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The UK's intelligence agencies (MI5, MI6, and GCHQ) are spying on everything you do, and with only the flimsiest of safeguards in place to prevent abuse, according to more than a thousand pages of documents published today as a result of a lawsuit filed by Privacy International.

The documents reveal the details of so-called "Bulk Personal Datasets," or BPDs, which can contain "hundreds to millions of records" on people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.

These records can be “anything from your private medical records, your correspondence with your doctor or lawyer, even what petitions you have signed, your financial data, and commercial activities,” Privacy International's legal officer Millie Graham Wood said in a statement. "The information revealed by this disclosure shows the staggering extent to which the intelligence agencies hoover up our data."

Audi has tested a number of autonomous cars at the race track. There was Shelley, a TTS it built with the Revs program at Stanford. And a pair of autonomous RS7s have given demos and passenger rides at Hockenheim in Germany and Sonoma Raceway in the US. (credit: Audi)

Taking a vehicle to the race track to improve it has been a thing almost as long as we've had cars. Henry Ford built his brand's name on his early racing exploits, and so have countless others. So it's natural that some of the people interested in self-driving cars have been thinking about how the track can benefit this new technology. Joshua Schachter is one such person, and he's organizing the first autonomous track day, to be held on May 28th-29th at Thunderhill Raceway in Willow, California.

Self-driving cars and racing are two of my favorite things, so I spoke to Schachter to find out more. The idea is to create a venue where you can "run what you brung," whether it's a fully autonomous car (or kart), a set of sensors, or maybe some control software. "If you squint at it, and it's automotive, come try it on the track," he said.

Interest in autonomous race cars is starting to build. Later this year, a series called Roborace will support Formula E in 2016-2017, for example. But Roborace will provide all the teams with identical cars; the job of the teams will be to write algorithms to make their car the fastest on the track.

(credit: Spanish Coches)

In San Francisco this morning, US District Judge Charles Breyer said Volkswagen Group would buy back nearly 500,000 2.0L diesel vehicles which were discovered in September to have software that illegally disabled the emissions control system during normal driving conditions.

VW Group is facing some 600 lawsuits that Judge Breyer is overseeing collectively, and the German automaker was compelled by court order to present a plan for fixing the faulty vehicles by today. Specifics of the plan will be hammered out in the coming months.

Volkswagen will also set up a fund for people who bought certain diesel Jettas, Golfs, Passats, Beetles, and Audi A3s after 2009. Breyer said this would offer customers "substantial compensation," on top of the car buyback.

The reentry capsule for the SJ-10 research mission is shown after landing in inner Mongolia on Monday. (credit: Xinhua)

Over the next couple of decades, NASA wants to extend the human presence into the Solar System, including onto the surface of Mars. Elon Musk founded SpaceX expressly to colonize the red planet by the 2020s or 2030s. For now, both the government and private sector have focused on “hardware”: the rockets, spacecraft, and technology needed to keep humans alive en route to Mars and on its surface. And these are not simple or inexpensive problems to solve.

One could argue, however, that the “software” problems may prove even more challenging. That is, can an embryo mature in space, be born, and grow into a healthy human being?

After a 12-day experiment in space this month, Chinese scientists claim they have done so. On April 6, the SJ-10 spacecraft launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu province carrying about 20 different experiments in a retrievable satellite module. It returned to Earth on Monday, landing in inner Mongolia.

(credit: Flickr user FreddieBrown)

Unemployment obviously has economic effects on people, but it can also have psychological impacts, sometimes triggering depressive episodes. However, until now, there has been no quantitative research evaluating consequences of unemployment on people’s feelings about money. A study published in PNAS finds that unemployment changes how people think about entitlement.

The study defines entitlement as the acknowledgement that someone has a right to keep, consume, or dispose of things that they have earned, including their salary. The idea of entitlement is important for understanding the labor market and workers’ self-interest. Generally, people who earn a higher income tend to be more self-interested, with minimal preference for wealth redistribution, whereas lower-income individuals tend to think that wealthier people should pay more taxes and poorer people should be eligible for social support.

The study examined participants’ attitudes on wealth redistribution and wealth entitlement twice, with a year-long gap between experiments. This setup allowed the researchers to study people who transitioned between various states of employment in the interim. The study was conducted in Spain, which has the third highest unemployment rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The attrition rate was 48 percent between the two experiments, and this paper focuses on 151 participants who were either employed or students for both experiments, or employed/students for the first experiment and unemployed for the second.