on the surface of a seed before. How this happened needs explication.

Albert Hoffman was an extremely skilled synthetic chemist and he not only invented the techniqes used to produce lysergic acid derivatives, he synthesized a large number of them himself.

While working with the 25th dialkyl derivative of lysergic acid that he had prepared, LSD-25 (it was the diethyl derivative), he became the first person to be intoxicated by it, but how he managed to ingest it (probably about 25 micrograms) has never been determined. The procedures he used should have protected him from exposure but somehow that day did not.

Indeed. It is a "customer management" UI, designed to promote up-sell.

Said a wealthy, supremely well-connected, upper class male Roman citizen.

One may wonder why the vending machine simulation is talking about quantum mechanics, contacting the FBI, and threatening nuclear annihilation. Why is this part of the vending machine simulation? Also why it cannot understand such basic things as orders have to be delivered before it will actually have them.

And the fundamental reasons are:

• The are language models, they are only playing with the statistical frequencies of words in all the texts they have had scraped from the Internet. They know all the words in the world, and the language contexts is which they get used, but do not understand anything at all. They words have no meaning to them. So of course a vending machine company has access to anything that has ever been described as existing in the world -- they all just words. It has no concepts, knows literally nothing about the world, just the words that have been used to talk about it.
• As a giant statistic word-game player it does not know about such things as the properties of numbers or time or causality. That things must be delivered before you have them, and I am mildly surprised that it did not think it could restock all the machines indefinitely with just one delivery, not knowing that things get "used up".

Internet Time

Actually if a steel producer started to market freshly produced steel, did not add any scrap, and did not melt Co-60 sources into the steel as part of the production process (they actually did this for many years, and still do in some cases), clean steel would be available. But nuclear physicists are too small a market to make anyone bother.

Despite the always reliable summaries of facts that the anybody-can-edit Wikipedia has (/s) the problem with steel radioactive contamination is not nuclear bombs that have not been exploded in the atmosphere at all since 1980, and mostly before 1964. It is cobalt-60 radiation sources that get melted down into steel with some regularity, and the fact that virtually all steel in commerce includes (contaminated) scrap steel, even when a batch is mostly from freshly mined ore.

When producing fresh steel the industry, using conventional blast furnaces, decided to monitor erosion of the lining by putting Co-60 sources in the brick lining, and when the Co-60 disappeared (because it had gotten melted into the steel) they knew the lining needed to be replaced. So adding radioactive contamination was part of the production process. This is still done is some places, but mostly the Co-60 now comes from sources used to measure the thickness of steel, and every so often one of them ends up in the pile of scrap to be remelted.

But it is accurate to say that the contamination of steel started with the nuclear age because before 1945 there was no Co-60 to contaminate the steel with.