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Showing posts from 2017

Tales from Middle-Earth: Shadow of War

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Middle-Earth:Shadow of War Developer: Monolith Productions Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment Price: ₹3,499 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One Talion and the wraith celebrity residing in him, Celebrimbor, sounded understandably overconfident about springing a particularly stupid Uruk's trap. So we sauntered directly into the trap and out jumps Bubol the Diseased, with his disgusting pus glands rupturing as he taunted me. With the worst timing ever, Krunk, an orc sporting metal bandages, decided to stop by for some revenge. To top it off an Uruk named Ogg showed up with his Captain pals, hurt because they haven’t been hunted. Seriously! So it's five Captains along with their henchmen against just one of me. None of this is scripted, it just happened. It’s just another day in Middle-Earth: Shadow of War. What's it about? Shadow of War force fits itself into the Lord of the Rings canon by telling the untold story of a War of the Rings way before t...

Bakhshali, Jambudvipa and India’s role in science

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London’s Science Museum on Tuesday unveiled a new exhibition that traces India’s contribution to science and technology over the past 5,000 years. Bringing together pieces from scientific institutes and museums across India as well as those held by British institutions, the Indian High Commission and the museum hope to be able to bring the exhibition to India too. The highlight is a folio from the Bakhshali manuscript, loaned to the exhibition by the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which contains the oldest recorded origins of the symbol “zero”. Dated to 3rd century In September, the Bodleian revealed that new carbon dating research into the manuscript revealed it to be hundreds of years older than originally thought and that it could be dated back to the third or fourth century. Another remarkable piece is an 1817 version of Jambudvipa, or Jain map of the world, and a spectrometer from 1928 designed by Nobel Prize winner C.V. Raman. The exhibition also covers significant rec...

Tata motors to sell 10000 e vehicles to govt

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State-run Energy Efficiency Services Ltd (EESL) today said it would procure 10,000 electric vehicles from Tata Motors after a competitive bidding. Tata Motors will supply the electric vehicles in two phases with 500 e-cars in the first phase in November 2017 and the remaining 9,500 EVs in the second phase, EESL said. “The company (Tata Motors) was selected through an international competitive bidding aimed at increased participation,” it said. EESL said Tata Motors quoted the lowest price of Rs 10.16 lakh exclusive of GST. The vehicle will be provided for Rs 11.2 lakh, which will be inclusive of GST and comprehensive 5-year warranty, — 25 per cent below the current retail price of a similar e-car with 3-year warranty. Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) and Nissan had also participated in the tender and bids for Tata Motors and M&M were opened, it added.  EESL claimed that its tender was for the world’s largest single electric vehicle procurement. The company, which...

Say hello to heart scan to unlock your computer

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Forget facial recognition technology or fingerprint computer identification as researchers have developed a computer security system using the dimensions of the heart as identifier. "No two people with identical hearts have ever been found," said the study's lead author Wenyao Xu, Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo in New York. And people's hearts do not change shape, unless they suffer from serious heart disease, he said. The system, which may eventually be used for smartphones and at airport screening barricades, is a safe and potentially more effective alternative to passwords and other biometric identifiers, the researchers said. "We would like to use it for every computer because everyone needs privacy," Xu said. "Logging-in and logging-out are tedious," he said. To make sure no one else steps in to run your computer, the system uses low-level Doppler radar to measure your heart, and then continually monitors yo...

Removing toxic metals from tannery waste

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Researchers find that a fungal biomass does the job Removing hexavalent chromium from industrial effluents, particularly untreated tannery waste, will become easier and more efficient thanks to the work by a team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (CSIR-IICB), Kolkata. Importantly, the heat-dried fungal biomass converts Cr(VI) — which is neurotoxic, genotoxic and a carcinogen — to a non-toxic trivalent form of chromium, thus eliminating the problems of disposing Cr(VI)-containing waste. Cr(VI) is found in very high concentration in tannery waste. The results were published in the journal,  Scientific Reports. A team led by Sucheta Tripathy from the Structural Biology and Bio-Informatics Division at IICB isolated a fungus,  Arthrinium malaysianum , and used the fungus biomass to remove Cr(VI). In experiments carried out in the lab using potassium dichromate solution, the adsorption capacity of the biomass was found to be as high as over 100 mg per...

95 mobile companies set up plants in India: IT Minister

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Law and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad today said that 95 mobile manufacturing companies have set up their plants under the new government. “Today 95 mobile manufacturing factories have come in India and India is becoming a big hub of electronics and mobile manufacturing. 32 have come in Noida and Greater Noida,” Mr. Prasad said at Capital Foundation Annual Lecture. He was speaking on ‘Emerging Digital World In India’. “In Silicon Valley 51% of new inventions are IT based and 14% of those are created by Indian minds there. That is how India is emerging,” Mr. Prasad said. He said that young entrepreneurs are growing their businesses and raising hundreds of millions from investors. “Every day we are adding 3-4 start-ups. They are IITians, they left their jobs in America and come back to India,” Mr. Prasad said. The minister complimented the Supreme Court for leveraging digital technology in expediting judicial processes. “We have created digital data grid. Today we h...

Infinity in your palm

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As more people (sometimes grudgingly) shift to watching content from small screens to even smaller ones — video producers and device manufacturers are pushing to create a more immersive on-the-go experience Watching a fellow commuter watch  World War Z  on his phone, (sounds like Joseph Heller looking at Rembrandt’s painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer) I thought I would never ever watch content on my phone. What is the fun of watching zombies bring a chopper down on a tiny little screen? When film editor Arindam Ghatak ( Rocket Singh, Go Goa Gone ) posted on Facebook that his mother was on a movie-watching spree as she recovered from a cerebral stroke, I was intrigued. “Now she spends most of her waking hours pouring over her phone watching classics on YouTube,” Arindam wrote. “Ray would have been horrified. So would a lot of us, at the very thought of watching entire films on a little smartphone. But she is so full of joy when she sits to watch her film...

Clash of the titans

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Publisher: Capcom Price: ₹2499 on PlayStation 4, ₹3,999 on Xbox One It's going to be hard not to compare the latest Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite game with DC's successful Injustice 2, which launched earlier this year. Both are fighting games, and both are based on successful comic books and comic book movies. While Injustice has been around for a few years, Marvel vs. Capcom has a pedigree, coming from a long line of games starting way back with X-Men vs Street Fighter and now culminating in the latest Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite. It’s the crossover of our dreams where characters from Capcom's roster of games meet Marvel's superheroes and villains in an all out fireworks display of action. What's it about? Ultron, the villain from the last  Avengers movie is back and this time he's quite literally, joined forces with Sigma, the main bad guy from the Mega Man series. They’re fused into Ultron Sigma, a robotic super being that brings together two un...

Microsoft brings Xbox One S to India

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Xbox One S, which will be launched in India by October 5, is now available for pre-order. A part of the Xbox family of devices, it is 40% smaller than the original Xbox One, featuring a sleek, slimline design, “robot white” colour and a built-in power supply, said Microsoft. It supports 4K Ultra HD for Blu-ray movies and content streamed from partners like Netflix, as well as High Dynamic Range for video and gaming.The list of games includes Forza Horizon 3, Gears of War 4 and Battlefield 1. Xbox One S is available in two variants — 500GB and 1TB.

A step closer to treating oral cancer without surgery

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Researchers in Mumbai have moved a step closer to treating surface tumours such as oral, breast and cervical cancer and other tumours such melanoma and colon cancer through photothermal ablation using gold-polymer nanoparticles and near infrared light. The researchers from Mumbai’s Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and Tata Memorial Centre have synthesised hybrid polymer-gold nanoparticles as photothermal agent to ablate solid tumours. The near infrared light heats up the nanoparticles and the heated nanoparticles, in turn, can kill the cancer cells. Unlike other agents tried out by others, the hybrid nanoparticles used by the Mumbai team has no toxicity, is biodegradable and gets cleared from the body through urine. The team led by Prof. Rohit Srivastava from the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering at IIT Bombay and Dr. Abhijit De from the Molecular Functional Imaging Lab at ACTREC, Tata Memorial Centre used a thermoresponsive polymer (poly(N-vinyl caprola...

What is Google Tez?

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Here is all you need to know about Google Tez, the latest entrant to the digital payment marketplace. Google made its foray into the burgeoning mobile payments sector in India on Monday by launching its mobile wallet app, Google Tez, at an event in New Delhi attended by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. Here is all you need to know about the latest entrant to the digital payment marketplace. How does it work? Google Tez is a mobile wallet based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform built by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). UPI-enabled wallets permit users to transfer money without requiring the bank account details of the recipient. The UPI ID of the recipient is used as a proxy for the account number and IFSC code, thereby simplifying the process of money transfer. How is it different from other digital wallets? Unlike most other wallets apps, it does not require money to be stored in the app to make digital payments. Tez works as an exte...

Hackers compromised CCleaner free software, Avast's Piriform says

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Hackers broke into British company Piriform's free software for optimizing computer performance last month and installed tools that could have allowed them to take control of tens of millions of devices, the company and independent researchers said on Monday. The malicious program was slipped into legitimate software called CCleaner, which is downloaded for personal computers and Android phones as often as 5 million times a week. It cleans up junk programmes and advertising cookies to speed up devices. CCleaner is the main product made by London's Piriform, which was bought in July by Prague-based Avast, one of the worlds largest computer security vendors. At the time of the acquisition, the company said 130 million people used CCleaner. A version of CCleaner downloaded in August included remote administration tools that tried to connect to several unregistered web pages, presumably to download additional unauthorized programs, security researchers at Cisco's Ta...

Black dot in 1,800-year-old Indian manuscript is first ‘zero’, say researchers

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The birch bark scroll is known as the Bakhshali manuscript after the village, which is now in Pakistan, where it was found buried in 1881. A black dot on a third-century Indian manuscript has been identified by Oxford University as the first recorded use of the mathematical symbol for zero, 500 years earlier than previously thought. "Scientists from the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, have used carbon dating to trace the figure's origins to the famous ancient Indian scroll," the university said in a statement. The birch bark scroll is known as the Bakhshali manuscript after the village, which is now in Pakistan, where it was found buried in 1881. It has been held at the Bodleian Libraries since 1902. "The creation of zero as a number in its own right, which evolved from the placeholder dot symbol found in the Bakhshali manuscript, was one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of mathematics," said Marcus du Sautoy, a mathem...

Ultra-thin craft to wrap space debris

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Resilient ‘sheet’ being developed by Aerospace Corporation Scientists are developing an ultra-thin spacecraft that can remove space debris — which potentially threatens satellites or astronauts — by enveloping junk in the Earth’s orbit and dragging it through the atmosphere, causing it to burn up. The Brane Craft, being developed by U.S.-based Aerospace Corporation, is flexible and measures less than half the thickness of a human hair. “It has to be bullet-proof, because a five-micron diametre particle can penetrate the main structural sheet, which is only 10 microns thick,” said senior scientist Siegfried Janson . The spacecraft’s microprocessor and digital electronics are fabricated in such a way that if one component gets damaged, the others will continue to work.

Forces of freedom : early access version review

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forces of freedom is an online combat game which can be played in team format. Each team consists of give players. However, the teams are made randomly by the server.  To play the game all you have to do is download the game data which is a little more than 100 mb , get the tutorial and you are ready to play. You can choose either to be a gunman or you can be a sniper . A gunman can move fast, has a larger magazine and on the other side, a sniper has a long zoom range but can fire a single shot at a time and has to reload after the shot. The game is currently in the development stage and most of its features dont work. But one thing is sure that it is a fun game to play and you will thoroughly enjoy it once you get into it.

Lego go build game. Early access review.

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Enjoy the lego building blocks now on your phone. Without the fear of some of your blocks. This game is available free of cost on google play store in early access mode. There are currently three modes in the game. The first mode is the basic building mode. In this mode you have to make an object given in the picture step by step. Some blocks are given and the shadows are shown to you to make it easy for you to place the blocks on the right place.however, the shadows can be disabled. Once you complete the whole object , you can save them in your gallery and unlock more objects. The second mode is little different than the earlier one. In this mode an object is shown to you in a picture and different ways are suggested to accomplish that object and moreover, you can also change the colour of the object. The third mode is what found most interesting. An objects starts building in front of you quickly and some options are given at the bottom of the screen about what coul...

5 smartphones that have the best battery life

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As they say, life with a smartphone is like having a second brain in your pocket. However, there are times when this second brain goes dead because of something as trivial as your phone running out of battery.  With most buyers focusing on phones with bigger displays and faster and more power-hungry processors, the humble battery pack that actually brings all the magic to life is often forgotten. But having said that, a big battery on a low spec, or worse a badly designed phone is also of no use. So here's our list of phones that not just offer great battery life but also come with best specs (well, almost).   Moto E4 Plus Kicking things off is the recently launched Moto E4 Plus which brings with it a massive 5000 mAh battery pack, a 5.5-inch 720p display, a fingerprint sensor running on Android 7.1.1. It's also equipped with a capable MediaTek MT 6737 quad-core processor clocking at 1.3GHz paired with 3GB RAM. There's also 32GB of inbuilt storage...

Nokia 6 Launched on Amazon Price Rs 14999 (Sale 23 Aug)

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Nokia 6 Launched on Amazon Price Rs 14999 (Sale 23 Aug) Nokia 6 Launched on Amazon Price Rs 14999 (Sale 23 Aug) – The Nokia 3 and Nokia 5 were launched a couple of days back and are already available for purchase in the retail market. While the top of the line Nokia 6 was not available so far online but now it is going to get available on Amazon India for a price tag of Rs. 14,999. TheNokia 6 was launched in China back in January 2017 and crossed 1 million registrations in quick time. The smartphone will start selling in the Indian market now, and Amazon will be holding a sale on 23 August 2017, you will need to pre-register for sale to purchase the device. Amazon is offering Rs. 1000 back to buyers using Amazon Pay balance to buy the Nokia 6. Effectively you can purchase it for Rs. 14,000 using the Amazon Pay. The Nokia 6 comes with premium 6000-grade aluminium design and has robust construction. The smartphone is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 Processor and co...

Samsung Galaxy A7 (2017) review: Marathoner with a punch

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Introduction T A Samsung for every taste - that seems to be the main mantra of the Korean giant as of late, as evident by its sprawling and ever-expanding smartphone lineup. We guess it's always good to have more options, but we just can't shake the feeling that some of Samsung's recent creations are beginning to overlap and thread in each other's territory - at least from the global perspective we have. Here's what we mean - the Galaxy A line and the Galaxy C line are way to close specs-wise to clearly distinguish them from a consumer point of view. The Galaxy A7 (2017) packs a 5.7-inch display, an efficient 14nm Exynos 7880 Octa SoC, a body made out of a glass/metal combo, IP68 certification, 16MP f/1.9 cameras front and back. Offerings like the Galaxy C7 and its C7 Pro sibling come pretty close to the Galaxy A7 formula and the 6-inch C9 Pro takes things even further size-wise. Samsung Galaxy A7 (2017) at a glance: Body: Aluminum frame, Gorilla Glass...

Apple secretly re-launches iPhone 6 at a cheaper price

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The smartphone has been launched on Apple’s official channel platform’s websites Apple re-launched iPhone 6 late last month on some e-commerce websites in India. The smartphone has re-appeared again on the company’s official channel partner’s websites including Beetel, Ingram, Rashi Peripherals and Redington. The new iPhone 6 (32GB) model will be hitting offline stores as well. Reports suggest that the device is already on sale through numerous retailers in Bengaluru at a price of Rs 30,700. Amazon is selling the iPhone 6 (32GB) Space Grey variant for Rs 28,999. The e-commerce giant is still selling the device as a part of a ‘limited time offer.’ Interested buyers can also avail the exchange offer of up to Rs 7,115 on the website. As far as the specifications of the smartphone are concerned, the iPhone 6 packs a 4.7-inch HD Retina display, iOS 10, Apple A8 chipset clocked at 1.8GHz, 1GB of RAM, 32GB ROM, an 8MP rear camera along with a 1.2MP front camera. The device is furt...