Last week Russia's president Vladimir Putin unexpectedly removed one of his closest associates as chief-of-staff. The man who was appointed as the replacement to the post [is] Anton Vaino, a former diplomat and deputy chief of staff. Since then Vaino has become [a subject of interest] for his apparent authorship of several very peculiar academic articles, including one describing the invention of a mysterious device called the "Nooscope," ... entitled, "Capitalization of the Future." by a Russian academic journal. According to the paper: "The Nooscope is a device for recording changes in the Noosphere." Reading further, it consists of "spatial sensors" and can "make the invisible visible." One characteristic sentence reads: "The sensory network of the Nooscope, beginning from new-generation bank cards and finishing with 'smart dust,' straightforwardly identifies co-Being in time and space." Most grandly, the paper apparently written by Putin's new top aide states: "The Nooscope is the first device that allows the study of humanity's collective consciousness." In fact, the idea of "Noo" is not Vaino's invention but [was] developed as a theory in the early 20th-Century. The "Noosphere" generally means the sphere of human thought, that is the collective consciousness of mankind. The Noosphere has been studied elsewhere, including ... in the United States by scientists formerly part of Princeton University' controversial PEAR parapsychology lab. One of [Vaino's] co-authors, Viktor Saraev ... told [BBC's Russian-language service] the Nooscope was an "Internet of Things" device, working from Big Data.