Vox Sentences: Someone tell Mike Pence who his running mate is

Mike Pence appears unfamiliar with the words and actions of one Donald J. Trump; the Nobel Prizes honor the inventor of the nanocar; and the NSA has another leaker on its hands.

The Gaslight Anthem

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

• There was a vice presidential debate last night! Mike Pence and Tim Kaine took a break from chaperoning your middle school dance to talk over each other for about an hour and a half. [Washington Post / Aaron Blake]
• Let's be honest: There are approximately zero people in the United States who are basing their vote for president on the performance of running mates at the VP debate, especially a VP debate that drew half the viewers of 2008's. [AP / Steve Peoples]
• That being said, Kaine's performance was … shaky. He interrupted both Pence and the moderator repeatedly, which came off as disrespectful and arguably sexist in the latter case. [Vox / Dara Lind]
• That led most people (us at Vox included) to judge Pence the victor. But he won, more or less, by repeatedly lying and denying that Donald Trump has said the things he has said about Vladimir Putin, or the people of Mexico, or wanting more countries to have nukes. Pence basically attempted to gaslight the entire country. [Slate / Jamelle Bouie]
• Most strikingly, he gave a long answer on Russia calling for American strength and resistance to Russian aggression, which completely contradicts Trump's platform. So insofar as Pence did well, he did so by distancing himself or denying the reality of his running mate's platform. It may have been a win for Pence, but it definitely wasn't for Trump. [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]
• The bad part for Pence: A lot of the things he denied Trump ever said are things that Trump is on video saying. So it was very easy for the Clinton campaign to cook up this video of all his denials, matched with proof that he was lying. [Hillary Clinton]

Nanocars in nanodriveways of nanohouses with nanolawns on nanohillsides

Atila Altuntas/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

• Nobel Prize winners! They're being announced this week. Who are they? What did they discover? Did they discover things? Let's find out!
• So far, three of the six awards have been announced. The latest, in chemistry, went to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart, and Ben Feringa, for their work on "nano-machines," which are "a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair" and include "switches, motors, shuttles and even something resembling a motorcar." [The Guardian / Hannah Devlin]
• Sauvage got the work started in 1983 by figuring out how to link two molecules into a mechanical chain — a connection weaker than a regular covalent bond, so the individual molecules could still move around. Stoddart used this technique to build a molecular shuttle: an "axle" with a molecular ring around it, a ring which can travel back and forth between ends of the axle. Feringa then figured out how to make a molecular-scale motor, and in 2011 built a nano-scale car. [Vox / Brad Plumer]
• It's not totally clear what practical applications nano-machines will have in the future, but their potential to help precisely direct where medicines go in the body, or to make self-healing materials (like a cell phone screen that irons out its own scratches), or to improve battery or processor abilities, is significant. [AFP]
• The three winners in physics — David Thouless, Duncan Haldane, and John Kosterlitz — worked on applying topology (the field of math that studies which properties of objects are preserved when they're stretched or twisted) to the study of matter at cold or condensed states. I'll let my colleague Brian Resnick explain in more detail. [Vox / Brian Resnick]
• Yoshinori Ohsumi was the sole winner for medicine, for his work on autophagy: the process wherein cells break down some of their components and repurpose them, for reasons like generating fuel and fighting infections. Mutations in autophagy-related genes can contribute to diseases like cancer and diabetes, and Ohsumi's work is relevant to developing treatments in those areas. [Vox / Julia Belluz]
• The Peace Prize announcement is expected at 5 am Eastern on Friday; the Economics Prize at 5:45 am on Monday at the earliest; and the Literature Prize on Thursday, October 13. [AP]

Booz I did it again, I played with your files, got lost in the game…

Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

• The FBI secretly arrested Harold Martin, a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor formerly positioned at the National Security Agency, in recent weeks, accusing him of stealing and distributing classified hacking software the agency uses to break into foreign governments' networks. [NYT / Jo Becker, Adam Goldman, Michael Schmidt, Matt Apuzzo]
• Booz, of course, was the same contractor that employed Edward Snowden. It basically serves only one client — the US government — and makes about a fifth of its revenue from intelligence work. It regularly employs veterans of the intelligence community; Mike McConnell, the former NSA director and director of National Intelligence, is a vice president, and current DNI James Clapper worked there in the 1990s. [NYT / Binyamin Appelbaum and Eric Lipton]
• Martin, however, does not appear to want to be a defiant Snowden-type figure. According to the criminal complaint, he admitted to investigators that he knowingly took documents and files from work to his home without authorization, and "knew what he had done was wrong." [Department of Justice]
• The arrest comes a couple months after a group calling itself "The Shadow Brokers" (after a character from Mass Effect) leaked what it claimed were stolen NSA hacking tools, and threatened to auction off even more powerful tools. [Washington Post / Andrea Peterson]
• Snowden himself had speculated that the Shadow Brokers hack was perpetrated by the Russian government… [Edward Snowden]
• …while national security journalist James Bamford argued it was probably an NSA leaker. [Reuters / James Bamford]
• To be clear, we do not know that Martin leaked the Shadow Brokers tools. But if he didn't, and just happened to be caught leaking NSA hacking software at roughly the same time that the Shadow Brokers leak happened … that's one hell of a coincidence. [Julian Sanchez]

Miscellaneous

• Old and busted: lab-grown meat. New hotness: lab-grown leather. [Wired / Michael Rundle]
• A straw poll of 43 NFL players found that 20 out of 22 black players plan to vote for Hillary Clinton — and all 21 white players plan to vote for Donald Trump. [Bleacher Report / Mike Freeman]
• Basra wanted to be the next Dubai, a global city funded by oil riches emerging after a decade of war. This is how the dream fell apart. [FT / Erika Solomon]
• Jordan Peele — like, of Key and Peele — made a psychological thriller. Not a thriller parody, a straight-up sincere thriller. And it looks really good! [io9 / Germain Lussier]
• DC doesn't have cash bail — the vast majority of defendants are released before trial, and the exceptions are determined entirely based on risk of reoffending or fleeing justice, not ability to pay. The rest of the country should follow. [Washington Post / Ann Marimow]

Verbatim

• "[Donald Trump] will gut you, and he will walk over your cold dead body, and he won't even flinch. He'll climb over your cold dead body and get onto his helicopter. I don't mean to be dramatic but that's what's at stake." [Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) via ABC News]
• "Who the fuck do you think you are, calling me a fat fuck? I'm the fucking governor of this state!" [Chris Christie to Ft. Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, via NYT / Kate Zernike]
• "Like tropes of 'entanglement' in postcolonialist works, these terms are red flags: they signal that an invalid inference from accidental juxtapositions is probably coming next." [Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews / John Davenport]
• "If you don’t have cable there are plenty of different ways to watch Trump’s running mate Mike Pence and Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine square off. Kaine, of course, is perhaps best known as the lead singer of the band Future Islands." [Gizmodo / Matt Novak]
• "The past two decades have been described as an era of hyper-globalization during which both the level and rate of global integration was judged as having intensified. Based on our analysis, it is reasonable to conclude that this period is over." [Brookings / Laurence Chandy and Brina Seidel]

Watch this: The formula for selling a million-dollar work of art

Some dead sharks are worth $12 million. [YouTube / Dion Lee]

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