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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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...