Science & Tech

MNA Science & Tech Desk: With an aim to offer students with disabilities an opportunity to learn the language of technology, Apple is bringing an accessible coding programme to schools serving the blind and deaf communities, first to the US and then to more schools around the world. Beginning this autumn, US schools supporting students with vision, hearing or other assistive needs will start teaching the “Everyone Can Code” curricula for Swift-Apple’s intuitive programming language, the Cupertino, California-headquartered tech giant said in a statement on Thursday. “Apple’s mission is to make products as accessible as possible,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s ...

Science & Tech Desk: On Wednesday, Whole Foods debuted a much-anticipated loyalty program that offers special discounts to Prime customers, including 10 percent off hundreds of sale items and rotating weekly specials such as $10 per pound off wild-caught halibut steaks. Those perks are available now in Florida and will roll out to all other stores starting this summer. Amazon previously announced free two-hour delivery from Whole Foods stores for members of Prime, its subscription club with fast shipping and video streaming. The new loyalty strategy will test whether Amazon’s $13.7 billion deal for Whole Foods brings much-feared disruption and ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Ground stations in Gazipur and Betbunia have received test signals from the Bangabandhu Satellite-1, said the state minister for ICT division Junaid Ahmed Palak. The two ground stations received the test signals from the country’s first ever communications satellite after 6:25pm US Eastern Time (BDST 4:25am), reported news agency. To deploy the satellite to its geostationary orbit, SpaceX separated it from the second stage booster some 33 minutes after the launch from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on Friday afternoon (local time). The satellite will be operated by its makers Thales Alenia Space for ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: After several rounds of delays, the launch of the Bangabandhu satellite has been set for May 10, says Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission chief Shahjahan Mahmood. The satellite will be launched at 4:00pm (US time) on the day, he said. A 30-member delegation from country led by State Minister for Information Tarana Halim will leave country for Florida on Monday to attend the launching programme, he said. Though the test results of Bangladesh’s first satellite was expected to be in hand by Saturday evening, the SpaceX authorities are yet to provide its results. The launching of ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: NASA on Saturday launched its latest Mars lander, called InSight, designed to perch on the surface and listen for “Marsquakes” ahead of eventual human missions to explore the Red Planet. “Three, two, one, liftoff!” said a NASA commentator as the spacecraft blasted off on a dark, foggy morning atop an Atlas V rocket at 4:05 am Pacific time (1105 GMT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, marking NASA’s first interplanetary launch from the US west coast. The $993 million project aims to expand our knowledge of interior conditions on Mars, inform efforts to send ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: After Facebook’s red warning labels to flag fake news backfired, the social networking giant is now literally sizing down the doubtful stories to prevent the triumph of falsehood on its platform. As part of its new strategy to combat fake news, Facebook wants its users to miss these stories at the time of scrolling their News Feed, while not withdrawing them altogether so as to walk a fine line “between censorship and sensibility”, according to a media report. When an article is verified as inaccurate by the social network’s third-party fact-checkers, Facebook will shrink the ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Facebook took action on 1.9 million pieces of content related to the Islamic State (IS) and Al Qaeda in the first quarter of 2018, twice as much as the last quarter of 2017. The key part is that Facebook found the vast majority of this content on its own. “In Q1 2018, 99 per cent of the IS and Al Qaeda contents we took action on was not user reported,” Monika Bickert, vice president of Global Policy Management at Facebook, said in a blog post late on Monday. “Taking action” means that Facebook removed the ...

MNA Tech Desk: Huawei Consumer Business Group has launched in the country a new superstar smartphone Huawei nova 3e which fuses high-end design and performance advances with exceptional value. This uniquely featured smartphone is specifically designed for dynamic, young professionals who closely follow the latest design trends. It features Huawei FullView Display 2.0 with a 5.84-inch FHD screen with 19:9 screen-to-body ratio for an immersive viewing experience. Huawei FullView Display 2.0 is supported by retina HD with 432 pixels per inch as well as a contrast ratio of 1500:1 that results in richer and more vibrant colours. Featuring a 16 ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Google collaborates Earth Day 2018 with renowned ethologist and conservationist Dr Jane Goodall to speak about our planet’s future. In the illustrated video of Doodle, she speaks about the conversation efforts and animal welfare. The search engine giant partnered with Jane Goodall and The Jane Goodall Institute to create the graphic, through which Goodall shares her own personal message with the world. Every year, Earth Day is celebrated on April 22 worldwide, and with the Earth Day-themed doodle, Google supports and promotes the environment protection. The theme of Earth Day 2018 is the end of ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: NASA blasted off its newest planet hunting spacecraft, TESS, a $337 million satellite that aims to scan 85 percent of the skies for cosmic bodies where life may exist. “Three, two, one and liftoff!” said NASA commentator Mike Curie as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) soared into the cloudless, blue sky atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 6:51 pm (2251 GMT). The washing machine-sized spacecraft is built to search outside the solar system, scanning the nearest, brightest stars for signs of periodic dimming. These so-called “transits” may mean that ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: The very first three-dimensional (3D) animation series based on children’s adventure story in Bangla is on the drawing board as the trial of ‘Chacha Bahinir Ajob Kahini’ has been released on Youtube channel. Maverick Studios plans to introduce children classics, including fairytales of Bangla literature to the new generation. Wahid Ibn Reza, a Bangladeshi filmmaker working with Sony Pictures Imageworks in Vancouver is the creative producer of the project. Wishing Shubha Nabarsha to everyone through Facebook, Reza said, ‘Personally, I have long been trying to create some contents in Bangla for our future generation. Especially ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: The total number of Bangladesh’s mobile phones subscribers reached nearly 150 million at the end of February, with addition of 3.66 million new users in the first two months of the year, statistics of the country’s telecom regulator showed on Tuesday. The number of subscribers in the country reached 148.76 million in February, news agency reported citing a data by Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC). Bangladesh has now four mobile companies, three of whom — including Grameenphone, Robi and Banglalink — are foreign-backed cellphone operators. However, the total number of Bangladesh’s mobile phone subscribers reached ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Search engine giant Google is celebrating Pahela Baishakh, the first day of the Bangla new year, by replacing its regular home page graphic with a special doodle for the Bangladeshi surfers. Google’s new Doodle Saturday featured a parade of colorful banners in the shape of an elephant and Mangal Shobhajatra, reported news agency. The calendar was originally commissioned by Mughal Emperor Akbar who introduced the calendar to facilitate tax collections in the spring-just after the harvest. Google Doodle is a special, temporary alteration of the logo on Google’s homepage that is intended to celebrate holidays, ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Country’s first commercial satellite ‘Bangabandhu-1’ will be launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on May 4, reported news agency. Private space flight and technology company SpaceX has confirmed the launch date for Bangladesh’s first satellite, BTRC Chairman Shahjahan Mahmud confirmed this to news agency. SpaceX had previously planned to launch the satellite using Falcon-9 rockets on Dec 16 of last year, but the launch was postponed due to damage from Hurricane Irma. The ‘Bangabandhu’ Satellite received the green light at a cabinet meeting in 2015. BTRC signed a loan deal worth Tk 20 billion with Thales ...

MNA Tech Desk: Aiming to tackle abuse and hate trolls, Twitter has teamed up with two researchers from Harvard and Princeton Universities to study online abuse. In an experiment that began on Friday, Twitter will publicise its rules to users to test whether this would improve civility, the researchers wrote on Medium. “We proposed this idea to Twitter and designed an experiment to evaluate it. This project also pioneers an open, evidence-based approach to improving people’s experiences online, while protecting their privacy,” said Susan Benesch, faculty associate at Harvard University and J Nathan Matias, Post-doctoral research associate at Princeton University. ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before the US congressional committee after the Cambridge Analytica scandal over alleged misuse of users’ personal data. He will testify before the US House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11, the panel said on Wednesday. Facebook has come under fire in recent weeks after it was revealed that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked for US President Donald Trump’s campaign, gained access to the personal data of 50 million Facebook users. “This hearing will be an important opportunity to shed light on critical consumer data privacy issues ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: A three-day long ‘Divisional Digital Innovation-2018’ fair is going to be held from April 1 in Rajshahi. The divisional administration will arrange the fair at Rajshahi College auditorium to encourage people to use Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Latest ICT products, multi-media classroom, mobile banking and e-learning items will be displayed in 54 stalls of the fair. Deputy director of Local Government division Parvez Raihan disclosed this in a press briefing held at Teachers Conference Hall of Rajshahi College on Wednesday. Deputy director of Department of Information Md Shamsuzzaman, editor of Daily Sonali Sangbad Liakat ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Stupefied astronomers on Wednesday unveiled the first and only known galaxy without dark matter, the invisible and poorly-understood substance thought to make up a quarter of the Universe. The discovery could revise or even upend theories of how galaxies are formed, they reported in the journal Nature, reported news agency. There are 200 billion observable galaxies, perhaps more, astronomers estimate. Some 65 million light-years from Earth, NGC1052-DF2 — “DF2” for short — is about the same size as our Milky Way, but has 100 to 1,000 times fewer stars. Dark matter’s existence is inferred from ...

MNA Tech Desk: A scandal engulfing Facebook over the use of its data by political consultants widened on Tuesday when a whistleblower said Canadian company AggregateIQ had developed a programme to target Republican voters in the 2016 US election. Christopher Wylie, who previously revealed that consultancy Cambridge Analytica had accessed the data of 50 million Facebook users to build voter profiles on behalf of Donald Trump’s campaign, said AggregateIQ (AIQ) had built software called Ripon to profile voters. Wylie was giving evidence to a British parliamentary committee over the scandal, minutes after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declined to appear before ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for the data debacle that has upended the social media giant and said he was ready to testify before Congress, a media report said. “The short answer is I’m happy to if it’s the right thing to do,” Zuckerberg said in a CNN interview on Wednesday night. “What we try to do is send the person at Facebook who will have the most knowledge. “If that’s me, then I am happy to go,” he added. Although Facebook employs a small army of lawyers and lobbyists in Washington, Zuckerberg himself ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Mobile phone operator Grameenphone introduced a new cloud telephony solution “Audio Conferencing” for its enterprise customers. Deputy CEO and Chief Marketing Officer of Grameenphone Yasir Azman launched the solution at GP House in city’s Bashundhara, said a press release on Tuesday. The Grameenphone Audio Conferencing supports simultaneous voice conferencing with up to 1,000 participants and comes with a host of conferencing features, such as PIN-based secure access. This cloud-based service is hosted at Grameenphone’s own Data Center and offered through a number of channels, such as web portal, iOS/Android mobile apps and Microsoft Outlook plug-ins ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Google said on Wednesday it was banning advertisements for cryptocurrency and initial coin offerings, the latest internet company to clamp down on the sector amid growing concerns about scams. Google’s action, which takes effect in June and follows a similar move by Facebook earlier this year, sent the price of the best-known cryptocurrency, bitcoin, down more than 10 percent to its lowest in a month. Interest in cryptocurrencies has surged in the last year as their prices rocketed. That growth has spawned online advertising used by hundreds of companies trying to raise funds by launching ...

MNA Science & Technology Desk: France will take legal action against Google and Apple for “abusive business practices”, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said Wednesday as transatlantic ties threaten to be riven by a trade war. “I believe in an economy based on justice and I will take Google and Apple before the Paris Commercial Court for abusive business practices” against French start-ups, Le Maire said on RTL radio. He said start-ups face conditions imposed on them when selling their apps on Google and Apple. It is unclear if European nations will obtain waivers, with Trump having singled out the ...

MNA Science Desk: Renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking, whose mental genius and physical disability made him a household name and inspiration across the globe, has died at age 76, a family spokesman said Wednesday. “We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today,” professor Hawking’s children, Lucy, Robert, and Tim said in a statement. “He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years.” Hawking defied predictions he would only live for a few years after developing a form of motor neurone disease that left him confined to a ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: The company that takes credit for the shine in the coveted Oscar trophy is using a gold coating technology that NASA has helped it improve, the US space agency has said. “Our telescopes and the #Oscars trophies are both plated with the same gold!” NASA said in a tweet. Brooklyn-based Epner Technology has been using the improved technique for its varied commercial clients, NASA said in a statement released over the weekend. In 2016, Epner’s reputation for durable and brilliant gold coatings, built in part through its many years working for NASA, brought a new ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Nest products won’t be sold by Amazon.com any longer once current stock runs out, according to a report from Business Insider. Amazon last year declined to offer some of Nest’s newer products like the Nest Cam IQ and latest-generation smart thermostat. After weeks of simply ignoring the products and being unresponsive to Nest, Amazon informed the company of its decision by phone late in the year and said the directive “came from the top,” something Nest took to mean it had been handed down by CEO Jeff Bezos. There has been no direct confirmation of ...

MNA Science & Tech Desk: Alphabet Inc’s Google is raising the price of its YouTube TV online service for new customers as it adds channels from Time Warner Inc’s Turner, National Basketball League and Major League Baseball, the company said Wednesday. Less than one year after launching YouTube TV, the company is increasing its pricing to $40 per month from $35 per month as it adds Turner’s channels, which include TNT, CNN and TBS, and soon will be adding MLB Network and NBA TV, the company said. Google is expanding its offering at a time when a growing number of ...