Funded by the Australian Research Council, the world’s first long-term assessment of adolescent mental health regarding late night mobile phone usage examined students’ quality of sleep, along with mood, aggression, coping skills, self esteem and whether they experienced any symptoms of depression, Xinhua news agency reported.

The process was conducted as an annual survey over four years and included 1,100 students from 29 schools.

When the subjects began the process, they were in Class 8 of High School. When the programme concluded, they had hit Class 11.

The questionnaires focused on what time of the night students continued to receive or send text messages and phone calls.

“We found that late night phone use directly contributed to poor sleep habits, which over time led to declines in overall wellbeing and mental health,” lead researcher Lynette Vernon said.

“We have demonstrated how poor sleep is the key link connecting an increase in night-time mobile use with subsequent increases in psychosocial issues.”

Around two thirds or 65 per cent of students in Class 8 who owned a mobile phone were reported to use it regularly after “lights out”.

When the study concluded four years later, the figure was 78 per cent, finding that “as their levels of mobile phone use grew over time, so did their poor sleep behaviour”, co-author Kathryn Modecki said.

According to Mark Levi, a Sydney-based sleep doctor, the scientific reason why mobile phones can have such a negative influence on sleeping patterns is due to the unnatural light they produce.

“Blue light in your bedroom retards your sleeping, it affects your hormones, it affects your melatonin secretions, your insulin secretions, it affects a lot of balance in the body,” Levi told Xinhua on Tuesday.

“So the more you sit in bed and watch TV, play with your tablet, phone and have your phone beeping at 3 in the morning, all these things affect the slow waves of your sleep pattern and will give the person poor quality sleep.

“Blue light is a real, real problem in the bedroom. It’s a big, huge problem.”

For Levi, the findings of the study are no surprise, “there is no question, no question at all that it’s a growing issue with teenagers, adolescents and the young”, the sleep expert said.

“When a phone is beeping all night or they are watching a screen all night, it’s affecting their sleep a lot and we’re seeing child with sleep patterns that are disturbed and it’s going to affect their attitude, their cognitive skills, concentrations skills, their moodiness during the day.”

Despite the damning findings, Vernon said the answer to solving the problem was not to simply ban teenagers from using their devices but to find ways of promoting better sleep habits to adolescents.

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Formally known as tendinitis, the condition was earlier only seen in factory workers. It causes the tendon that bends and flexes the thumb to become inflamed.

But with increased use of smartphone for our daily activities, this type of pain has become more common over the years in the US, according to a CBSNews.com report.

“One of the hypotheses is that, you know, the joints get loose and lax, and because of that the bones kind of move differently than they would in a normal situation,” Kristin Zhao, a biomedical engineer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester was quoted as saying by CBS Minnesota.

The movements we require our thumbs to make as we hold our phones are awkward, Zhao said.

“It’s also a movement that requires some force through the thumbs. It’s not just free movement in space,” she explained.

“Our hypothesis is that abnormal motion of bones in the thumb could be causing pain onset and eventual osteoarthritis,” Zhao said.

The ways to prevent the problem include giving your thumbs a break, using your forefinger sometimes, and doing daily stretching exercises to keep your tendons limber, among others.

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Scientists have discovered that almost every galaxy has a supermassive black hole with a mass several million to several billion times that of the Sun at its centre. With their mighty gravitational attraction, the supermassive black holes engulf the surrounding gas and dust, Xinhua news agency reported.

When a black hole swallows too much, the excess matter is converted into two jet-flows perpendicular to the accretion disk of the black hole, which is like a glutton with a bloated belly belching.

The jet-flows and accretion disk of the supermassive black hole generate X-ray radiation strong enough to travel billions of light years. These galaxies have very bright nuclei — so bright that the central region can be more luminous than the remaining galaxy.

Scientists call them active galactic nuclei.

The Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT), developed by Chinese scientists, will observe some active galactic nuclei.

“Since the active galactic nuclei are very far from the Earth, our telescope can only detect the brightest ones,” Zhang Shuangnan, lead scientist of HXMT and director of the Key Laboratory of Particle Astrophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), said on Monday.

The big eaters are full of mysteries. Scientists have found the double jet phenomenon is very common in galaxies with active galactic nuclei, but they don’t understand why supermassive black holes cannot engulf all the matter falling into them.

Supermassive black holes are very different from black holes of stellar mass, which are formed when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycles.

Scientists are still not clear how supermassive black holes are formed and grow, which is a key to understanding the evolution of galaxies.

HXMT’s observation is expected to help scientists see the core region close to the event horizon of supermassive black holes at the centre of active galaxies and gather information about the extremely strong gravitational fields, Zhang added.

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A crash-landing software for drones developed by Patricia Glaab, an aerospace technologist at NASA Langley Research Center, and her fellow NASA colleague and husband, Lou Glaab, could help drones automatically spot the best places to crash-land without hurting anyone on the ground, Fortune.com reported on Sunday.

In test flights, the technology has successfully spotted safer landing zones like swamps or drainage ditches to crash instead of on top of people’s cars, Glaab said.

The software links on-board drone components like batteries and motors to monitor their health.

While the technology is far from finished to be used in real-life situations, the goal is to identify when something on the drone goes haywire and put the drone in a sort-of crash-landing mode in such a situation.

When this mode is triggered, the software checks a pre-installed database of nearby safe zones and identifies one for safe landing.

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Oculus, which makes virtual reality headsets Rift and Gear VR, will allocate $50 million to directly fund creators of non-gaming VR content, Jason Rubin, the company’s vice president of content, said in a blog post.

Rubin added that Oculus is “still absolutely committed to growing the VR film and creative content ecosystem.”

Facebook paid $3 billion to acquire Oculus and retain its employees in 2014. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said he believed the medium that offers a 360-degree panoramic view using headsets “will become a part of daily life for billions of people.”

Oculus tapped talent from both Oscar-winning animation company Pixar and the video gaming world to head up Story Studio, which it launched in January 2015 at the Sundance Film Festival.

Facebook’s VR ambitions have been threatened somewhat by a lawsuit from video game publisher ZeniMax Media Inc accusing Facebook and Oculus of infringing ZeniMax’s copyrighted software code.

A jury found in ZeniMax’s favor in February, awarding it $500 million. Oculus has asked for a new trial.

Vive, a unit of HTC Corp, and Sony Corp are also racing to bring virtual reality products to a mass audience.

Oculus debuted its first short film called “Lost” at Sundance two years ago, a story of an animated mechanical creature in a forest.

Last year, Story Studio won an Emmy for original interactive program for its short VR film “Henry,” and at Sundance this year, it premiered “Dear Angelica,” an illustrated film of a mother and daughter.

But internally, Oculus has undergone some changes in its management in the past year.

Brendan Iribe stepped down as CEO in December, saying he was going to head up the PC division of the VR company. In March, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who created the prototype Oculus headset, parted ways with Facebook.—Reuters

Image: Reuters

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He mounts a fixed-gear bike with flat, slightly curved wide handlebars. Riding through the streets of San Francisco, he occasionally taps or swipes his right hand over the left cuff of his jacket, as the directions he’s listening to continually pop up on the screen of this advertisement.

It’s an ad from iconic US jeans maker Levi Strauss for Project Jacquard, an initiative with Google that the companies started two years ago for so-called “smart” denim.

The future of the popular fabric was the focus at a recent international fashion fair in Paris — after all most believe the word denim derives from the French “serge de Nimes”, a serge from the city of Nimes.

The fair featured many wearable innovations such as a waterproof jacket with sunscreen bands and a cable in the pocket to recharge a cellphone, or jeans that keep your body temperature stable.

Once mainly the purview of athletic gear — with moisture-wicking shirts and trousers and then clothing that can track motion, heart rate, and body temperature — the new trend for fashion designers is to take everyday wear and transform it using new technologies.

This is clothing made from specially woven fabric with touch-screen control capabilities that can be designed in such a way to visually stand out or go unnoticed depending on designers’ wishes.

French-based fashion company Spinali Design, for example, has created jeans that can give wearers directions without having to whip out the mobile at every single intersection.

Through blue tooth sensors stitched into the jeans’ waistband, the smart phone stays out of sight.

“You put a destination into the pap (and) sensors will vibrate right if you need to turn right, left if you need to turn left,” Spinali innovation director Romain Spinali told AFP.

In 2015, the company from the eastern French town of Mulhouse designed a bikini that tells women when it’s time to apply more sun screen.

The two-piece retails for 149 euros ($163) and comes with a small detachable ultraviolet sensor that, through a smart phone or tablet, sends a “sun screen alert” when the sunbather’s skin needs more protective cream.

The detector is calibrated to the wearer’s skin type and how much of a tan she wants to get, and is “virtually devoid of any radiation,” Spinali said.

The Spinali jeans, made in France, cost 150 euros and also have email notification capabilities.

“They will vibrate differently depending on whether the message received is from your family, your friends or work, in a way that you won’t have to constantly check your email on weekends or on vacation,” Spinali said.

On their end, Google and Levi expect to release their denim jacket sometime this year, but it will come with a hefty $350 price tag due in part to its special interactive fabric that allows the jacket’s wearer to order various products online.

Other international etch and fashion companies have also jumped on the “smart” denim bandwagon.

Using thermo-regulated fabric and microfiber cloth popular in athletic wear, Brazilian textile maker Vicugna Tex til has designed denims that will keep the wearer’s core temperature stable.

American designer Cone Denim for its part has blended its denims with technical textile fibres from equipment used on motorcycles — this to better tout the sturdiness of its clothes.

But these companies recognise that there has to be more to “smart” jeans than just fashion sense and connected capabilities and that means making sure they are environmentally friendly.

“The consumer demands greater traceability and ecology, especially when it comes to denim because it is a product that is a bit controversial,” said Marion Foret, fashion products chief for Premiere Vision Paris, which organises trade shows for the textile and clothing sector, including the denim show.

Denim is a product “that doesn’t always carry the best reputation, so textile makers are forced to use more ecological processes,” Foret added, such as making denims with organic or traceable cotton, cleaning denims without water, and using dyes that won’t pollute the land.

In keeping with that trend, Dutch fashion designer Pauline van Wongen makes denims using fabrics from used and already worn jeans.

Others seek to keep consumers better informed like Pakistani manufacturer Artistic Fabric Mills which developed an application to retrace the history of the jeans.

But for some young fashion students the future of jeans is not all about technology.

“Connecting jeans to a smartphone is not necessarily what we want to have,” said Aurelia Martin, who studies fashion in Brussels.

“There are problems that are a little more essential in terms of production, the dye, the cotton, the (jeans’) pretty weak longevity, and the quality.”—AFP

Image: AFP

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Bitdefender analyst Bogdan Botezatu said the previously undiscovered hacking group flew under researchers’ radar by using well-worn electronic espionage techniques, some more than a decade old.

He told The Associated Press the group’s “simplicity is its strength.”

Botezatu wouldn’t reveal the group’s identity or its targets beyond saying that its victims included a slew of government agencies. He said he needed to be discreet to avoid disrupting ongoing investigations.

The group, dubbed Netrepser, is dissected in a 20-page report published Friday.

Attempts to reach the hackers were unsuccessful.—AP

Image: Alamy

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The takeoff of the C919 brought cheers and applause from hundreds of invited guests at Shanghai Pudong International Airport and was broadcast live on Chinese state television. The jet soon became invisible on a windy and polluted day in Shanghai, which was also in the path of dense sandstorms from the north.

After the 1 ½ hour flight was over, the test pilots came down smiling from the plane, wearing orange overalls with the Chinese flag.

With the flight, the official Xinhua News Agency said China had become “one of the world’s top makers of jumbo aircraft,” becoming the fourth large jet producer after the U.S., Europe and Russia.

China is touting the C919 as a rival to single-aisle jets such as the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737. It was originally due to begin flying in 2014 and be delivered to buyers in 2016, but has been beset by delays blamed on manufacturing problems. It’s now unlikely to carry commercial passengers until at least 2019.

Mohshin Aziz, a Kuala Lumpur-based aviation analyst at Maybank Kim Eng Securities, said it wouldn’t be clear for 7-9 years whether the C919 can make a dent in Airbus and Boeing’s duopoly.

“This is just the test flight,” he said. “Eventually it needs to have some cornerstone customers, of which it will have because there are state-owned airlines, some of them are going to be forced to use it.”

Mohshin said other potential customers would wait to see what experience the first customers have. “You are not going to spend a lot of money on something you don’t know,” he said.

The aircraft’s maker, state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China Ltd., or Comac, will seek certification from China’s civil aviation authority and foreign regulators before making any deliveries.

Bao Pengli, deputy director of Comac’s project management department, said Thursday the manufacturer planned to make two planes a year from now to 2019 to obtain proof of safe flight before any mass production is started.

Comac says it has 570 orders from 23 domestic and foreign customers. Most are state-owned Chinese airlines. The handful of foreign customers includes GE Capital Aviation Services and Thailand’s City Airways.

The plane can be configured with 155-175 seats and has a standard flight length of 4,075 kilometers (2,530 miles).

The jet’s development is a key step on the path laid out by Chinese leaders to transform the country from the world’s low-cost factory into a creator of profitable technology.

At the same time, China’s aviation market is growing rapidly as a rising middle class travels more for leisure and business.

Boeing forecasts that an annual 6 percent growth in China’s air passenger traffic over the next two decades will create demand for 6,810 new planes worth a total of $1 trillion — the first trillion-dollar aviation market in its forecast. Of the new planes, 75 percent are expected to be single-aisle.

Airbus has five joint ventures in China, including a factory that assembles A320s in Tianjin, a port city near Beijing, that opened in 2008. Mohshin said much of China’s aircraft technology started from Russia, and the Tianjin factory has since given China’s supply chain vital experience.

“I would say that a lot of their technology mirrors Airbus,” he said.

Comac says more than 200 Chinese companies and 36 universities have been involved in research and development of the C919.

But it relies on foreign-made technology for critical systems, including its engines, which are made by CFM International, a joint venture between General Electric’s aviation subsidiary and France’s Safran Aircraft Engines. The first deliveries of Chinese-developed engines are expected in 2020, according to the company tasked with making them, AVIC Commercial Aircraft Engine Co. Ltd.

Airbus delivered 153 aircraft to Chinese operators last year, including 141 from the A320 family, Eric Chen, president of Airbus Commercial Aircraft China, said in an emailed statement.

“We believe C919 will bring new competition to the market,” he said. “And we welcome competition, which is good for the development of the industry.”

Boeing says it delivered more than 160 planes to China in 2016, and more than half of China’s fleet are Boeing planes.

China’s first domestically made commercial jet, the twin-engine regional ARJ-21, flew its first passengers in June 2016, eight years after its first test flight. That smaller jet is a rival to aircraft made by Bombardier Inc. of Canada and Brazil’s Embraer SA.

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The fast food chain’s 15-second television ad targeted Google Home, a speaker that can answer questions and control other smart appliances. When an actor in the ad said “OK, Google” and asked a question about the Whopper, Google Home obediently began reading the burger’s ingredients in homes around the country — effectively extending the commercial for however long it took someone to shout “OK, Google, stop!”

Google and Wikipedia quickly made fixes to shut it down. Though annoying, the stunt may have done some good by highlighting how easy it is to hijack such devices. (Just imagine a burglar spying a voice assistant and asking it to unlock all the doors.) It could also speed the development of home voice assistants with better security.

“It’s a wakeup call,” said Earl Perkins, a digital security analyst at the research firm Gartner. “It’s a harbinger of things to come.”

TRIGGER WARNING

Voice assistants such as Google Home, Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Echo devices have always been susceptible to accidental hijack. A Google ad during the Super Bowl that used the phrase “OK, Google” reportedly set off people’s devices. And in a January story that briefly turned a family into media celebrities, a woman’s 6-year old daughter ordered a dollhouse and sugar cookies simply by asking Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa for them.

Since the devices are so new — the Amazon Echo debuted in 2015, Google Home last year — they’re still having growing pains. And they’re growing in popularity; Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimates that Amazon sold 3 million Echo devices in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2016, bringing the total to more than 8 million. Amazon doesn’t release sales figures.

Many experts believe that deliberate attempts to trigger voice assistants will be short-lived. Among other things, brands have to face the consequences of potentially annoying millions of people.

“Burger King was doing what the Burger King brand is known to do, stir controversy and make sure it gets lots of coverage,” Forrester principal analyst James McQuivey said. “Very few brands want to do that.”

Of course, spammers and other bottom-feeding marketers can still try to implement the technique. But voice assistants already have a few ways to block them.

THREATS AND COUNTERMEASURES

Amazon already makes sure its TV commercials and those of its partners can’t inadvertently trigger the speaker. Developers that provide Echo with “skills” that let it, for instance, order pizza, are also prohibited from creating Alexa commands that would trigger ads. Google says it also has techniques to block TV ads from activating Google Home. Neither company provided details on those techniques.

Voice assistants are still in their “very early days,” Google says; the company plans to “monitor and learn as we go.”

Hackers might also be a threat. But because voice assistants are so new and limited in scope, more established connected devices such as webcams, routers and printers pose more of a threat for now.

“It’s not that we won’t see some creative or unique instance (of hacking), but I don’t think this is going to be the next great wave of cybercrime,” said Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at the security company McAfee.

MORE SECURITY TO COME

But before long, the devices are going to need better security. “When you move into a world of voice, some of the rules that we’re accustomed to, related to security for computers, change,” Gartner’s Perkins said.

Exactly how that works could depend on exactly what task a voice assistant is performing. Asking about the weather requires less security than say, shopping or accessing a bank account.

Amazon already has options for setting up security codes to shop, make financial transactions or unlock and start cars.

Of course, someone could always overhear you reciting a security phrase. A better solution, and one that companies are hard at work on, would be to identify a person’s voice, much the way Google and Facebook identify faces today. Beyond improving security, that technology could help the device personalize recommendations or even ads for the individual, not the whole family.

Apple already lets users voice-train its Siri digital assistant so it’s more likely to activate only when it hears a specific voice. Amazon has a voice training option for Alexa. Google Home can recognize up to six different voices, though it won’t prevent unauthorized users from activating the assistant.

Experts suggest that companies will eventually add cameras to voice assistants. Amazon’s new Echo Look has a camera, but it’s for offering fashion advice. Combining a facial scan with voice recognition would definitely beef up security, although they’ll also create new privacy concerns.

“Without any security or minimal security, (voice assistants are) going to be a fat target,” Perkins said. “There will be all kinds of innovation associated with compromising these systems.”—AP

Image: AP

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Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) in partnership with the Ministry of Railways, under its IMPRINT programme, is setting up FMSAFE, India’s first knowledge centre on Formal Methods on Safety Critical Systems.

The MHRD-supported IMPRINT is a Pan-IIT + IISc joint initiative to address the major science and engineering challenges in the country.

Formal methods are a new genre of techniques which use logic based on Artificial Intelligence theories to prove the correctness of software and electronic systems before they are deployed in safety critical applications.

A coordinated formal methods programme in India will help indigenous developers to aim for a high degree of safety assurance essential for global competence.

“What will be needed is a deep understanding on what is safety critical in Indian operating contexts and developing design and validation practices accordingly. This is what the new centre aims to catalyse,” said Pallab Dasgupta, who will lead the FMSAFE centre at IIT Kharagpur.

The FMSAFE centre will function as a networked knowledge and research centre and students working on cutting edge projects under this centre will spend time at all three IITs.

The centre will be led by Dasgupta from IIT Kharagpur along with Sandeep Shukla from IIT Kanpur and Supratik Chakraborty from IIT Bombay.—IANS

Image: Alamy

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