List of All Articles with Tag 'tec'

NASA's Perseverance rover picked up some intriguing-looking objects on Mars this week, which prompted all kinds of speculation on social media. The photo in question was captured on 18 August as Perseverance travels over an "ancient river" and was voted the space agency's top image of the week. On X/Twitter, NASA wrote: "As promised, here’s the new Image of the Week, as voted by you! This rocky duo was spotted hanging out together in a wind-swept area. I spy a…crab claw? Shark fin?" The post was soon flooded with users' takes, with many claiming the two boulders mirrored a shark fin and a crab claw. "I don't know why, but those rocks are really satisfying to look at," one person wrote, while another joked: "I vote for coffee bean." Meanwhile, one realist responded: "That’s literally two rocks." The Perseverance rover landed on 18 February 2021, after a 7-month journey from Earth that started in the summer. The robot has since provided the world with stunning visuals – one of which captured the hearts of social media users. Last year, the rover acquired a pet rock friend on its back wheel, that continued to hitchhike months into its journey. Perseverance likely picked up the large stone in Jezero Crater, which is a 45 kilometer-wide crater thought to have once been filled with water. "The Perseverance rover has a pet rock. NASA says it's breaking hitchhiking records," one person said at the time, while another added: "There's a small rock that's been hitching a ride inside one of the metal wheels of a Mars Rover and I gotta say Perseverance's Pet Rock is a kid's book in the making." Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Starting in November, Google will require political advertisements to prominently disclose when they feature synthetic content — such as images generated by artificial intelligence — the tech giant announced this week.

Payment services Cash App and Square have been hit by a major outage. The problems left customers unable to pay and see their balance as a result of what appeared to be serious technical issues. Both companies said their services were mostly back online. But some customers were still seeing issues many hours after the problems began. Customers first started reporting problems on Thursday. They acknowledged that there were widespread issues that could affect the basic features of both apps. “We are currently experiencing issues with multiple Square services,” Square said on X, formerly known as Twitter. “We understand how important it is for your business that our services be up and running, and we are actively working toward a fix.” Cash App said much the same. Both are under the same parent company, Block. On Friday, the companies said that the issues were fixed but that some problems could remain. Some said that they been able to get back onto the app – but that certain transfers or other updates appeared to have gone missing. “We are continuing to resolve the outage. Our services are mostly back online. You may experience brief delays with certain services. If you experience a delay, there is no need to reattempt,” the company said on its status page on Friday. Read More Could China be about to take a big bite out of Apple’s iPhone business? Update your iPhone immediately First photo emerges of Elon Musk and his baby twins with Neuralink director

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission brought enforcement actions against three decentralized finance firms and signaled that more

The viral gaming hit Only Up has been surprisingly removed from gaming platform Steam with the creator of the title citing "stress" as the reason. Only Up became a big hit with gamers on various streaming platforms earlier this year with players attempting to complete the seemingly easily but hard-to-master platformer which involved a character scaling various objects higher and higher into the sky. However, the game has now been pulled from Steam's storefront so it's creator who goes by the alias of SCKR Games can focus on their next title, which according to IGN has a codename of Kilth. In a statement, SCKR Games said that Only Up is "a game I did for creativity, to test myself, and where I made a lot of mistakes." They added: "The game has kept me under a lot of stress all these months. Now I want to put the game behind me." "What I need now is peace of mind and healing. I plan to take a pause, and continue my education in game design and further with new experience and knowledge to direct my energies to my next game with the working title ‘Kith’ — it will be a new experience and a new concept with realism, a completely different genre and setting, and the emphasis is on cinematography. “This time I hope the project will be created by a small team. This is a challenging project on which I want to significantly improve my skills in game design.” The game had been removed from Steam back in June and later returned in July after copyrighted assets from another developer managed to get into the game but was soon resolved. It's unknown whether the game will return to Steam at a later date but its page remains available on the website although it cannot be purchased. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Apple is set to unveil the iPhone 15 in just a few days, and it's widely expected to come with a significant change.

MILAN Carmaker Stellantis aims to develop lighter electric vehicle batteries, cutting weights in half to improve sustainability, the

BEIJING China's Huawei Technologies on Friday started presales for its Mate 60 Pro+ smartphone, adding a new version

iPhone users have been urged to download a new update immediately. The update was pushed out by Apple to iPhones and iPads after a major security vulnerability was found in the devices. Patching up that hole with the new software update should keep those devices safe. But without it, attackers could break into an iPhone and spy on its user. The security issue was found by researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. They said the problem was being “actively exploited” by hackers, and that all users should update immediately. They were doing so by delivering commercial software called Pegasus, which is made and sold by Israeli company the NSO Group. That software is expensive and targeted, and has primarily been used on specific activists, journalists and politcians, who are likely to know if they are at particular risk of an attack. The latest attack was used on the iPhone of a member of staff at a US civil society organisation with international offices, Citizen Lab said. It named the new exploit BLASTPASS and said that it did not even require users to click anything on their device. The NSO Group and Apple have in recent years been engaged in a long-running fight to find and fix security flaws that could allow for the delivery of that software. Recent iPhone updates brought a new “Lockdown Mode” that places extra restrictions on the device in an attempt to close up potential security flaws. That includes not downloading images that could include spyware, for instance – which is how attackers deliver the hack in this most recent scare. Downloading the new update is simple. It is done through the Settings app on iPhones and iPads, by clicking the “general” and then “software update” options – that will check for any new updates, and offer the option to download it. Phones may eventually automatically install the new operating system, which could mean that no download shows up in that screen. Users can check if they have already updated to the new, patched operating system by clicking the “about” option in the general settings, and looking whether they have the newest iOS 16.6.1. Similar updates are available for Macs and Apple Watches, and are installed in much the same way. Citizen Lab also advised that anyone “who may face increased risk because of who they are or what they do” should switch on Lockdown Mode. Apple confirmed that would block the new attack, researchers said. Read More Apple is dropping leather from iPhone cases and Watch bands, report claims Apple is about to make a huge change to the iPhone that it never wanted to do Here’s when you will actually be able to get the new iPhone

Apple Inc.’s most important new product unveiling of the year gets underway on Tuesday, when the company will

Scientists have grown human kidneys in pigs, for the very first time. Researchers at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wuyi University created human-pig chimeric embryos containing a combination of human and pig cells. When they transferred into 13 surrogate pig mothers, they developed kidneys that contained mostly human cells at a rate of 50 to 60 per cent, giving hope for potential transplants in the future. “Rat organs have been produced in mice, and mouse organs have been produced in rats, but previous attempts to grow human organs in pigs have not succeeded,” said the senior author Liangxue Lai. “Our approach improves the integration of human cells into recipient tissues and allows us to grow human organs in pigs.” The kidneys were not entirely human as they included vasculature and nerves made mostly from pig cells, meaning they could not be used for transplantation in their current form, but it is still a pretty impressive step. And apart from the kidneys, the embryos were dominated by pig cells, with very few human cells in the brain or central nervous system. Making brains using human and pig cells is very controversial for ethical reasons, so there are tight regulations for this kind of research. Meanwhile, pig cells tend to outcompete human cells during development, so previous experiments have created embryos that are almost entirely pig. The latest work, published in Cell Stem Cell, overcame this by genetically engineering a single-cell pig embryo so that it lacked two genes needed for kidney development. This created a gap within the embryo that could be filled by human cells. “We found that if you create a niche in the pig embryo, then the human cells naturally go into these spaces,” said Prof Zhen Dai of Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, another senior author. The scientists said that being able to incubate a fully human kidney inside a pig would be likely to take many years. “We would probably need to engineer the pigs in a much more complex way and that also brings some additional challenges,” said Miguel Esteban, also of the Guangzhou institute and a senior author. A central challenge would be to allow human nerves and vasculature to develop within the target organ without nerve cells developing in the central nervous system that could lead to a humanised brain. “Even theoretically it’s not clear how you’d do that,” said Ilic. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Yelin Mo and Brenda Goh BEIJING/SHANGHAI A new series of smartphones launched by China's Huawei Technologies has