Technology

China took the lead in terms of the 5G market in 2020, with 200 million new 5G connections, accounting for 87 per cent of the global total, and the number is expected to hit 822 million by 2025, according to a report released by the Global System for Mobile Communications Association on Feb 22. Rapid growth of 5G application in …

BRASILIA: Humans have degraded or destroyed roughly two-thirds of the world’s original tropical rainforest cover, new data reveals raising alarm that a key natural buffer against climate change is quickly vanishing. The forest loss is also a major contributor of climate-warming emissions, with the dense tropical forest vegetation representing the largest living reservoir of carbon. Logging and land conversion, mainly …

KARACHI: Federal Minister for Information Technology and Telecom Aminul Haque has offered government support to a teenage student of Karachi who despite meagre resources built his own messaging app. JDC’s Zafar Abbas posted an emotional video on Facebook in which 15-year-old Nabeel Haider was seen showing him his ‘FF Family’ app that he built on the pattern of Whatsapp, using …

Insilico Medicine, a Chinese investors-backed company that uses artificial intelligence to develop new drugs, said that its chemical compound candidate is likely to enter into clinical trials by the end of this year, according to its top executives. “We expect our chemical compound candidate to start its first clinic trial by the end of the end before the second and …

WASHINGTON: The Mars rover Perseverance has successfully conducted its first test drive on the Red Planet, the US space agency Nasa said on Friday. The six-wheeled rover travelled about 6.5 metres (21.3 feet) in 33 minutes, Nasa said. It drove four metres forward, turned in place 150 degrees to the left, and then backed up 2.5 metres, leaving tire tracks …

From flat battery to full charge in just five minutes — an Israeli start-up has developed technology it says could eliminate the “range anxiety” associated with electric cars. Ultra-fast recharge specialists StoreDot have developed a first-generation lithium-ion battery that can rival the filling time of a standard car at the pump. “We are changing the entire experience of the driver, …

Most children and adolescents are spared from severe COVID-19, but among those who do require hospitalization, temporary neurologic effects are common, researchers found. In their study of 1,695 patients age 21 or younger hospitalized for COVID-19 or a COVID-19-related illness known as multisystem inflammatory syndrome, 365 – or 22% – had neurologic complications, including 43 (12%) with life-threatening neurologic disorders …

A coronavirus variant circulating in Brazil is likely able to reinfect people who survived infections with earlier versions of the coronavirus, new data suggest. The variant that emerged in Brazil, called P.1, carries a mutation that is already known to make a variant prevalent in South Africa harder to treat with antibodies and harder to prevent with available vaccines. New …

LAHORE: WhatsApp has announced that it has made private and secure one-to-one voice and video calls available on its desktop app. According to a blog on WhatsApp’s official website, the company says: “Throughout the last year we’ve seen significant increases in people calling one another on WhatsApp, often for long conversations. Last New Year’s Eve, we broke the record for …

KARACHI: The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) signed a contract with a consortium on Friday to operationalise the ‘Track & Trace Solution’ on tobacco, cement, sugar and fertiliser sectors from July 1, aimed at accelerating digitisation of economic activity, improving revenue forecasting and curbing counterfeit products in the market. The FBR said that 45 million tonnes of cement, over four …