Sci-Tech

Breakthrough treatment helps paralysed patients walk

by Sara HUSSEIN Agence France Presse TOKYO, Japan (AFP) — A breakthrough treatment involving electrical stimulation of the spine has enabled paralyzed patients to walk again, apparently reactivating nerve connections and providing hope for people even years after accidents. A team including neurosurgeons and engineers used targeted electrical pulses to achieve the results, triggering individual muscles in a sequence, the way the brain would. The pulses are produced by an implant placed over the spine […]

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Apple unveils new Macs, iPad Pro

  NEW YORK, United States (AFP) — Apple has unveiled a new version of its MacBook Air laptop, this time made of recycled aluminum, as well as a new Mac Mini and an iPad Pro, all pricier than their predecessors. Nearly 10 years after the launch of the first MacBook Air by the late Steve Jobs, his successor Tim Cook presented on Tuesday the latest version of this PC, just 1.56 cm thick, compared to […]

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Typical tweet shorter since character length doubled

SAN FRANCISCO, United States (AFP) — Twitter on Tuesday confirmed that a year after doubling the character limit for tweets, the average length of messages fired off in English actually got a smidge shorter. The news promised to allay concerns that raising the character limit from 140 to 280 last year would ruin Twitter’s succinct comment style and lead to rants, rambles and diatribes. “We made this change because we want every person around the […]

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NASA’s planet-hunter telescope, Kepler, runs out of fuel

by Kerry SHERIDAN Agence France Presse TAMPA, United States (AFP) — The US space agency’s Kepler space telescope has run out of fuel and is being retired after nine and a half years, having helped discover more than 2,600 planets, some of which may hold life, officials said Tuesday. The unmanned space telescope, which launched in 2009, revealed that billions of hidden planets are in space and revolutionized humanity’s understanding of the universe, experts said. […]

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NASA spacecraft breaks record for coming closest to Sun

TAMPA, United States (AFP) — NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which launched earlier this year, has set a new record for becoming the closest human-made object to the Sun, the US space agency announced Monday. “The spacecraft passed the current record of 26.55 million miles (42.73 million kilometers) from the Sun’s surface on Oct. 29, 2018, at about 1:04 pm EDT (1704 GMT),” said a NASA statement. “The previous record for closest solar approach was set […]

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China, France launch satellite to study climate change

BEIJING, China (AFP) — The first Franco-Chinese satellite was launched into orbit on Monday to study ocean surface winds and waves around the clock, better predict cyclones and improve scientists’ understanding of climate change. A Long March 2C carrier rocket blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China’s Gobi Desert at 0043 GMT to enter orbit 520 kilometers (323 miles) above the Earth, according to China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and […]

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Twitter surges on profit, revenue growth

by Rob Lever Agence France-Presse WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Twitter shares flew higher Thursday after the social network reported a record quarterly profit that helped investors look past a drop in the number of users due to the weeding out of fake and abusive accounts. The San Francisco group delivered a $789 million profit, including one-time gains, compared to a net loss of $21 million in the previous year, as revenues grew 29 percent […]

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Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

by Marlowe HOOD Agence France Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported Monday. In some locations, the amount of oxygen available could even keep alive a primitive, multicellular animal such as a sponge, they reported in the journal Nature Geosciences. “We discovered that brines” — water […]

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Japan orders Facebook to improve data protection

TOKYO, Japan (AFP) — The Japanese government on Monday ordered Facebook to improve protection of users’ personal information following data breaches affecting tens of millions of people worldwide. Facebook said early this month that hackers accessed the personal data of 29 million users in a breach at the world’s leading social network first disclosed late September. The company had originally said up to 50 million accounts were affected in a cyber-attack that exploited a trio […]

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Mercury mission to explore origin of Solar System

by Laurence COUSTAL Agence France Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Is Mercury’s core liquid or solid, and why — on the smallest planet in our solar system — is it so big? What can the planet closest to the Sun tell us about how our solar system came into being? An unmanned European-Japanese space mission, dubbed BepiColombo, blasted off early Saturday morning from French Guiana, to probe these and other mysteries. “BepiColombo is coming like […]

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Postman, shopper, builder: In Japan, there’s a robot for that

by Karyn NISHIMURA-POUPEE Agence France Presse TOKYO, Japan (AFP) — Forget the flashy humanoids with their gymnastics skills: at the World Robot Summit in Tokyo, the focus was on down-to-earth robots that can deliver post, do the shopping and build a house. Introducing CarriRo, a delivery robot shaped a bit like a toy London bus with bright, friendly “eyes” on its front that can zip around the streets delivering packages at 6km/h (4 miles per […]

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Facebook launches ‘war room’ to combat manipulation

by Julie CHARPENTRAT Agence France-Presse MENLO PARK, United States (AFP) — In Facebook’s “War Room,” a nondescript space adorned with American and Brazilian flags, a team of 20 people monitors computer screens for signs of suspicious activity. The freshly launched unit at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters in California is the nerve center for the fight against misinformation and manipulation of the largest social network by foreign actors trying to influence elections in the United States […]

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