Citizen Mars: the bonus bits

The Mars One candidates have a single goal: to help establish the first human settlement on the Red Planet. Over the course of five episodes, we’ve seen them weigh up what it takes to become a Mars One astronaut and the costs of leaving everyone and everything behind. Now, in these bonus clips, they’re asked how they would face some particularly challenging situations in their new Martian habitat.

Source: Citizen Mars

TalkTalk hack: exactly 156,959 customers had personal details stolen

Two weeks after TalkTalk confirmed a “significant and sustained cyberattack” on its website, the company has revealed exactly how much data was stolen. Hackers obtained personal details for 156,959 customers, including their names, email addresses and phone numbers. A week ago it placed the figure at “less than 1.2 million” — and while that was technically accurate, today’s update should feel like a radical downgrade. Of those affected customers, TalkTalk says 15,656 bank account numbers and sort codes were obtained in the attack. That’s down from the “less than 21,000” it had stated previously.

TalkTalk has also clarified that the 28,000 obscured credit and debit card numbers that were taken — this figure hasn’t budged from last week — can’t be used for financial transactions. In its previous update, the company broke out the number of stolen customer dates of birth too, but this information is noticeably absent in today’s statement — we suspect it’s been bundled into the new 156,959 figure, which simply covers “personal details.” TalkTalk is keen to emphasise that overall, only four percent of its customers have any “sensitive personal data” at risk.

Source: TalkTalk

The New York Times VR app launches with portraits of refugee children

At a time when virtual reality is changing the way we experience entertainment, it was only a matter of time before news outlets turned to immersive storytelling. The New York Times was one of the first major news outlets to announce its VR efforts last month. Today they launched the NYT VR app with three poignant portraits — a 9-year-old Sudanese boy, a 12-year-old Syrian girl and an 11-year-old boy from eastern Ukraine — to highlight the plight of 30 million children who have been displaced by war. The Times is making a Google Cardboard kit available to its domestic subscribers along with their Sunday editions on November 8, but the stories can also be viewed without a headset on both iPhone and Android devices.

Scientists map high-temp superconductivity in 3D for the first time

High-temperature superconductivity represents a potential breakthrough across multiple fields of technology, from MRIs to levitating trains, hoverboards and computing. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered the first 3D model of the elements involved in high-temperature superconductivity, uncovered using powerful magnetic pulses and “some of the brightest X-rays on the planet,” according to a press release. Superconductivity is a quantum mechanical phenomenon that occurs in certain materials when they’re cooled to extreme temperatures, at which point they conduct zero electrical resistance and expel their magnetic fields. If humans can harness superconductivity at room temperature, the technology could take off in a massive way (Did someone say singularity?).

The US wants the world to offer more airwaves for 5G and drones

The US doesn’t just want to carve out space for 5G cellular service on its own frequencies — it wants the rest of the world to follow suit. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is calling on other countries to free up more of their wireless spectrum for the sake of 5G, drones and flight tracking systems. Ideally, this would create a wide-enough demand for advanced wireless that the economies of scale make sense. Your favorite phone or robot makers might be more likely to embrace the technology if they know that it’ll be useful across the planet, rather than one or two regions.

Source: Reuters