Satellites are beaming and hackers are scheming, but first: a cartoon about the giggle economy.
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Today’s News
The largest scientific structure ever powers up in Africa
Towering above an ancient seabed in the Karoo—a remote semidesert in South Africa—is a seven-story dish antenna that will soon begin scanning the universe for its deepest secrets. It’s part of a group of 3,000 dishes, each 50 feet wide, that will eventually spread across eight additional African countries. That array will then join up to 1 million smaller antennas to form a single observatory—the largest scientific structure on the planet.
WhatsApp fixes yet another group chat security gap
WhatsApp fixed a security flaw this fall that allowed hackers to cause chaos in group chats with a specially crafted message that would crash the app, forcing users to uninstall WhatsApp altogether and in many cases lose their data. While this specific bug is now fixed, it highlights the challenge of maintaining end-to-end encryption in group chats. This isn’t the first group chat bug in WhatsApp, and it’s unlikely to be the last.
Fast Fact: 48
That’s how many people have died from a mysterious vaping-related lung illness that has swept the country. While antivaping laws are now coming into effect, they may be doing more harm than good. It turns out this lung disease may be the result of Vitamin E acetate, an ingredient found primarily in black market vapes, and e-cigarette bans could be driving smokers to more dangerous alternatives.
WIRED Recommends: Aeropress Go
If you are serious about brewing your own coffee as you travel, look no further than the Aeropress Go. Our reviewers gave it a 9/10.
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