Technology

When India banned the hit PUBG mobile game over its diplomatic row with China, Zeyan Shafiq’s eSports team was suddenly left without players. So Shafiq, who is based in Indian occupied Kashmir, did something very unusual: he reached across the border to Pakistan. Shafiq, 18, feared reprisals over his move, but none came. It resulted in an unheard-of alliance between …

Acknowledged for her groundbreaking cell-biological work on the mechanisms of epigenetic gene regulation, Pakistan-born Asifa Akhtar has been selected as a recipient of Germany’s Leibniz Prize — one of the most prestigious awards of the country. Germany’s Max Planc society — a fundamental research and science organization, where Akhtar is also serving as the first international female Vice President — shared the …

Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Tuesday it had resolved a problem with Gmail due to which some of its users had faced issues with the mailing platform, just a day after a global outage affected YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive. Downdetector.com, a website that tracks outages, showed there were more than 13,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Gmail.   …

TOKYO: Officials from Japan’s space agency said on Tuesday they have found more than the anticipated amount of soil and gases inside a small capsule the country’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft brought back from a distant asteroid this month, a mission they praised as a milestone in planetary research. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said its staff initially spotted some black particles …

BRUSSELS: The European Union on Tuesday unveiled tough draft rules targeting tech giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook, whose power Brussels sees as a threat to competition and even democracy. The landmark proposals — which come as Silicon Valley faces increasing global scrutiny — could shake up the way Big Tech does business by menacing some of the world’s biggest …

BEIJING: China’s Baidu is considering making its own electric vehicles and has held talks with automakers about the possibility, three people with knowledge of the matter said, the latest move in a race among tech firms to develop smart cars. The search-engine leader, which also develops autonomous driving technology and internet connectivity infrastructure, is considering contract manufacturing, one of the …

Antibodies are supposed to attack invading germs, but severely ill COVID-19 patients have so-called autoantibodies that mistakenly attack not just their own tissues and organs but even virus-fighting proteins produced by the immune system, new research shows. Scientists studied 194 COVID-19 patients, including 55 with severe disease, plus a control group of 30 people without the virus. In the sickest …

Trained dogs can identify people with COVID-19, even those with no symptoms, according to researchers. In the preliminary study published on Thursday in PLoS One. Dogs who sniffed swab samples of armpit sweat could tell which samples came from COVID-19 patients and which were from people who tested negative for the new coronavirus. That study was conducted in March. More …

CALIFORNIA: Google services, including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive, were restored for most users on Monday, following a global outage that affected thousands. Google’s website that logs outages said the services that were affected for nearly an hour should be restored for most users. The company has some of the most widely used services in the world. YouTube records over …

Social network firm Reddit said here on Sunday it would buy short-video platform Dubsmash, becoming the latest company to expand in a space dominated by Chinese-owned TikTok. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a spokeswoman for Reddit said the acquisition was based on a combination of cash and stock. The success of ByteDance’s TikTok has prompted …