Technology

The Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) has launched Regional Plan9 — a network of incubators for technology startups across the province, it emerged on Monday. Under the plan, PITB will be launching nine incubation centres in Lahore, Bahawalpur, Dera Ghazi Khan, Faisalabad, Multan, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Sahiwal and Sargodha in partnership with public sector universities, the board said in a statement. …

  PESHAWAR: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has blocked access to around 500,000 objectionable videos on the popular video-sharing application TikTok in the country, a single-member Peshawar High Court bench was told on Monday. During the hearing into a case regarding the court’s recent ban on TikTok in the country, PTA lawyer Jehanzeb Mehsud also told Chief Justice Qaiser Rashid Khan …

Former US President Donald Trump, suspended from Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, plans to launch his own platform in two to three months, one of his senior advisers told Fox News on Sunday. Jason Miller, a spokesman for Trump’s 2020 campaign, told the network that Trump would re-enter the social …

PARIS: The largest asteroid to pass by Earth this year is expected to swing closest on Monday, giving astronomers a rare chance for a good look at a space rock that formed at the dawn of our solar system. While in astronomical terms this marks a close encounter with the asteroid — called 2001 FO32 — Nasa says there is …

ISLAMABAD: The government is set to launch 4G broadband services in Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir and an announcement to this effect is expected to be made on March 23. Sources in the ministry of information technology said the government had decided to open up “digital roads” in GB and AJK and the auction proceeds for new spectrum would …

The human immune system makes many antibodies in response to COVID-19 infection or vaccination, and no single variant of the new coronavirus can yet escape all of them, according to a study posted on Thursday on bioRxiv ahead of peer review. Researchers looked at how mutations in coronavirus variants affect antibodies’ ability to target a key region on the virus spike …

Some of the new coronavirus variants can cause COVID-19 in mice, researchers have found. The implications, such as whether mice could then transmit the virus to humans, will require further study, they said. The original virus strain identified in Wuhan, China, could not produce illness in mice because the spikes on its surface could not bind well to the ACE2 …

Facebook Inc said on Friday its services were being affected by a number of issues, after nearly a million people across the world reported problems with its photo-sharing app Instagram. “Multiple teams are working on it (the outage), and we’ll update you when we can,” Facebook’s gaming unit said in a tweet. It tweeted about an hour later that the …

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) on Thursday announced that it had connected the much-awaited 1,100MW Karachi Nuclear Power Plant Unit-2 (K-2) to the national grid. In a statement, the PAEC termed it a ‘Pakistan Day’ gift to the nation. It said the nuclear power plant (NPP) had achieved criticality at the end of February and was undergoing certain …

Earlier this month, SpaceX’s Starship SN9 spacecraft blew itself to pieces around eight minutes after a successful touchdown. The failure must have cost tens of millions of dollars – yet it was celebrated. That’s because failure is a necessary station on the path to success. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and now the richest man in the world, said if things …