The experiment was designed to see if the crew could conduct experiments and deal with stressful situations they might experience, including emergencies and communication delays. No murderous computers were involved. The American scientists running the experiment forced their counterparts to endure sleep deprivation, monitored their interactions with Mission Control, and then looked at how stress and fatigue impacted the performance of their duties.

The scientists running the experiment consider it a great opportunity. Said project leader Charles A. Czeislder, who worked on the project,

We've done experiments in the sleep lab to test the efficacy of lighting interventions, but that is a highly controlled environment. By transitioning studies into an operational environment, like the 105-Day Mission, we have the opportunity to learn how to best deploy interventions in a realistic mission setting. This analog is a great intermediate step before implementation on an actual spaceflight.

He and colleagues are hoping that the experiment will allow them not only to help astronauts survive long flights in cramped quarters, but provide some data to help other sleep-derived Earthbound professionals with stressful jobs to stay awake and function better.

In the sleep deprivation experiment, scientists expect to prove that bathing sleep-deprived workers in green light rather than red suppresses the body's production of melatonin, allowing them to work more effectively during overnight shifts. In the stress impact experiment, scientists used facial recognition-style software during videotaped cognitive tests, to have the computer look for signs of stress or negative emotions, in an effort to validate the software for use during real missions. Meanwhile, they went through tests that measured their attentiveness, response times and impulsiveness. In the final experiment, the crew experimented with differing levels of autonomy with mission control to track whether lots of interaction with management was more or less helpful to individual relationships and job performance. Initial results suggest that they didn't appreciated being nagged any more than the rest of us.

105-Day Mars Simulation: U.S. Studies Focus On Improving Work Performance [National Space Biomedical Research Institute ]

The Plukanians have bizarre customs, including the fact that when we see two guys, one of them always has a bell hanging from one nostril. And they have a little device that looks like a thumb drive, but can tell whether you're upper class or lower class by scanning you (which one of the Plukanians attempts to do in this clip.) They're technologically advanced but have weird shortages, and a box of matches our travelers are carrying becomes the most valuable object on the planet. An animated remake (hopefully with English subtitles) is in the works for next year.

This game is based on a trilogy of novels by Russian author Alexander Zorich, which present an alternate future where the Russians end up dominating outer space. As they struggle to control their extraterrestrial colonies and work with four different alien races, you take command of a ship and help quell uprisings and explore the universe. Complete planetary systems are modeled, and you can take your ships all the way from high orbit down into the atmosphere for your peeping pleasure. Hopefully you've developed some extrasensory abilities along the way as well, because it looks like you'll need them to keep track of everything happening on-screen at once. The Tomorrow War will be out for PC gamers later this year, and with any luck there will be an English translation coming soon after.

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Our tour of the interwebs in search of Страху нет yielded the band Mumiy Troll, who have been playing music in Russia since 1981. We couldn't find hide nor hair of this song on the site, though. You can hear their entire new album played on their website if you're patient enough to endure their brain-melting powers of rock. Maybe this will spawn a whole slew of scifi music videos that tell an epic story. We can only hope! After all, we're tired of listening to Styx's Kilroy Was Here over and over again.