Beyond Infinity

The China Academy of Space Technology is aiming high, with an orbiter, lander and rover mission to Mars scheduled for 2020. Thirteen payloads will be carried, including ground-penetrating radar and a methane-sensitive spectrometer to look for hints of biological processes. But getting there aint easy, with more than half of all Mars missions ending in failure.

Monsanto has been ordered to pay $290m to Dewayne Johnson, a Californian groundskeeper riddled with cancer after working with the herbicide Round Up. Simon Mulvany of Save The Bees Australia offers his thoughts on how this landmark case could open the door to over 4000 related law suits. He explains the terrible effects of Round Up on dogs and bees, and outlines alternative safe strategies to control weeds.

Google Plus, Google's failed social networking platform, suffered a significant security breach of users' private profile data but failed to disclose it immediately out of fear of 'reputational damage'.

Peptides extracted from Australia's deadly funnel web spider appear to be very effective in selectively killing melanoma skin cancer cells and Tasmanian Devil facial cancer cells. And there could be other uses in the biopharmaceutical industry.

In an effort to tap China's 750 million internet users, Google has secretly developed a search engine for the Chinese government that incorporates tight censorship and blacklists. Yet under pressure from free speech advocates, Google says the custom search engine may never be used.

There were only 40,000 cases of influenza in the 2018 Australian flu season, compared with 230,000 the year before - thanks mainly to an effective (and lucky) national vaccination program.

One of the biggest and most damaging malware attacks of the past 10 years, Wannacry infected millions of computers running Windows XP, 7 and 10 around the world, compromising hospitals, airports and government systems. Now the FBI has charged North Korean programmer Park Jin Hyok for a string of big cyber attacks, including Wannacry, the hacking of Sony Pictures in 2014 and stealing $81 million from a bank in Bangladesh.

A flawed genius or just chronically over-worked? Elon Musk's behaviour over the past few months has raised eyebrows among investors and regulators. Tesla's share price has fallen nearly 30% and the hunt is on to find a person to assume some of the responsibilities currently shouldered by the company's founder and CEO.

A survey of British school kids showed that 63% would be happy if social media had never been invented. Other studies suggest that younger crew are becoming disenchanted with Facebook, while older generations are getting on board.

RangerBot, developed at the Queensland University of Technology, is a compact autonomous submarine that can identify and kill crown of thorns starfish with a lethal injection of animal bile. In future, fleets of these robotic bounty hunters could help tame the scourge of coral-killing sea stars which threaten the Great Barrier Reef.