— ISRO (@isro) August 20, 2019 India finally launched its pioneering Chandrayaan-2 successfully today. The country’s space agency, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), launched a moon rover with GSLV MK-III, India’s most powerful rocket, at 2.43 PM IST. Our updates will continue. pic.twitter.com/oNQo3LB38S — ISRO (@isro) July 22, 2019 The mission was initially slotted for earlier this month on July 16. However, the space agency found a “technical snag” in the assembly, and decided to delay the launch....

According to a report by Times of India, the Army has set a deadline of July 15 for their personnel to delete these apps. An unnamed officer told ToI that this step was taken to thwart increased targeting from intelligence agencies of Pakistan and China. Earlier this year, the Indian Navy banned the use of smartphones and social media apps on Naval bases and ships. After last year’s incident involving Isreal-based NSO group exploiting vulnerabilities in WhatsApp for snoop, the Army barred select top officials from using Facebook and WhatsApp....

? Create a reel up to 30 seconds⏱ Extend the timer to 10 seconds when you’re recording ? Trim and delete any clip pic.twitter.com/kVrCEnvC55 — Instagram (@instagram) September 23, 2020 Probably the most important of the new features is the length change. Now you can record Reels up to 30 seconds in length. Not that I want to keep making comparisons to TikTok, but there is a reason so many of its stars make videos 30 seconds or longer — it allows for greater variety....

Last year, photographer Haukur Snorrason was on an aerial photo tour of the Skaftá river in South Iceland to grab pictures of the yearly glacier river floods. Unfortunately, when he grabbed his iPhone to film the flood, the phone got swept away by a gust of wind. Falling 60 meters (200 feet) down on rocky terrain — where a massive river was overflowing and rupturing roads — the time came for Haukur to say goodbye to his phone forever – or so he thought....

A spokesperson from Iran’s Energy Ministry reportedly said that anyone who outs those using subsidized electricity for cryptocurrency mining will be rewarded with up to 20 percent of the funds recovered from the miner, PressTV reports. Damages are based on how much electricity the cryptocurrency miners have used. Energy Ministry spokesperson Mostafa Rajabi made the announcement in an interview with the IRIB News yesterday. Rajabi said that using the national grid to mine cryptocurrencies during peak hours will be outlawed under new regulations used to calculate electricity prices....

After members of the public report their condition, algorithms evaluate their answers to connect symptoms to locations. The results are then displayed on a map showing the clusters of infection where the virus is spreading. Public healthcare officials can use these insights to focus on areas where another outbreak is likely. Governments outside of Israel are already using the system, according to the Weizmann Institute of Science, which developed the method alongside the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israeli Health Ministry....

Last year, two Korean battery-makers came to a head when LG Chem sued its smaller rival, SK Innovation, in the US for allegedly stealing trade secrets. LG Chem’s lawsuit attempts to prevent SK Innovation from setting up shop to produce EV batteries in the US. If this happens, the supply of key components to the American EV industry could be disrupted, Reuters reports. That includes the production of Ford’s upcoming all-electric F150 pickup truck....

At the recent City Leadership Forum organized by the Cities Today Institute in Columbus, transport leaders from across the US discussed their multipronged approaches to driving modal shift. As cities push to persuade people out of their cars towards more sustainable modes of transport, data is central to tracking results, understanding shifts, and adapting fast. Mobility leaders are also finding that a holistic, collaborative approach is key to success. In July 2021, the City of Pittsburgh launched Move PGH, a two-year pilot scheme to create mobility hubs where people can access all the city’s transit options — buses, bikes, mopeds and escooters — in one place....

But esports and gaming stocks seem impervious to the noise. HERO and ESPO, the market’s biggest gaming Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), are now trading at record highs. Both stocks are up around 75% year-to-date, far beyond the tech-heavy NASDAQ 100 and the broader S&P 500 market indices. Unlike Moderna (which suddenly boomed once news of its successful trials broke), our gaming ETFs have practically surged non-stop since the market bottomed out in March....

These chips clock up to 2.05GHz and can support a 10GB LPDDR4x RAM. Plus, it sports ARM’s Mali G76 GPU with speeds of up to 800MHz. The CPUs also support a single 64-megapixel camera sensor or a combination of 24-megapixel and 16-megapixel sensors. The chipmaker says the G90 series is powered by its “HyperEngine game technology” that supports simultaneous dual-band WiFi connection, smooth switching from mobile to wireless networks, improved touch response, and enhanced resource management....

Yesterday, the German Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) granted Mercedes-Benz system approval of Level 3 autonomous under UN-R157. With the opening of the Road Traffic Act (StVG) for Level 3 systems in 2017, Germany was the first country to create a legal basis for the intended use of these systems. But with numerous cars offering ADAS and automated lane-keeping systems, letting unpick what this actually means. What’s Level 3 again?...

What is the next step toward bridging the gap between natural and artificial intelligence? Scientists and researchers are divided on the answer. Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta and the recipient of the 2018 Turing Award, is betting on self-supervised learning, machine learning models that can be trained without the need for human-labeled examples. LeCun has been thinking and talking about self-supervised and unsupervised learning for years. But as his research and the fields of AI and neuroscience have progressed, his vision has converged around several promising concepts and trends....

Artificial intelligence. For most, those words immediately conjure images that are straight out of science fiction. The HAL 9000. The Terminator. Replicants. For the masses, AI is as far removed from daily life as walking the dog is from a trip to the moon. In recent years, that gap has been closing. Rapidly. But while the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning is playing a growingly influential role in global business and innovation, most small to medium-sized businesses feel like using AI in their operation is still as far removed from their reality as those sci-fi films....

Xiaoice — pronounced “Shao-ice” and translated as “little Bing” — is rather creepily programmed to act like an 18-year-old girl. The chatbot was initially released in China, but is now also available in Indonesia and Japan. According to Microsoft, the service has attracted more than 660 million online users since its 2014 launch. Xiaoice is designed to provide a more emotional experience than voice assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana....

IHS Markit, a market research firm with “supply chain info,” told Forbes the foldable Surface could be released the first half of next year and is expected two have dual 9-inch screens and a 4:3 aspect ratio. It’s also anticipated to use Intel’s upcoming 10-nanometer Lakefield chips and feature LTE or 5G connectivity. The software might be just as interesting as the hardware. The report claims the device will run on Microsoft’s new Windows Core OS – a stripped down, modern version of Windows we’ve been hearing about since 2017....

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) October 1, 2020 Yes, apparently Steve from Minecraft will be part of the latest Smash Bros DLC, called Fighter Pass Vol. 2, following the addition of Min-Min from ARMS. Their inclusion comes with a new Minecraft stage, along with echo fighters like Alex, Zombie and Enderman. The reactions I saw on Twitter were utter bemusement at the news. Twitter: “But who asked for this” — Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) October 1, 2020 Even director Masahiro Sakurai seemed to anticipate the obvious response, saying, “What exactly did we just watch?...

Recently, researchers MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) successfully completed a trial of its autonomous half-sized (2-meters long) vessel, Roboat II. The ship completed a three-hour course of Amsterdam’s canals and returned to the starting point with an error of just 0.17 meters. MIT started the 5-year long transportation project along with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions with the first public demo held in October 2018....

Let’s make haste and waste no time. Check it out. 1. Iran issues more than 1,000 cryptocurrency mining licenses According to a report from news.bitcoin.com, the Iranian government has reportedly issued more than 1,000 cryptocurrency mining licenses to businesses in the country since it began regulating the industry, news.bitcoin.com writes. [Read: Iranian gov reportedly offering bounties to those who rat out illegal Bitcoin mines] Cryptocurrency mining in Iran is somewhat of a gray area....

Neuroscientists have made substantial inroads toward mapping the complex functions of the brain’s 85 billion or so neurons and the 100 trillion connections between them. (To put this astronomical number into perspective, there are upwards of 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.) Enter Neuralink, a Silicon Valley start-up backed by Elon Musk that has developed a neuroprosthetic device known as a brain-computer interface. Among other things, Musk claims this chip could cure tinnitus, the neurological condition that causes ringing in your ears, within five years....

The space agency has unveiled plans to develop a new solar sail system for a demonstration mission. Dubbed Diffractive Solar Sailing, the project won Phase III of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which supports visionary space technologies. Those picked for Phase III are the closest to becoming real — so a spacecraft powered by solar sails isn’t a quixotic prospect. Indeed, variations of the technique have already reaped results....