Category: Technology

TOKYO: Gaming fans queued up for the launch of Nintendo’s Switch 2 on Thursday, which is widely expected to be in short supply globally amid pent-up demand for the more powerful next-generation gaming device. “The level of demand seems to be sky-high,” said Serkan Toto, founder of the Kantan Games consultancy. In the Ikebukuro shopping district of Tokyo, dozens of successful applicants to a sales lottery by electronics retailer Bic Camera lined up before the store opened to collect their devices. “I feel like I’m going to cry,” Yumi Ohi,…

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WhatsApp is rolling out a new feature that promises to streamline how users interact with Meta AI, the company’s artificial intelligence assistant. According to WABetaInfo, beta testers with the latest WhatsApp beta for Android 2.25.18.8 update, which is available on the Google Play Store, can explore a new way to interact with Meta AI through the capability to forward message. The update, currently in beta testing for select users, will allow direct forwarding of messages and media to Meta AI, eliminating the need for copy-pasting. To check if you have…

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WAKO: Offering up a potential solution for a modern-day scourge polluting oceans and harming wildlife, researchers in Japan have developed a plastic that dissolves in seawater within hours. Researchers from the RIKEN Centre for Emergent Matter Science and the University of Tokyo say their new material breaks down much more quickly and leaves no residual trace while scientists have long experimented with biodegradable plastics. At a lab in Wako city near Tokyo, the team demonstrated a small piece of plastic vanishing in a container of salt water after it was stirred…

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For years, the fate of our Milky Way galaxy has been seemingly sealed: a spectacular, inevitable collision with its neighbouring Andromeda galaxy. Hurtling towards each other at a breathtaking 250,000 miles per hour (400,000 kilometres per hour), past research had predicted this cosmic crash to occur in a relatively short 4 to 4.5 billion years. The envisioned scenario was a galactic grand slam, altering both stellar behemoths. However, a groundbreaking new study, incorporating recent observational data and introducing fresh variables, is throwing a cosmic wrench into those long-held assumptions. The…

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LONDON: Artificial intelligence pioneer and head of Google’s DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, on Monday said that greater international cooperation around AI regulation was needed but “difficult” to achieve “in today’s geopolitical context”. At a time when AI is being integrated across all industries, its uses have raised major ethical questions — from the spread of misinformation to its impact on employment, or the loss of technological control. At London’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival on Monday, Hassabis — who has won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on AI…

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WASHINGTON: The White House withdrew on Saturday its nominee for National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) administrator, Jared Isaacman, abruptly yanking a close ally of Elon Musk from consideration to lead the space agency. President Donald Trump said he would announce a new candidate soon. “After a thorough review of prior associations, I am hereby withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman to head Nasa,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site. “I will soon announce a new nominee who will be mission aligned, and put America First in space.” Isaacman,…

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Scientists have discovered a colossal object approximately 435 miles (700 kilometres) wide in the frigid outer reaches of our solar system, which may qualify as a dwarf planet. Named 2017 OF201, this distant celestial body travels on a highly elongated orbital path around the sun, making it one of the most remote visible objects in our solar system. Researchers suggest that its existence challenges previous assumptions about the emptiness of space beyond Neptune and the Kuiper Belt, which is known to host numerous icy bodies. The newly identified trans-Neptunian object…

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WASHINGTON: A group of scientists has found a strange new object about 435 miles (700 km) wide at the far edge of the solar system. It’s icy, very far from the sun, and might be big enough to count as a dwarf planet. Called 2017 OF201, this object travels in a huge, stretched-out path and takes 25,000 years to orbit the sun once. Experts believe it could help us learn more about the mysterious space beyond Neptune — a place once thought to be nearly empty The researchers called it…

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Astronomers have discovered a peculiar star, exhibiting a unique combination of radio waves and X-rays, unlike anything previously observed. This celestial object, located within the Milky Way galaxy approximately 15,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scutum, flashes every 44 minutes in both radio waves and X-ray emissions. This newly identified star has been classified as an exotic member of “long-period radio transients,” a class of celestial objects first identified just three years ago. These transients are characterised by bright bursts of radio waves that occur every few minutes to…

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SAN FRANCISCO: Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, praised the internet company’s generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) assistant, telling shareholders on Wednesday that a billion people use it every month across all of its platforms. As the social media giant competes with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others to become a leader in Gen AI, Zuckerberg once again highlighted the milestone during Meta’s annual shareholder meeting. It was not clear how much Meta AI use involved people seeking out the chatbot versus passive users of Meta AI, as it is built…

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