Scientists have turned to the opossum — a rat-like mammal found in the Americas — to develop a promising new and inexpensive antidote for poisonous snake bites.
Presenting the results at the 249th meeting of the American Chemical Society, they predicted it could save thousands of lives worldwide without the side effects of current treatments.
Intriguingly, opossums shrug off snakebite venom with no ill-effects.
American conglomerate Google has announced plans to add two new features-“on-body detection” and “smart lock”-which essentially uses the accelerometer on the smart phone and judges whether the phone is in use or rested on a surface.
According to the gizmodo.com web site, if the phone is unlocked and in your hand or in your pocket, the device will keep itself unlocked. But if you rest it on the table or on any other flat surface, the phone will automatically lock itself.
Social networking site Facebook has announced plans to introduce a new dialer application for android users.
Facebook is currently testing this app with Android and will eventually bring it to smart phones.
According to the gizmodo.com web site, the new application will be a lot like Truecaller, judging by the screenshot. The application will have access to your call logs and will let you block numbers that you desire and even pick out of the commonly blocked numbers from its database.
Facebook might soon launch a new app that would enable users to know who is calling and automatically block unwarranted calls.
The new app – named Phone – would be an addition to Facebook’s lengthy repertoire of offshoot apps that include Messenger, Home, Rooms, Groups and Slingshot, among others.
That info would include data pulled from Facebook’s vast network of people and businesses, Digital Trends reported.
Tapping on the Facebook Phone link led users to a blank page, so presumably this is just something that’s being tested internally for now.
San Francisco-based King Digital, maker of ‘Candy Crush Saga’, is facing a class-action lawsuit that claims the company deliberately hid a significant fall in the number of users ahead of its IPO last year.
The case, which was filed on Tuesday in California Superior Court, by investors Sean Debotte and Michael Nunes accused King Digital of misleading investors in its federal documents, Mashable reported.
The suit said that the company claimed that 97 million active users played 1.065 billion average daily games of Candy Crush ahead of the company’s initial public offering a year ago.
An ultramodern Bristol-built rocket car will try to break the land speed record this October with a confident RAF wing commander at the wheel, a report said. The attempt will be held on a specially cleared 12-mile stretch of the Hakskeen Pan in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert where the futuristic rocket cat is expected to reach a staggering 1,000mph, reported The Independent.
WordPress blogs are currently not accessible in Pakistan and several local outlets have held the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) responsible for the blockade, a report said.
According to TechCrunch, self-hosted WordPress blogs still work but WordPress.com and blogs hosted by WordPress cannot be reached.
The Pakistan government has blocked websites like, Facebook, Flickr, IMDb, Twitter and Wikipedia temporarily in the past for hosting content that it sees as blasphemous and inflammatory. (ANI)
In a bid to come up with new ways to fight obesity, scientists have now have programmed bacteria to generate a anti-obesity molecule in the gut.
The molecule, through normal metabolism, becomes a hunger-suppressing lipid, and in the study, mice that drank water laced with the programmed bacteria ate less, had lower body fat and staved off diabetes, even when fed a high-fat diet, offering a potential weight-loss strategy for humans.
The micro-blogging site Twitter can not only help political parties gauge the mood of youngsters but also persuade them to vote as elections approach, says a study.
The study that involved 3,000 Twitter-users aged 18 to 34 in Britain showed that 74 percent of those polled said they would vote in the next election.
While 45 percent said they became interested in or joined a political or social cause via learning from Twitter, 37 percent said they used the site to actively look for information about politics or the British general election, the Guardian reported.
Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to France next month, industry chamber FICCI will hold an interactive session here between chief executives of French companies in India and government officials on Monday
A white paper on “French companies Making in India” will also be released during the session with Industrial Policy and Promotion Secretary Amitabh Kant and French Ambassador Francois Richier, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry said in a statement here.
Researchers from the New Jersey-based Princeton University have decoded the shift from maternal genes to the embryo’s genes during development.
Learning how organisms manage this transition could help scientists understand larger questions about how embryos regulate cell division and differentiation.
“At the beginning, everything the embryo needs to survive is provided by mother but eventually, that stuff runs out and the embryo needs to start making its own proteins and cellular machinery,” said postdoctoral researcher and first author Shelby Blythe.
While the world is awestruck at the success of the sun-powered plane called Solar Impulse 2, NASA is working on a more efficient, electric-powered plane that has 18 propellers attached to it.
As part of NASA’s Leading Edge Asynchronous Propellers Technology project (LEAPTech), these 18 small engines sit atop the 31-foot-wide carbon composite wingspan and work together to lift and propel the plane forward.
The propellers are all powered by lithium iron phosphate batteries.
An ultramodern Bristol-built rocket car will try to break the land speed record this October with a confident RAF wing commander at the wheel, a report said.
The attempt will be held on a specially cleared 12-mile stretch of the Hakskeen Pan in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert where the futuristic rocket cat is expected to reach a staggering 1,000mph, reported The Independent.
Twitter is the latest Silicon Valley firm to join the league of companies facing lawsuits for gender discrimination as a former employee working with the micro-blogging platform claimed that its promotion process “unlawfully” favoured men.
In a class action suit filed in San Francisco on Thursday, ex-Twitter employee Tina Huang alleged that the firm relied on a “black box” style of promotion, wherein employees are informed about open positions via a mysterious “shoulder tap” process, reported The Verge.
It was today that the “global watercooler of news and inane chatter” took birth nine years ago with the first tweet posted by co-founder Jack Dorsey.
Dorsey took to Twitter on 21 March 2006 to compose the succinct message: “just setting up my twttr” and the rest, as they say, is history, reported The Independent.
The micro-blogging platform was initially named “Twttr” before it was padded out with vowels and was launched publicly four months after it first hatched.
The telecom industry on Saturday expressed concern that mobile phone services will be disrupted in Noida area as the landlords or properties where telecom towers are located have announced they will be switching off electricity and denying access to the companies’ operation and maintenance staff.
Google’s new update to its Android Device Manager app will now allow users to locate their lost phones.
The update will enable users to say “Ok, Google. Start. Find my phone,” into their Android Wear device and their Android phone will start ringing at full volume.
A report has said that Apple may bring in a “revamped Apple TV” at its World Wide Developers Conference in June.
Apple’s revamped TV is expected to offer more storage and feature a version of Apple’s latest mobile chip, the A8, along with third-party apps, voice control with Siri, and an internet-TV service, The Verge reported.
The inclusion of an App store would make the long awaited TV “more dramatic, capable and interesting,” as it would allow apps and games to take over the entire TV. ( news.in” target=”_blank”>ANI)
San Francisco-based King Digital, maker of “Candy Crush saga,” is facing a class-action lawsuit that claims the company deliberately hid a significant fall in the number of users ahead of its IPO last year.
The case, which was filed on Tuesday in California Superior Court, by investors Sean Debotte and Michael Nunes accused King Digital of misleading investors in its federal documents, Mashable reported.
The suit said that the company claimed that 97 million active users played 1.065 billion average daily games of Candy Crush ahead of the company’s initial public offering a year ago.
Prehistoric cavemen used to hunt and eat elephants half a million years ago, to boost their intelligence, scientists have claimed.
Archaeologists discovered stone tools in Israel, which showed signs of animal residue from big game, and the unearthed hand axes together with scrapers were used to separate fur and animal fat from muscle tissue, the Mirror reported.
‘ Toothy face’ selfie has been trending on Twitter to ward of men who have the tendency to harass women on social media.
Tired of men’s harassing comments on Twitter, a Brazil woman named Debora Adorno came up with the idea to scare off men by simply baring her pearly whites at them, giving a scary crazy lady look, News.com.au reported.
The ‘toothy face’ idea caught up instantly and women all across the globe are followed her lead, baring their teeth in response to sexual harassment with the hashtag #CaretaDoDentinho, roughly translated as “tooth grimace,” to mark their efforts.
As per a new study, superfast computers are a step closer to reality as a silicon chip’s quantum capabilities have been improved.
The University of Surrey team demonstrated a quantum on/off switching time of about a millionth of a millionth of a second, the fastest-ever quantum switch to be achieved with silicon and over a thousand times faster than previous attempts.
HAWC Observatory is going to study the universe’s most energetic phenomena.
Supernovae, neutron star collisions and active galactic nuclei are among the most energetic phenomena in the known universe. These violent explosions produce high-energy gamma rays and cosmic rays, which can easily travel large distances, making it possible to see objects and events far outside our own galaxy.
An experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease has already exceeded high expectations in an early study.
The results of the trial of an antibody known as aducanumab, which involved just 166 patients, have shown some benefit in people who were given it in the very earliest stage of the disease, the Guardian reported.
In the trial, conducted primarily to ensure the drug was safe and had no serious side-effects, brain scans showed a reduction of amyloid plaque, whose accumulation is thought to be one of the major causes of Alzheimer’s.
Application solutions provider AppDynamics has announced that its application intelligence platform will support apps designed for Apple’s smartwatch.
AppDynamics support is based on Apple’s publicly available WatchKit extension, it said in a statement adding that the firm has not entered into any deal with Apple to support this capability.
The company will provide mobile application performance monitoring and user analytics solutions for US-based firm’s recently unveiled smart watch — Apple Watch.