Science & Tech

Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Wednesday it will ban advertisements for cryptocurrencies and related content starting in June. Under the new policy, the company will ban ads for unregulated or speculative financial products like binary options, cryptocurrency and financial spread betting among others. In a separate blog post, Google said …

Shanghai’s 3D printing Cultural Museum showcased a display of world’s first 3D printing electric vehicle named LSEV. The tech-genius is expected to be made available in the markets by April 2019. The startup electric vehicle company is exhibiting its first 3D-printed LSEV at Shanghai’s China 3D printing Cultural Museum before …

SAN FRANCISCO: The group overseeing Internet addresses is scrambling to balance the privacy of website owners and the right to know who is behind online pages. The nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) began a weeklong meeting Monday focused on the fate of the public Whois database, …

A team of researchers from the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University have developed a mechanically robust conductive coating that can maintain performance under heavy stretching and bending. Stretchable, bendable and foldable electronics are crucial for the development of emerging technologies like adaptive displays, artificial skin, and biometric and …

In a world-first, an ESA-led team has built and fired an electric thruster to ingest scarce air molecules from the top of the atmosphere for propellant, opening the way to satellites flying in very low orbits for years on end. ESA’s GOCE gravity-mapper flew as low as 250 km for …

SAN FRANCISCO: Jeff Bezos is officially the richest person on the planet thanks to the success of Amazon — but his bold vision extends to space and even time itself. With Amazon´s share price up nearly 60 percent during the past year, the personal wealth of the company´s 54-year-old founder …

SEOUL: Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus smart phones are available for South Koreans who took advantage of the pre-order program, with initial sales numbers presumed to be below that of its immediate predecessor. Local mobile carriers said they have started distributing the Galaxy S9 series phones …

BEIJING: WeChat’s worldwide accounts have crossed the one billion mark, according to the chief executive of its parent company Tencent. The all-in-one app is a daily necessity for most Chinese, bringing together messaging, social media, mobile payment, games, news and other services. “WeChat’s worldwide monthly active users have surpassed the …

Lenses are no longer necessary for some microscopes, according to Rice University engineers developing FlatScope, a thin fluorescent microscope whose abilities promise to surpass those of old-school devices. A paper in Science Advances by Rice engineers Ashok Veeraraghavan, Jacob Robinson, Richard Baraniuk and their labs describes a wide-field microscope thinner …

A team from EPFL and NCCR Marvel has identified more than 1,000 materials with a particularly interesting 2D structure. Their research, which made the cover page of Nature Nanotechnology, paves the way for groundbreaking technological applications. 2D materials, which consist of a few layers of atoms, may well be the …