Category: Technology

WASHINGTON: The young hero Luke Skywalker gazes at two suns setting above the horizon on his desert planet Tatooine in a memorable image from the 1977 film “Star Wars”. Astronomers since then indeed have discovered worlds, called circumbinary planets, orbiting two stars. But for sheer exoticism, it would be hard to top a newly described circumbinary planet located relatively nearby in our Milky Way galaxy. It orbits not two stars but two brown dwarfs – celestial objects too small to be a star and too big to be a planet.…

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A mineral known as siderite, discovered in rock samples collected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (Nasa) Curiosity rover on Mars, provides compelling evidence of the planet’s warmer, watter past. This significant finding suggests that Mars once hosted substantial bodies of water and had conditions favourable for sustaining life. The Curiosity rover, which has been exploring Mars since its landing in 2012, identified siderite in samples taken from three different locations within the Gale Crater between 2022 and 2023. Siderite, an iron carbonate mineral, indicates that Mars once had…

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By discovering the chemical fingerprints of gases, that are only produced by biological processes on Earth, in the atmosphere of an alien planet, scientists have found what they describe as the strongest indications yet of potential extrasolar life. Scientists detected the gases’ fingerprints using the James Webb Space Telescope. They found signs of two gases, dimethyl sulphide (DMS) and dimethyl disulphide (DMDS), on the planet K2-18b. These gases are produced on Earth by living things, mostly microbial life like sea phytoplankton, or algae. This suggests the planet may be teeming…

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TikTok announced on Wednesday that it is experimenting with a new “Footnotes” feature, allowing users to include informative context beneath videos that could be perceived as misleading or lacking clarity. The feature being tested in the United States, where the short-form video sharing app has some 170 million users, appears similar to Community Notes on X, formerly Twitter. Unlike X though, TikTok will continue its own fact-checking program to fight misinformation, head of operations Adam Presser said in a blog post. “Footnotes will draw on the collective knowledge of the…

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, testifying in a landmark US antitrust trial, admitted on Tuesday that Instagram was acquired because its camera feature was “better” than what Facebook was building at the time. The acknowledgement appeared to bolster allegations by US antitrust enforcers that Meta had used a “buy or bury” strategy to snap up potential rivals, keep smaller competitors at bay and maintain an illegal monopoly. It came during Zuckerberg’s second day testifying at the high-stakes trial in Washington, in which the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is seeking to…

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Meta-owned platform WhatsApp is releasing a feature to share video status updates up to 90 seconds long, and it’s available to some beta testers, reported WABetaInfo. Removing the need to split content into multiple parts, this feature permits users to post longer and uninterrupted video clips as their status. By providing more time to convey their moments in a single video, users reported that this enhanced their experience with status updates. The screenshot shows display of WhatsApp’s new feature. — WABetaInfo Giving users even more freedom to express themselves through longer…

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BEIJING: The US National Security Agency (NSA) has been accused by Chinese police in the northeastern city of Harbin of launching “advanced” cyberattacks against critical businesses during the Asian Winter Games in February. Following investigations, police accused Virginia Tech and the University of California of being complicit in the attacks and placed three suspected NSA operatives on a wanted list, state news outlet Xinhua said Tuesday. The NSA agents were identified by Xinhua as Katheryn A Wilson, Robert J Snelling and Stephen W Johnson. The three were also found to…

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WASHINGTON: Social media juggernaut Meta goes on trial on Monday, facing serious US government allegations that it abused its market power to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp before they could become competitors. By moving forward, the trial in a Washington federal court dashes the hopes of Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg that the return of Donald Trump to the White House would see the government let up on the enforcement of antitrust law against Big Tech. The Meta case is being made by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the powerful US consumer…

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A supermassive black hole, which remained previously inactive, was seen erupting with the longest and most powerful X-ray blasts ever seen from such a cosmic titan at the heart of the galaxy SDSS1335+0728, located about 300 million light-years away from us. The start of the supermassive black hole devouring matter around it and erupting with short-lived flaring events called quasiperiodic eruptions (QPEs) is marked by this active phase, reported Space.com. The black hole is responsible for a region at the heart of its galaxy called an “active galactic nucleus,” or “AGN.”…

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WhatsApp is introducing a new chat memory feature for its Meta AI chatbot currently available to select beta testers who can access it in the latest WhatsApp beta for Android 2.25.11.13 update. The new feature in Meta’s popular instant messaging app enables users to manually store specific details in the chatbot’s memory by explicitly instructing Meta AI to remember them. For example, if a user requests restaurant suggestions and specifies that they follow a vegetarian diet, Meta AI will retain this detail and ensure that future recommendations align with their…

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