Category: Technology

WASHINGTON: For the first time, astronomers saw a planet being engulfed by its host star in May 2020. Based on the information available at that time, they thought the planet would perish as the star grew larger towards the end of its life and became a red giant. As a kind of postmortem, new findings from the James Webb Space Telescope show that the planet’s demise occurred in a different way than first believed. According to researchers, the planet appears to have come to the star, rather than the star…

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LAS VEGAS: Google’s parent company Alphabet has said it was commitment to spending around $75 billion this year to build out data centre capacity despite turmoil over US tariffs and sought to reassure investors that its AI plans were yielding good returns. Investors are fretting about the massive capital costs of AI projects, especially as uncertainty surrounding US President Donald Trump’s tariffs roil markets and clouds the economic outlook. Asked about the potential for US tariffs to raise the cost of building data centres, Sachin Gupta, vice president and general manager…

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WhatsApp is set to roll out a new feature aimed at enhancing transparency in conversations that will allow users to be notified whenever someone enables or disables the upcoming advanced chat privacy setting. Whether in one-on-one chats or group discussions, every participant will receive an alert when the privacy status changes, WABetaInfo reported. For instance, if a user decides to turn off the advanced privacy setting, a notification will be displayed within the chat to let everyone know. Meta’s popular instant messaging app’s new feature ensures transparency, as all participants…

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WASHINGTON: Tech giant Meta is set to stand trial next week, unless there is a last-minute reprieve, facing serious allegations from the US government that it exploited its market dominance by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp to neutralise potential competition. The trial, due to begin in a federal court in Washington, deals a blow to any hopes Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg may have had that a potential return of Donald Trump to the White House would lead to a softening of antitrust enforcement against Big Tech. The case is being brought…

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Dinosaurs were not in decline before the asteroid hit, instead poor fossilisation conditions and unexposed late Cretaceous rock layers mean they’re either not preserved or hard to find, as per a new study. Prior to the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period, it has been long indicated by fossil discoveries that dinosaurs were shrinking in numbers and diversity, reported Live Science. Some researchers believed previously that this was a sign that dinosaurs were already on the road toward extinction even before the cataclysmic encounter with a space rock.…

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Social media platform X is introducing more stringent rules for parody and impersonation accounts, with enforcement set to begin on April 10, BBC reported. Under the new guidelines, any account mimicking a real individual or organization must start its name with terms like “fake” or “parody.” Additionally, such accounts must avoid using the same profile image as the real person or group. According to the platform, these measures are aimed at reducing confusion and limiting misleading impersonation. “These changes are designed to help users better understand the unaffiliated nature of PCF accounts…

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has defended AI art amid the ongoing backlash over AI-generated Studio Ghibli images created using ChatGPT, terming it a ‘net win’ for society. On a YouTube podcast hosted by an Indian entrepreneur, Altman defended the technology’s social impact, saying: “I think the democratisation of creating content has been a big net win for society. It has not been a complete win, there are negative things about it for sure, and certainly it did something about the art form, but I think on the whole it’s been…

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Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab on Saturday released the latest version of its large language model (LLM) Llama, called the Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick. Meta said Llama is a multimodal AI system. Multimodal systems are capable of processing and integrating various types of data including text, video, images and audio, and can convert content across these formats. Meta said in a statement that the Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick are its “most advanced models yet” and “the best in their class for multimodality.” Meta…

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When scriptwriter Ed Bennett-Coles read an article in 2008 announcing that artificial intelligence had successfully written its first screenplay, he described it as a “death moment” in his career — a chilling realization of what might be coming for creatives. Today, alongside his longtime friend and collaborator Jamie Hartman, Bennett-Coles has responded to that moment with action: the launch of ARK, a new blockchain-based app built to protect human creativity. “AI is coming in, swooping in and taking so many people’s jobs,” Hartman said. The app’s purpose, he explained, is…

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Meta’s messaging platform WhatsApp is working on an advanced chat privacy feature to limit message sharing, which will be available in a future update. This new feature is designed to give users greater control over their conversations by disabling automatic media downloads to the device gallery and restricting the ability to export entire chat histories outside the app in the future, reported WABetaInfo. Ensuring that sensitive content stays within the app and giving users greater confidence that their conversations won’t be easily shared or stored without their consent would add a…

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