Tag: Science & Technology

LOS ANGELES (TIP): YouTube on October 21 unveiled a new $10-a-month subscription plan in the US called Red that combines ad-free videos, new original series, movies from top YouTubers, and on-demand unlimited streaming music.

Red builds on Google’s existing music streaming service by providing ad-free access to YouTube programming, along with features such as the ability to download videos to mobile devices and have music playing in the background while using other mobile apps.

YouTube Red will expand to other major markets next year. For users of iPhones and other Apple Inc. devices, the service will cost $12.99 a month. The subscription price for Apple users is more expensive because Apple charges app makers a 30% fee on in-app purchases such as subscriptions, a Google spokeswoman said.

“We’re realizing paid membership is a really hard business to be in,” said YouTube Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl at a press event Wednesday at YouTube’s campus near the Los Angeles International Airport, a sprawling space where YouTube stars and mainstream artists frequently perform and make videos. To compete, Mr. Kyncl said the company focused on its exclusive content and the “most desired” features on subscription services, such as offline capabilities.

YouTube’s new music app will also seek to differentiate itself from competitors. For instance, subscribers will have access not just to the same 30 million-song library that they do on Spotify and Apple Music, but also to an easily searchable database of each artist’s music videos, live performance videos, covers, remixes and other unofficial versions of their songs.

The music app will be free to download and use, but subscribing will remove ads and unlock additional background and offline features. App users get a 14-day free YouTube Red membership without entering a credit card number, and can extend their trial for an additional 30 days after entering credit card information.

A large cluster of objects in space look like something you would “expect an alien civilization to build”, astronomers have said.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish a report on the “bizarre” star system suggesting the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”, according to a new report.

“I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told The Atlantic. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

The snappily named KIC 8462852 star lies just above the Milky Way between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It first attracted the attention of astronomers in 2009 when the Kepler Space Telescope identified it as a candidate for having orbiting Earth-like planets.

But KIC 8462852 was emitting a stranger light pattern than any of the other stars in Kepler’s search for habitable planets.

Kepler works by analysing light from distant places in the universe —looking for changes that take place when planets move in front of their stars. But the dip in starlight from KIC 8462852 doesn’t seem to be the normal pattern for a planet.

Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale told The Atlantic: “We’d never seen anything like this star. It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

In 2011 the star was flagged up again by several members of Kepler’s “Planet Hunters” team – a group of ‘citizen scientists’ tasked with analysing the data from the 150,000 stars Kepler was watching.

The analysts tagged the star as “interesting ” and “bizarre” because it was surrounded by a mass of matter in tight formation.

This was consistent with the mass of debris that surrounds a young star just as it did with our sun before the planets formed. However this star wasn’t young and the debris must have been deposited around it fairly recently or it would have been clumped together by gravity – or swallowed by the star itself.

Boyajian, who oversees the Planet Hunters project, recently published a paper looking at all the possible natural explanations for the objects and found all of them wanting except one – that another star had pulled a string of comets close to KIC 8462852. But even this would involve an incredibly improbable coincidence.

That’s when Wright, the astronomer from Penn State University and his colleague Andrew Siemion, the Director of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) got involved. Now the possibility that the objects were created by intelligent creatures is being taken very seriously by the team.

As civilizations become more technologically advanced, they create new and better ways of collecting energy — with the end result being the harnessing of energy directly from their star. If the speculation about a megastructure being placed around the star system is correct, it could for instance be a huge set of solar panels placed around the star, scientists say.

The three astronomers want to point a radio dish at the star to look for wavelengths associated with technological civilizations. And the first observations could be ready to take place as early as January, with follow-up observations potentially coming even quicker.

“If things go really well, the follow-up could happen sooner,” Wright told The Atlantic. “If we saw something exciting… we’d be asking to go on right away.”

The Facebook social networking site has launched a new app that will help you take or upload photos and videos or update your status in a jiffy.

Called “3D Touch”, the new application allows iPhone 6s and 6s Plus users to hard press the app icon that will offer a handful of shortcuts, technology website TechCrunch reported.

“The addition is one of the more highly anticipated rollouts of third-party support for ‘3D Touch’, a new user interaction that’s something of a spinoff of the similar ‘Force Touch’ option on Apple Watch,” the report added.

“3D Touch” is another gesture you can use with your device for faster access to apps.

Facebook-owned Instagram was among the first to offer “3D Touch” support.

WhatsApp, Messenger, Moments, Groups and other popular Facebook applications are yet to support the new interaction.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Martian pebbles travelled roughly 50 kilometres down a riverbed from their source, according to a new study that provides evidence Mars once had an extensive river system, conditions that could support life.

While recent evidence suggests that Mars may harbour a tiny amount of liquid water, it exists today as a largely cold and arid planet.

Three billion years ago, however, the situation may have been much different, researchers said.

In 2012 the Mars Curiosity rover beamed images back to Earth containing some of the most concrete evidence that water once flowed in abundance on the planet.

Small, remarkably round and smooth pebbles suggested that an ancient riverbed had once carried these rocks and abraded them as they travelled.

Douglas Jerolmack, from the University of Pennsylvania, and Gabor Domokos, of Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and colleagues report the first-ever method to quantitatively estimate the transport distance of river pebbles from their shape alone.

The researchers’ estimate that the Martian pebbles travelled roughly 50 kilometres from their source, providing additional evidence for the idea that Mars once had an extensive river system, conditions that could support life.

Determining how far pebbles have travelled could also be useful for studies on Earth, for example in identifying sources of river-transported resources, such as gold.

“An object’s shape can itself tell you a lot. If you go to the beach, natural history is written underneath your feet. We started to understand that there is a code that you can read to begin to understand that history,” said Domokos.

Rocks flowing in rivers evolve in shape from being abraded against other rocks in the riverbed, gradually losing mass and taking on a smoother, rounder shape.

Domokos’ work showed that, when two particles of similar size bang together, the way in which they influence each other’s shape can be reduced to a purely geometric problem, regardless of the rock’s material or the environment in which it is moving.

The research team went to the lab to test this theory, rolling limestone fragments in a drum and periodically pausing to record their shape changes and mass loss.

The pattern of the rocks’ shape change closely followed the curve established by the mathematical theory.

Next the researchers went to a mountain river in Puerto Rico.

Plotting the data, they again found a trend between shape evolution and mass loss that agreed with the geometric model Domokos had developed.

Applying their calculations to the basalt material found on Mars, with a correction that factored in the reduced Martian gravity, they arrived at the calculation that the pebbles had travelled an estimated 50 kilometres, or about 30 miles from their source.

 Twitter announced today, Oct 13, that it was laying off some of its work force, to cut costs while it tries to find ways to attract new users.

The cuts are one of the first major moves by Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder who was named chief executive of the social media company last week. The social network has announced that it’s axing up to 336 jobs, or about 8 percent of its total headcount.

Dorsey argues that the move is necessary for a “streamlined” roadmap where Twitter focuses on fewer but bigger features, such as Moments. Most of the cuts will affect the engineering division, he says, since the company believes that a “smaller and nimbler” coding group would be more effective.

Twitter also said that revenue and adjusted profit for the third quarter would be at or above its previous forecasts. The high end of the company’s previous forecast predicted revenue of $560 million and adjusted earnings of $115 million.

Twitter said it would provide “generous” exit packages to those who lose their jobs. It intends to take a pretax charge of $5 million to $15 million in the fourth quarter in connection with the layoffs.

Twitter Inc rolled out its much-anticipated “Project Lightning” on Tuesday, a feature that shows users the site’s best tweets and content as curated by a Twitter team.

The feature, introduced a day after Twitter announced interim Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey would stay on permanently, is one of a slate of projects under Dorsey that aims to ramp up Twitter’s waning user engagement and growth.

When users open the Twitter app on their mobile phones, they will see a lightening bolt tab that opens up a list of “moments.” An unknown number of employees curate the day’s best tweets – such as interactions between celebrities or the most shared news stories and photos – so that users can find them even if they do not follow certain accounts.

Twitter also organizes moments by category, such as sports or entertainment.

The microblogging service has long been criticized for being confusing to use and difficult for users to find popular content. Although more than 1 billion people have tried Twitter, the site has 316 million users worldwide, compared with Facebook Inc’s 1.5 billion and Instagram’s 400 million.

Since Dorsey, widely heralded as a product visionary, assumed the interim chief executive officer job in July, Twitter has rolled out a number of updates and features that make it easier for users to locate the most interesting content.For example, Twitter recently introduced a “buy now” button that allows users to make purchases directly through Twitter.

“Our work forward is to make Twitter easy to understand by anyone in the world, and give more utility to the people who love to use it daily,” Dorsey tweeted Monday after announcing he would serve as the company’s permanent CEO.

Investors and analysts cheered Dorsey’s return, with shares rising as much as 6 percent on Monday. They have pointed to increased product rollouts since he took the helm in July – specifically citing Project Lightening – and said that what Twitter needs most to succeed is a regular slate of new features to simplify the site and keep users engaged.

Scientists are to send two spacecraft to knock an asteroid off course, as part of a test to block such rocks in future, which may threaten humanity.

The joint US-European Aida (Asteroid Deflection & Assessment) mission will send a small spacecraft to crash into the egg-shaped rock, known as Didymoon.Though the asteroid is too small to pose any threat, the mission will be an important test if we do eventually come at risk of civilisation being wiped out by a space rock.

The missions are set to be launched in October 2020 and are expected to reach Didymoon by May 2022. Nasa will send one craft in the mission, known as Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart), which will fire a probe to smack into the rock and see if it can throw it off course.

Besides the nudging probe, scientists will send another spacecraft -the Europe an Space Agency’s Asteroid Impact Mission (Aim)–that will fly around Didymoon watching the effect of the Dart mission, as well as measuring the asteroid’s mass and density , and putting a small lander on the asteroid itself to look at its insides.

“To protect Earth from potentially hazardous impacts, we need to understand asteroids much better–what they are made of, their structure, origins and how they respond to collisions,” said Dr Patrick Michel, lead investigator for the European Space Agency half of the mission.

“Aida will be the first mission to study an asteroid bi nary system, as well as the first to test whether we can deflect an asteroid through an impact with a spacecraft.The European part of the mission will study the structure of Didymoon and the orbit and rotation of the binary system, providing clues to its origin and evolution,” Michel said. “Asteroids represent different stages in the rocky road to planetary formation, so they offer fascinating snapshots into the solar system’s history ,” he added.

Despite its reputation as a forebodingly dusty, desolate and lifeless place, Mars seems to be a little bit wet even today.

Scientists reported definitive signs of liquid water on the surface of present-day Mars, a finding that will fuel speculation that life, if it ever arose there, could persist to now.

“This, I think, gives a focus of where we should look more closely,” said Alfred S McEwen, a professor of planetary geology at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator of images from a high-resolution camera on Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, McEwen and other scientists identified waterlogged molecules — salts of a type known as perchlorates — in readings from orbit.

“That’s a direct detection of water in the form of hydration of salts,” McEwen said. “There pretty much has to have been liquid water recently present to produce the hydrated salt.”

By “recently,” McEwen said he meant “days, something of that order.”

Although young Mars was inundated by rivers, lakes and maybe even an ocean a few billion years ago, the modern moisture is modest. Scientists have long known that large amounts of water remain — but frozen solid in the polar ice caps. There have been fleeting hints of recent liquid water, like fresh-looking gullies, but none have proved convincing.

In 2011, McEwen and colleagues discovered in photographs from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter dark streaks descending along slopes of craters, canyons and mountains. The streaks lengthened during summer, faded as temperatures cooled, then reappeared the next year.

They named the streaks recurrent slope linae, or RSLs, and many thousands of them have now been spotted. “It’s really surprisingly extensive,” McEwen said.

Scientists suspected that water played a critical role in the phenomenon, perhaps similar to the way concrete darkens when wet, with no change in the shape of the surface, and returns to its original color when dry.

A tiny worm, which is actually the larva of a beetle, eats Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene, a Stanford University researcher has found. Microorganisms in the worms’ guts biodegrade the plastic in the process. This first ever finding holds out hope for a world that is being swamped by plastic.

These findings, published studies in Environmental Science and Technology, are co-authored by Wei-Min Wu, a senior research engineer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford. “Our findings have opened a new door to solve the global plastic pollution problem,” Wu said.

The world produced nearly 300 million tonnes of plastic according to 2013 data published by the Worldwatch Institute. In Europe, 26 percent, or 6.6 million tons, of the post-consumer plastic produced in 2012 was recycled, while 36 percent was incinerated for energy generation. The remaining 38 percent of post-consumer plastics in Europe went to landfills. In the United States, only 9 percent of post-consumer plastic (2.8 million tons) was recycled in 2012. The remaining 32 million tons was discarded.

The new discovery is the first to provide detailed evidence of bacterial degradation of plastic in an animal’s gut. Understanding how bacteria within mealworms carry out this feat could potentially enable new options for safe management of plastic waste.

“There’s a possibility of really important research coming out of bizarre places,” said Craig Criddle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering who supervises plastics research by Wu and others at Stanford. “Sometimes, science surprises us. This is a shock.” In the lab, 100 mealworms ate between 34 and 39 milligrams of Styrofoam – about the weight of a small pill – per day. The worms converted about half of the Styrofoam into carbon dioxide, as they would with any food source.

Within 24 hours, they excreted the bulk of the remaining plastic as biodegraded fragments that look similar to tiny rabbit droppings. Mealworms fed a steady diet of Styrofoam were as healthy as those eating a normal diet, Wu said, and their waste appeared to be safe to use as soil for crops.

Researchers, including Wu, have shown in earlier research that waxworms, the larvae of Indian mealmoths, have microorganisms in their guts that can biodegrade polyethylene, a plastic used in filmy products such as trash bags. The new research on mealworms is significant, however, because Styrofoam was thought to have been non-biodegradable and more problematic for the environment.

Researchers led by Criddle, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, are collaborating on ongoing studies with the project leader and papers’ lead author, Jun Yang of Beihang University in China, and other Chinese researchers. Together, they plan to study whether microorganisms within mealworms and other insects can biodegrade plastics such as polypropylene (used in products ranging from textiles to automotive components), microbeads (tiny bits used as exfoliants) and bioplastics (derived from renewable biomass sources such as corn or biogas methane).

As part of a “cradle-to-cradle” approach, the researchers will explore the fate of these materials when consumed by small animals, which are, in turn, consumed by other animals.

WASHINGTON (TIP) : Portabella mushrooms may be key to making efficient and longer-lasting batteries that could power cellphones and electric vehicles, scientists say.

United States researchers at the University of California have created a new type of lithium-ion battery anode using portabella mushrooms, which are inexpensive, environmentally friendly and easy to produce.

Engineers were drawn to using mushrooms as a form of biomass because past research has established they are highly porous, meaning they have a lot of small spaces for liquid or air to pass through.

That porosity is important for batteries because it creates more space for the storage and transfer of energy , a critical component to improving battery performance.

In addition, the high potassium salt concentration in mushrooms allows for increased electrolyte-active material over time by activating more pores, gradually increasing its capacity.

We are surrounded by “electrosmog” – invisible clouds of electromagnetic radiation that enable mobile and Wi-Fi networks. If captured, it can power small devices. Now, a former British science minister Paul Drayson, a peer in the UK’s House of Lords, has developed an efficient energy-harvesting system, called Freevolt, which uses an antenna to draw power from multiple wavebands of the electromagnetic spectrum while fitting into a unit the size of a credit card. “We can’t power a mobile phone, but we’ve found that the ambient energy density is sufficient to power sensors, beacons and some wearab les,” Drayson says.

The technology, launched on Wednesday, was placed inside a personal air pollution sensor called CleanSpace, to allow individuals to monitor the air quality around them. The sensor, called Tag, pairs with a mobile app to keep track both of carbon monoxide levels and transport choices made by an individual.

Users earn points each time they walk, run or cycle. These can be traded for rewards from partners including Amazon, Boohoo.com and MaxiNutrition. The data from individual sensors is then aggregated to build up a map of the air quality.

“This is the first commercial device that is powered solely from ambient radio frequency energy,” says Drayson, who stumbled upon the idea when he came across the work of Imperial College, London, PhD student Manuel Pinuela Rangel, who was researching inductive power transfer, and set up Drayson Wireless.

The team decided to create a personal air quality sensor in recognition of the increasing public awareness of air pollution as a health problem. About 29,000 people die each year in the UK because of poor air quality each year.

Drayson now plans to license the technology to other commercial partners looking to create sensor networks, beacon-driven retail marketing tools or low-powered wearables. As it stands, the inventor contends that Freevolt could generate enough power for devices like the Fitbit Charge or Jawbone UP3. Drayson also points out that because Freevolt works across multiple bands of radio frequency , even if there isn’t any 3G or 4G signal, it can gather energy from Wi-Fi or even broadcast signals.

Google will collaborate with Indian Railways to provide wi-fi services at 500 stations by next year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced as he visited the headquarters of the search engine giant on Sep 27, 2015.

Sunder Pichai, the CEO of Google welcomed the Prime Minister and took him through the latest technology that powers the search giant. “We are proud of what is happening in India and share Prime Minister’s vision of digital India”, he said.

The Prime Minister was also joined by Chairman Eric Schmidt and Google co-founder Larry Page in the tour of the headquarters.

Hosted by the Indian IT industry trade body, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), along with a clutch of start-ups in India and the United States, the hackathon is having a simultaneous session at Tech Mahindra’s Noida facility.

Describing Modi as “amazing ambassador” of India, Chambers endorsed Digital India, saying it has the potential to bring about great changes in India. So we are very excited that we are starting with 100 of the busiest stations.

Observing that two main things computing and connectivity – are foundation for a digital India, Pichai said android today is available in many Indic languages. He also announced Design India initiative and labs, saying it would help in “Make in India” program.

Earlier, India-born Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the seach engine giant will provide high speed internet services at 100 railway stations in India initially and then expand it by 400 more by next year.

Recalling his young days when he used to travel by train from Chennai to Kharagpur, Pichai noted that 25 million people daily ride the Indian Railways which has 7500 stations.

According to an IAMAI-IMRB report, India is expected to have 213 million mobile internet users. That’s effectively 17 percent of India’s population.

Ahead of Modi’s visit to the USA, the country’s ministry of information technology released draft rules for encryption that would have required users to store the plain texts of encrypted information for 90 days from the date of a transaction and provide the text to law enforcement agencies when required under the laws of the country.

A satellite launch vehicle carrying ASTROSAT, India’s first astronomy observatory to study distant celestial objects, was launched from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh today, Sep 28, 20.

PSLV Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle C-30 lifted off from the launch pad at the rocket port of Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, around 80 km from Chennai, at 10 am IST, Sep 28. Minutes later, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) declared that its 30th successful Launch for the PSLV series,  and that they have successfully launched ASTROSAT into the orbit.

PSLV-XL rocket lifted off with India’s first space-borne astronomical observatory along with one Canadian and one Indonesian satellite in orbit, as well as four American nano-satellites, a first.

The time of launch coincides with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley and on the same day as a planned visit to President Barack Obama. As The Guardiannoted, India’s Mars Orbiter Mission entered orbit around Mars just days before Modi’s visit to the US in September 2014.

With its successful launch, India becomes the first country in the developing world to have its own telescope in space and joins a select club of US, European Union and Japan to have such a capability. China is still working on its first space telescope called the ‘Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope’.

The turbo-charged ‘mini Hubble Telescope’ will be used to study black holes and analyse how stars and galaxies are actually born and how they ultimately die.

This flight of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) is historic as, for the first time, American satellites are being launched by India. Till recently, the US had kept ISRO under sanctions and was denied the critical cryogenic engine technology which pushed back India’s foray into deep space by two decades.

The four small LEMUR satellites are being launched for a San Francisco-based company.

The 1,515-kilogram satellite has been assembled at the ISRO’s Satellite Centre in Bengaluru. It took the agency Rs. 178 crore and 10 years to make it. The idea was conceived more than 20 years ago.

Top Indian institutions like Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) in Bengaluru, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune and the Raman Research Institute (RRI) of Bengaluru were involved in its development.

With its successful launch, ISRO asserts, India will be the only country to have multi-wavelength space-based observatory capable of monitoring intensity variations in a broad range of cosmic sources.

According to ISRO, the satellite will have concurrent wide spectral coverage over visible, ultra-violet, soft X-ray and hard X-ray regions of the spectrum.

“Black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, white dwarfs, quasars, and active galactic nuclei are just some of the cosmic objects that the ASTROSAT will observe,” said Dr John Hutchings of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Canada, who was a part of the mission.

The five instruments and one passive monitor on board ASTROSAT will all have switched on by December 13, 2015, 45 days from when ASTROSAT enters orbit. The switch-on sequence goes like:

• Charged Particle Monitor – September 29
• Scanning Sky Monitor – October 6
• Cadmium-Zinc-Telluride Imager – October 6
• Large Area X-ray Proportional Counter – October 20
• Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope – December 10
• Soft X-ray Telescope – December 13

Thanks to a fan club with a £180 million kitty, the supersonic airliner may soon return to the skies.

Club Concorde, a group of ex-pilots, airline executives, engineers and Concorde enthusiasts have unveiled their plan to have the airliner back in the sky by 2019. Concorde was retired by its owners British Airways and Air France in 2003. The twin owners have since resisted the approaches of Richard Branson, who hoped to make the fleet commercially viable, much to the dismay of the members of Club Concorde.

Club president Paul James told the Telegraph that the club has secured millions of pounds in investment to buy back the retired planes and get them back in action.The club’s aims are twofold: display an aircraft by the London Eye, above the Thames, and buy another to do up and fly . The club has reportedly secured £40 million in investment to buy a plane to display . It hopes to purchase one that is currently stationed near Orly Airport in Paris and charge £16 a ticket to visitors on the Thames as soon as 2017.

A further £120 million reserve fund has been secured to buy and restore an aircraft on display at Le Bourget airport in Paris. Once operational, the club plans to use this craft for fly-pasts at airshows as well as corporate and special events. Flying at supersonic speeds, a Concorde could fly between London and New York in a little less than three hours. In comparison, a regular commercial flight can take around seven hours. It has been nearly 12 years since Concorde took its last flight, with the final journey occurring on October 24th, 2013. While Club Concorde is hoping to get the plane back in action, despite the fact that British Airways and Air France have no plans to restore or sell the planes, it may not be the only supersonic jet in the sky . Airbus has filed plans for Concorde Mark 2, a supersonic jet that could fly from London to New York in an hour, while Boston based Spike Aerospace hopes to have a supersonic jet in the skies by the 2020s.

The worst seat on the plane set to get better

The middle seat on an aeroplane is equivalent to the seventh circle of hell.But, with any luck, it’s about to get better.A new seating concept aims to speed up the boarding and subsequent exiting of a plane, could revolutionise air trave forever.

The Side Slip Seat, developed by Hank Scott of Molon Labe Designs, consists of aisle seats which slide on top of middle seats, creating more room while getting on and off-board. To accommodate this, the middle seat is set lower and a few inches back, giving occupants room more elbow room. This design is yet to be certified for use in a commercial aircraft.