Technology

Is Mercury’s core liquid or solid, and why — on the smallest planet in our solar system — is it so big? What can the planet closest to the Sun tell us about how our solar system came into being?   An unmanned European-Japanese space mission, dubbed BepiColombo, blasted off early Saturday morning from French Guiana, to probe these and ...

The Ariane 5 rocket carrying BepiColombo lifts off from its launch pad at Kourou in French Guiana, for the mission to Mercury, Saturday, Oct. 20, 2018. Tokyo, Oct 20 : European and Japanese space agencies said an Ariane 5 rocket successfully lifted a spacecraft carrying two probes into orbit Saturday for a joint mission to Mercury, the closest planet to ...

Social networking giant Facebook is developing a camera-equipped set-top box for TVs that would support functionalities like video-calling, a media report said.   Internally codenamed “Ripley”, the device would use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically detect and follow people as they move through the frame during a video call, news website Cheddar reported on Tuesday.  Apart from facilitating video-chat, the ...

Recent findings show that ‘Vampire burial’ techniques were used in ancient times to prevent a child, possibly infected with malaria, from rising from the dead and spreading the disease to the living.   The discovery of an ancient grave of a 10-year-old at a Roman site in Italy suggested that measures were taken to prevent the child–probably infected with malaria–from ...

New dating app DonaldDaters was supposed to help lonely conservatives find each other discreetly. But the app leaked its database of users on launch day, a report said Monday. With the slogan “Make America Date Again,” the app targets the “American-based singles community connecting lovers, friends, and Trump supporters alike,” its website says. The app had just over 1,600 users ...

Another NASA space telescope has shut down and halted science observations.   Less than a week after the Hubble Space Telescope went offline, the Chandra X-ray Observatory did the same thing. NASA said Friday that Chandra’s automatically went into so-called safe mode Wednesday, possibly because of a gyroscope problem.  Hubble went into hibernation last Friday due to a gyroscope failure. ...

Apple is adding 300 computer chip engineers to its team after striking a deal to hire them from one of its British suppliers. It is paying Dialog Semiconductor $300m (£227m) for the acquisition, which also includes some of the Reading-based company’s patents and facilities.   Apple has long used Dialog’s products to monitor and control power consumption in its iPhones ...

U.S. astronaut Nick Hague, right and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), walk prior to the launch of Soyuz MS-10 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018. Baikonur, Oct 11 : Two astronauts from the U.S. and Russia are making an emergency ...

When SpaceX launched a rocket carrying an Argentine Earth-observation satellite from California’s Central Coast, both the night sky and social media lit up.   People as far away as San Francisco, Sacramento, Phoenix and Reno, Nevada, posted photos of the Falcon 9 rocket’s launch and return on October 7 night. It was the first time SpaceX landed the first-stage booster ...

Google is shutting down its long-shunned Plus social network for consumers, following its disclosure of a flaw discovered in March that could have exposed some personal information of up to 500,000 people.   The announcement came in a Monday blog post , which marked Google’s first public description of the privacy bug.  Google deliberately avoided disclosing the problem at the ...