Suvastu Tech

                                           Scientists said that they had tracked down the oldest known lizard, a tiny creature that lived about 240 million years ago when Earth had a single continent and dinosaurs were brand new. Scans of the fossilised skeleton of Megachirella revealed the chameleon-sized reptile was an ancestor of today´s lizards and snakes, which belong to a group called squamates, an international team wrote in the science journal Nature. This finding dragged the group back in time by 75 million years, and means that "lizards inhabited the planet since at least 240 million years ago," study co-author Tiago Simoes of the University of Alberta in Canada told AFP. That, in turn, suggested that squamates had already split from other ancient reptiles before the Permian/Triassic mass extinction some 252 million years ago, and survived it. ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Saturday spoke to astronauts on board the ISS via a live video link from the Kremlin. Russian astronaut Anton Shklaperov and his Japanese colleague Norishige Kanai, on board the International Space Station (ISS), appeared on a giant screen in the Kremlin after the two leaders held bilateral talks. “We have been cooperating with Japan in space for over ten years,” Putin told the astronauts, stressing Japan’s “important contribution” to the functioning of the ISS. “Allow me to express my joy to the fact that you work in such unity in space,” Abe said, according to Russian interpreters. “Our cooperation leads to important results,” Japan’s Kanai told the two leaders. Shklaperov said it was “particularly pleasant” that the ISS celebrates the 20th anniversary of its founding in 2018, which has been declared the year of Japan in Russia and the year of Russia in Japan. Both astronauts arrived ...

Who would have suspected that a handheld genetic test used to unmask sushi bars pawning off tilapia for tuna could deliver deep insights into evolution, including how new species emerge? And who would have thought to trawl through five million of these gene snapshots — called “DNA barcodes” — collected from 100,000 animal species by hundreds of researchers around the world and deposited in the US government-run GenBank database? That would be Mark Stoeckle from The Rockefeller University in New York and David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who together published findings last week sure to jostle, if not overturn, more than one settled idea about how evolution unfolds. It is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung populations — think ants, rats, humans — will become more genetically diverse over time. But is that true? “The answer is no,” said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal Human Evolutio...

A computer was better than human dermatologists at detecting skin cancer in a study that pitted human against machine in the quest for better, faster diagnostics, researchers said Tuesday. A team from Germany, the United States and France taught an artificial intelligence system to distinguish dangerous skin lesions from benign ones, showing it more than 100,000 images. The machine -- a deep learning convolutional neural network or CNN -- was then tested against 58 dermatologists from 17 countries, shown photos of malignant melanomas and benign moles. Just over half the dermatologists were at "expert" level with more than five years of experience, 19 percent had between two and five years´ experience, and 29 percent were beginners with less than two years under their belt. "Most dermatologists were outperformed by the CNN," the research team wrote in a paper published in the journal Annals of Oncology. On average, flesh and blood dermatolo...

China launched a relay satellite on Monday as part of a groundbreaking program to be the first to land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon later this year. The satellite, lofted into space aboard a Long March-4C rocket, will facilitate communication between controllers on Earth and the Chang'e 4 mission, the China National Space Administration said on its website. China hopes to become the first country to soft-land a probe on the moon's far side, also known as the dark side because it faces away from Earth and is comparatively unknown. The satellite, named Queqiao, or “Magpie Bridge,” after an ancient Chinese folk tale, was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the southwestern province of Sichuan, the Space Administration said. The satellite, lofted into space aboard a Long March-4C rocket, will facilitate communication between controllers on Earth and the Chang'e 4 mission, the China National Space Administration said on its web...

Mobile wallets can make paying by credit or debit card seamless: tap your phone at checkout and you’re on your way. But mobile wallets are just the beginning. Payment networks and manufacturers are building payment functions into more devices expanding your options as well as freeing up your hands. You could find yourself buying gas from the dashboard of your car, groceries from your refrigerator door or dinner by flashing a smile. And you won’t even need your phone with you to make purchases on the go. More devices add payment capability: payment options already available or on the horizon include: Wearables. Connected “smart” accessories such as watches, bands and rings, travel lighter than a phone. To use, the wearer holds a wrist or hand up to a contactless payment terminal. Visa tested these devices at the 2016 Rio Olympics to demonstrate possibilities, says Mark Jamison, global head of innovation and design at Visa. The market will determine, he says,...

A federal court jury on Thursday ordered Samsung to pay Apple $533 million for copying iPhone design features in a patent case dating back seven years. Jurors tacked on an additional $5 million in damages for a pair of patented functions. The award appeared to be a bit of a victory for Apple, which had argued in court that design was essential to the iPhone. The case was keenly watched as a precedent for whether design is so important that it could actually be considered the "article of design" even in a product as complex as a smartphone. "We don't think it is supported by the evidence," Samsung attorney John Quinn told US District Court Judge Lucy Koh after the verdict was read in her courtroom in Silicon Valley. "We have every concern about the determinations about the article of manufacture." Quinn declined an offer by the judge to send jurors back for further deliberation, saying Samsung would pursue post-trial motions...

A pair of identical, sportscar-sized satellites are poised to zoom around the Earth and track changes in water and ice, offering new insights into global warming and sea level rise, NASA said Monday. Groundwater, oceans, lakes, rivers and ice sheets will be monitored by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO), a joint mission between the US space agency and German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). The satellites are scheduled to blast off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Tuesday at 12:47 pm Pacific time (1947 GMT). A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will propel the satellites to an orbit about 310 miles (500 kilometres) above the Earth. The pair will fly 137 miles (220 kilometres) apart, or about the distance from Los Angeles to San Diego. NASA has spent $430 million on the mission, and Germany has spent about $91 million. The new pair of satellites will pick up where the first GRACE mission left off, having completed its...

Finnish materials physicist Tuomo Suntola, who developed a groundbreaking technology to reduce the size of complex devices, on Tuesday won Finland's take on the Nobel science prizes. The 74-year-old was awarded the Millennium Technology Prize worth one million euros ($1.18 million). “Suntola's prize-winning ALD (atomic layer deposition) innovation is a nanoscale technology in use all over the world,” the Technology Academy Finland, which awards the biennial prize, said in a statement. His technology is used to manufacture ultra-thin material layers for a variety of devices such as computers, smartphones, microprocessors and digital memory devices, enabling high performance in small size. “The extremely thin isolating or conducting films needed in microprocessors and computer memory devices can only be manufactured using the ALD technology developed by Tuomo Suntola,” the academy said. He developed the technology in 1974 to initially replace bulky moni...

Comcast may make an offer for Twenty-First Century Fox, potentially putting it in a head-to-head bidding war with Disney. Comcast Corp. on Wednesday did not provide specific details on a bid, other than to say that it would be all cash and at a premium to the value of Disney's current all-stock offer. The Wall Street Journal and others reported earlier this month that Comcast had $60 billion to challenge Disney. Disney's $52.4 billion bid would go a long way in allowing it to better compete with technology companies in the entertainment business. Any tie-up would put in its stable more Marvel superheros, as well as the studios that produced the Avatar movies, “The Simpsons” and “Modern Family". Disney would control Fox's cable and international TV businesses as well. Comcast said on Wednesday that it's in the “advanced stages” of preparing its bid. The Philadelphia company said the structure and terms of its offer would be at least as fav...

British lawmakers want their European counterparts to quiz Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about a scandal over improper use of millions of Facebook users´ data, as he will not give evidence in London himself. Zuckerberg will be in Europe to defend the company after alleged misuse of its data by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consultancy that worked on US President Donald Trump´s election campaign. But while he will answer questions from lawmakers in Brussels on Tuesday, and is meeting French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday, he has so far declined to answer questions from British lawmakers, either in person or via video link. Damian Collins, chair of the British parliament´s media committee, said on Tuesday that he believed Zuckerberg should still appear before British lawmakers. "But if Mark Zuckerberg chooses not to address our questions directly, we are asking colleagues at the European Parliament to help us get answers - particularly on who...

A SpaceX rocket Tuesday blasted off a duo of sports car-sized satellites built by the US and Germany to reveal changes in sea level rise, ice melt and drought on Earth. "Three, two, one, liftoff!" said a SpaceX commentator as the Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 12:47 pm Pacific time (1947 GMT). The $521 million payload is called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-on (GRACE-FO). It picks up from GRACE, a satellite pair that launched in 2002 and tracked, among other things, precisely how much ice was lost each year in Greenland and Antarctica until 2017. Groundwater, oceans, lakes, rivers and ice sheets will be monitored by the twin satellites, a joint mission between the US space agency and German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). The pair will fly 137 miles (220 kilometers) apart, or about the distance from Los Angeles to San Diego.

The Electronic World Trade Platform (eWTP) Ecosystem Fund, established to enable enterprises that promote innovation and quality consumption, was unveiled in Hong Kong on Wednesday. The eWTP Fund counts Alibaba Group and Ant Financial among its anchor investors, and Yu Yongfu, a member of Alibaba Partnership, has been appointed founding partner and chairman of the eWTP Fund. As the initial fund of the eWTP Fund family, a US$600m eWTP Technology & Innovation Fund (‘the fund”) was launched today. The fund’s mission is to drive strategic investments that helps companies accelerate their international expansion and support ideas that drive life-changing technological innovations around the world, including initiatives closely related to the “One Belt, One Road” push. “The eWTP concept started with Alibaba, but it does not stop with or belong only to Alibaba. We believe that every country, every organization, every enterprise and every individual can become builde...

The Grand Mosque in Makkah will be using drones to manage the crowd in Ramadan, for the first time in its history. As per reports by Saudi media outlets, the deputy commander of the Umrah forces, Major General Mohammed Al-Ahmadi has stated that the Umrah crowd management plan for this Ramadan involves security, as well as organizational and humanitarian aspects. Adding further he said, that any pilgrims displaying signs of distress will not be permitted inside the premises of the Grand Mosque, taking into account the safety of them as well as of others present inside. Pilgrims coming in with luggage will also be denied entrance at the Haram plazas. As per reports, apart from the drones, the safety plan is also inclusive of a security aircraft and an approximate of 2,500 cameras that will incessantly observe the movement of the crowd. Around 2,400 policemen along with 1,300 security patrols have been assigned to carry out the security plan of the Grand M...

For its updated news application, Google is doubling down on the use of artificial intelligence as part of an effort to weed our disinformation and help users get viewpoints beyond their own "filter bubble." Google chief Sundar Pichai, who unveiled the updated Google News earlier this month, said the app now "surfaces the news you care about from trusted sources while still giving you a full range of perspectives on events." It marks Google´s latest effort to be at the center of online news and includes a new push to help publishers get paid subscribers through the tech giant´s platform. According to product chief Trystan Upstill, the news app "uses the best of artificial intelligence to find the best of human intelligence -- the great reporting done by journalists around the globe." While the app will enable users to get "personalized" news, it will also include top stories for all readers, aiming to break the so-called filter bubble...

US telecommunication giants AT&T and Verizon announced this week that they will start selling a holographic smartphone later this year. The smartphone, which is called Red Hydrogen One smartphone, is the first phone from video equipment company Red. With a 4-view camera which enables users to see 3D images without glasses, it has become the world's first holographic smartphone. "This revolutionary smartphone will provide you with significant advancements in the way you create and view content on the leading network for entertainment," Kevin Petersen, senior vice president of device and network services marketing of AT&T, said in a statement. "When the Red Hydrogen One launches you will be able to look around, below and into your screen's image with a 4-view holographic display, which is even better than 3D," said Petersen. During pre-orders on the official website of the Red company, the price of the smartphone ranges from 1,195 U.S. dollars for ...