It was an accident waiting to happen. Despite all efforts by Joachim Müller-Jung the conversation slowly but surely swerved towards self-driving cars. Up until then, I had been rather bored.

Yahoo has discovered a 3-year-old security breach that enabled a hacker to compromise more than 1 billion user accounts, breaking the company's own humiliating record for the biggest security breach in history.

Britain's fertility regulator has decided that "three-parent baby” treatments can go ahead, opening the way for parents to be treated as early as next spring. This landmark decision makes Britain the first country in the world to offer licenses for this treatment. Earlier this year, a baby was born in Mexico through the technique.

You've just published a new book, "Welcome to the Universe" with co-authors J. Richard Gott and Michael Strauss. It's based on a course you taught at Princeton University. And it starts with a thought exercise in numbers as a way to describe the size and scale of the universe. So I wanted to try one out on you… … and I'm sure you're scared! Thing is, I was talking to this kid the other day, and I tried to describe the universe as this endless expanse. But I also said how that confused me, because surely the universe has to exist in something. And he said, "Well, what about endless - plus one?" And I was totally stumped by that, so I thought I'd hand it over to you. Endless plus one? Is that possible?

Nowadays, the smartphone is our constant companion: Spotifiy for music, WhatsApp for messaging, Netflix for movies. We often use our phones for several hours per day, for private and work purposes. Some people even have the feeling they can't live without it. But because of the broad use of smartphones in society, it is hard to say when an individual person is addicted to media - or just a frequent user.

If all we do is listen to the technology industries - in all their various shapes and sizes - there is but one truth: digitalization is good. Or if you'll permit a line of Orwellian poetry: digital good, analog bad. Truths are seldom so simple or one-sided. Even in the digital world, we have the Boolean values "true" and "false," "on" and "off," and zeros and ones. And even these ignore the grey zones in between.

Even for the skeptics among us, it's hard to overstate the importance of this anniversary: 75 years ago - at the height of the Second World War - a 31-year-old German civil engineer called Konrad Zuse presented the Z3. It was the first programmable, automatic computer - and was widely viewed as the child of a family of machines we take for granted today, from desktop computers and mobile devices to the massive data centers controlling the world.

Yoshinori Ohsumi, of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, was awarded science's most prestigious award for "his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy," the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine announced in Stockholm on Monday October 3rd.

The thing that stands out most for me in your book "The Glass Cage" is the idea of automating moral choices. You suggest it's impossible to automate certain processes without automating moral choices too - for instance, how should a self-driving car be programmed to react in an accident if there's a chance only one of two lives can be saved? How do you feel about companies such as Apple and Google, who are developing self-driving cars, taking on the responsibility of making these moral choices for the rest of us?

Just setting up my twttr...again (account suspension was an internal mistake)," Dorsey tweeted late Tuesday. For about 15 minutes those trying to access Dorsey's account received a message stating that the account was suspended.

Julian Guthrie: Well, exactly. People think that SpaceX, Blue Origin and what Boeing is doing in the United States, and Virgin Galactic, is a new phenomenon. In terms of the largeness and the promise, it is. But my book, "How to make a Spaceship" tells this amazing, entrepreneurial story, how these people take a huge amount of risk to launch an industry … the renegades, the rocket-makers, the college-dropouts, who went after this $10 million (9.2 million euros) prize, this shared dream. You're talking about the XPrize, which was set up by Peter Diamandis.

Uber will seek to convince Europe's top court next week that it is a digital service, not a transport company, in a case that could determine whether app-based startups should be exempt from strict laws meant for regular companies.

Facebook Inc has quietly developed a censorship tool that could persuade China to allow the world's biggest social media network to re-enter the world's second largest economy after a seven-year ban, the New York Times (NYT) reported on Tuesday. Facebook developed the software -- which suppresses posts from appearing in people's news feeds in specific geographies -- with the support of Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, the newspaper said, citing unnamed current and former employees.

The emergence of start-ups providing technology and innovation-based solutions has secured relatively easy access to revenues. This time, technology may have offered Egyptian women a chance.

A report by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology showed that the number of mobile users increased by 0.01% in September compared to August, scoring 96.26 million users. The penetration of mobile services reached 108.5% of the total population.

We have all seen the pictures: Refugees who lost everything, but their clothes - and their mobile phones. Often when they get off the boat in Europe the first question is: "Where can I find water?" The second right afterwards: "Where can I find wifi?" Clinging to their mobile phones is crucial for surviving on the journey to Europe: To find the next water source or shelter, communicate with the human trafficker who promises the way out of misery and a path to a better place, to stay in touch with the family left behind and tell them that you are alive and well.

Full disclosure: I've been using Apple devices since the mid-1990s. My first was a grey plastic laptop with a 3.5 inch floppy drive. I am so locked-in, I think I must have thrown away the key myself. But I have an open mind. Which is good, because I've grown increasingly weary of the Cupertino mob's focus on consumer whizz-bangery. And its music app … aaah! Stop syncing what ain't there.

There's no doubt these are exciting times to be building new rockets and propulsion systems for space travel - "Unprecedented," says Casey Dreier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society. But so far most of that excitement has been felt in the US - not in Europe. There was a brief burst of commercial entrepreneurship in the early 1980s when the shuttle began to fly, Dreier says. Then, after the Challenger disaster, NASA pulled back from investing in commercial projects. Now, those projects are coming back.

Accusing TE Data of monopoly is nonsense, said Ahmed Osama, vice president and chief commercial officer of home and personal communications at Telecom Egypt and chairperson and managing director of TE Data.

You may often wonder: Is it my fault that I can't concentrate in an office with colleagues around me constantly chatting and talking on the phone? A new study shows that it's not. Background noise keeps you from thinking - particularly if these background noises are work-related conversations within earshot. That's what Japanese researchers say. A team led by Takahiro Tamesue, an associate professor at Yamaguchi University in Japan, had volunteers completing visual and auditory attention tests while listening to either "real" speech or voice-noises without any meaning.

German President Joachim Gauck awarded the three brains behind carbon concrete the German Future Prize for innovation on Wednesday. It is endowed with 250,000 euros ($264,000) . Worldwide, the building industry uses around 160 million tones of steel each year to reinforce concrete. In future, the advances made by winners Peter Offermann, Manfred Curbach and Chokri Cherif, the three Technical University of Dresden researchers behind the invention, could replace the use of steel in construction work for good.