Warner Bros/DC Comics
Wonder Woman 1984 was originally supposed to be released in December 2019, and it shows: the plot concerns a failed businessman turned television personality who – through greed and hubris – takes the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
The film, a sequel to the 2017 origin story
Wonder Woman, stars Gal Gadot as Diana Prince (aka Princess of Diana of Themyscira, aka Wonder Woman), who is keeping a low profile – foiling the odd low-level crime while working in the archives of the Smithsonian museum.
Advertisement
Batman vs Superman and
Justice League – are still years in the future. But it’s been decades since the events of her first standalone film, set during the First World War, and Prince still pines for American pilot Steve Trevor (played by Chris Pine), whose death still haunts her. That changes when her Smithsonian colleague Barbara Minerva, a klutzy gemologist played by Kristen Wiig, chances across a dangerous artefact with the
Sunday 13 December 2020
A group of designers from the Royal College of Art want to reinvent your mouth as a device for multi-factor authentication
Royal Collage of Art
Cybersecurity experts cite a golden trio of requirements for the utmost safety: something you know, like a password or PIN; something you have, like a smartphone or fob; and something you are, like a retina scan or fingerprint.
This is known as multi-factor authentication, but even a three-pronged approach could be vulnerable to determined hackers. Passwords can be stolen or snooped by cameras, or revealed through carelessness – in August, login details for computer systems at the UK Passport Office in Plymouth were visible on a flip-chart through a window.
NU QUANTUM
There are three kinds of light, says Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, the CEO and co-founder of Nu Quantum – a quantum photonics company based in Cambridge. Chaotic light is the stuff we encounter on a daily basis – street lamps and light bulbs. Coherent light covers things with structure, like lasers – which were first built in 1960, and have had a revolutionary impact on everything from surgery to home entertainment.
Palacios-Berraquero hopes that the third category, single-photon sources, could have an equally transformative effect. At Nu Quantum, she is working on technologies that can emit and detect single photons – the smallest possible units of light. “Photonic quantum technologies are about manipulating information – processing, communicating and securing information encoded in single particles of light,” she says. “That allows you to do different things – more powerful calculations, or better security.”