Technology

Facebook on Tuesday announced an overhaul of its Messenger smartphone app in an effort to simplify the service for its 1.3 billion monthly global users.   The social network began rolling out a redesigned version featuring three tabs instead of nine, saying it was “going back to its roots” seven years after the standalone app’s launch.  “We build one feature ...

Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported. In some locations, the amount of oxygen available could even keep alive a primitive, multicellular animal such as a sponge, they reported in the journal Nature Geosciences.   “We ...

Search engine giant Google has created a new Doodle on its homepage celebrating the life of Bangladeshi poet, columnist and journalist Shamsur Rahman on the occasion of his 89th birth anniversary, UNB reports.   Shamsur Rahman (23 October 1929 – 17 August 2006) who emerged in the latter half of the 20th century wrote more than sixty books of poetry ...

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 ...