Monthly Archives: May 2018

Xiaomi Mi 7 photo leaked on Weibo, Sports 8GB RAM, finger scanner, snapdragon 845

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Xiaomi Mi 7 is all set for a grand release with in-display fingerprint scanner, Snapdragon 845 chipset among other features and a Chinese website has leaked the picture with the possible date of its release.

The Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, who is going to IPO in Hong Kong exchange currently, was supposed to have announced its flagship Mi 7 at the Mobile World Congress 2018 held from February 26 to March 1 but it has disappointed fans with no announcement on Mi 7.

Now the reports have surfaced in China and elsewhere that Xiaomi might announce the Mi 6 successor this month itself, perhaps once the IPO funding is done with the exchange.

But a Weibo post on the Chinese technology giant has revealed the release date of the Mi 7 will be May 23, 2018. The website has also published a photo of the device with the Mi logo on it.

Since, it is more than year since its predecessor Mi6 was released, the news cannot be brushed aside as another fake news. Xiaomi never shied away from releasing at least one new version of all the brands it sells in the market.

According to Weibo post, the Xiaomi Mi 7 will feature an in-display fingerprint scanner and notch up top. It could be sporting either a 5.65-inch or a 5.8-inch bezel-less AMOLED display with 2,560×1,440 pixels screen resolution against 5.15-inch (1080 x 1920 pixels) display seen in the Mi 6.

Under the hood, the flagship is likely to have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor, a 6GB/8GB RAM, a 128GB/256GB internal storage, a dual 19MP+19MP main camera, and a 4,480mAh battery.


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Frequent sauna bathing brings down stroke risk, says study

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Frequent sauna bathing can bring down the risk of stroke, said a new international study, based on a 15-year follow-up on people taking a sauna 4-7 times a week.

the study found that they were 61% less likely to suffer a stroke than those taking a sauna once a week. This is the first such large-scale study and the findings have been published in the journal Neurology.

Stroke is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, with a cascading effect on the economy with huge medical bills and payouts. The reduced risk associated with sauna bathing was found by a team of scientists from the Universities of Eastern Finland, Bristol, Leicester, Atlanta, Cambridge and Innsbruck.

The findings are based on the population-based Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor (KIHD) study. The study involved 1,628 men and women aged 53 to 74 years living in the eastern part of Finland, whose frequency to traditional Finnish sauna baths with a relative humidity of 10-20%.

The participants were divided into three groups: those taking a sauna once a week, those taking a sauna 2-3 times a week, and those taking a sauna 4-7 times a week.

The more frequently saunas were taken, the lower was the risk of stroke, the results showed. Compared to people taking it once a week, the risk considerably decreased by 14% among those with 2-3 sessions and 61% among those with 4-7 sessions.

The association persisted even when taking into account conventional stroke risk factors, such as age, sex, diabetes, body mass index, blood lipids, alcohol consumption, physical activity and socio-economic status, with no gender bias.

Previous results from the KIHD study at the University of Eastern Finland have shown that frequent sauna bathing reduces the risk of cardiovascular mortality. The association of sauna bathing with reduced stroke may include a reduction in blood pressure, stimulation of immune system, a positive impact on the autonomic nervous system, and an improved cardiovascular function.

In another recent experiment, the same team had shown that sauna bathing has acute effects on the stiffness of the arterial wall, hence influencing blood pressure and cardiac function parameters.

Sri Reddy row: Telugu Film Industry promises CASH committees, Helplines, Toilets and more

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Amid an ugly #MeToo movement when actress Sri Reddy bared her body in the public, the shocked Telugu film industry (TFI) has come up with a series of steps to ensure women’s safety.

In a statement, the Telugu Film industry said that it has decided collectively to deal with the matter with utmost urgency and in a wholistic manner. Despite several means to air one’s grievances, the statement said a few people have chosen “alternative platforms” to air their grievances that has caused concern.

Hence, the TFI said it has collectively decided to take a few short term and long term measures.

To begin with the Telugu film industry has decided to set up a Panel against sexual harassment. It comprises 50 percent non-industry members to give it a greater transparency and integrity. These members include doctors, members from NGOs, psychologists, educationists, ex-government officials among others. Currently, a legal framework of the the guidelines for this panel are being prepared by a team of legal experts, said the statement.

The industry bodies have given guidelines to producers council, MAA, and TFDA about the measures to be taken to enhance women safety, including setting up of CASH committees as per Vishakha guidelines, providing minimum toilet facilities and decent changing rooms to junior artists, character artists doing auditions only in in-camera facilities and in the presence of at least one other woman present, avoid using profane language in any form of communication.

The defensive Telugu Film Industry said it is in the process of conducting various meetings with women groups within the industry to be able to understand in greater depth their specific issues following which more concrete policies can be framed.

Interestingly, the panel against sexual harassment will have a direct hotline with women teams to take up swift measures. Besides, the helplines via email, phone, SMS have been set up so women can easily approach the panel with complaints, said the statement without giving further details about any hotline.

It said licenses will be issued soon to model coordinators so that the candidates are properly vetted and made accountable. It assured counselling for new actors who are wishing to enter the Telugu Film Industry.

UFOs floating in shape over Shrewsbury, claims ex-army officer

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An ex-army officer has claimed that he has captured a streak of UFOs floating over Shrewsbury, in Pontesbury Hill and the witness assured the viewers that it was not a military aircraft.

"Having served in the forces for over 30 years, I can bet my pension they are not known to the military. They moved slowly around the back of Pontesbury Hill and out towards Eastridge Woods," he said, reports Shropshire Star.

He said the unidentified flying objects did not make any sound and they moved in a controlled manner in the skies of Shrewsbury moving towards Stiperstones. They are certainly not the Chinese lanterns released during the festive season to float around in the sky along with the wind, he said.

“Did anyone else see these as I’m told that Shropshire is a hotspot for UFO sightings?" asked the witness, whose name has not been revealed.

The UFO sightings has increasingly been making it to the newsrooms and many former space scientists and astronauts have joined the row either claiming to have seen UFOs or denying the phenomenon as a hoax.

In addition, the time travellers have been hitting the Youtube or social media claiming that they had visited a particular year in the future and recollecting their experience. But none of them reveal their name or face or even their voice.

Since readership for anything UFO or time-travel is high, even major news outlets have repeatedly published such news. NASA, however, remains stuck to it stand that they are Internet Hoax.

But UFO buffs around the world claim that the governments are aware of alien existence and they even collaborate with them.

Tobacco firm Philip Morris admits nicotine addiction exists

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After decades denying the role of nicotine dependence in smoking addiction, tobacco company Philip Morris has finally admitted that nicotine is the main driver of smoking behavior in 2000, though it said their internal understanding of smoking addiction was more complex.

The company defended saying they simultaneously promoted nicotine reduction products alongside advertising and policy campaigns to promote smoking behavior, according to a new study published this week in PLOS Medicine.

The research, by Jesse Elias, Yogi Hendlin, and Pamela Ling of the University of California, San Francisco, analyzed previously secret documents made available as a result of litigation against the tobacco industry to explore the company’s understanding of addiction before and after publicly admitting nicotine’s addictiveness.

The researchers found that Philip Morris continued studying addiction through the 2000s to develop successful and potentially safer nicotine products, and that from the mid-1990s to at least 2006, its internal models of addiction branded them on psychological, social, and environmental factors than nicotine in driving cigarette use.

Elias and his colleagues argue that Philip Morris’s outward support for nicotine’s role in driving smoking allowed the company to divert from social and environmental interventions to promotion of potentially reduced but harmful products.

The researchers note that the industry documents archive may have been missed some key studies though they emphasize that reducing smoking prevalence requires policies that address all factors driving smoking addiction such as advertising restrictions, plain packaging, tobacco taxes, and widespread smoke-free ban.

The authors say: “As PM’s internal research indicates, positive health outcomes are more likely to be achieved by complementing NRT and behavioral counseling with ever-stronger society-level interventions addressing the psychological, social, and environmental components of addiction.”

Stephen Hawking’s final theory on Big Bang published, What it says?

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Professor Stephen Hawking’s final theory on the origin of the universe, predicting the universe is finite and far simpler than many current theories on it, has been published on Wednesday, April 2, 2018 in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

The theory, worked in collaboration with Professor Thomas Hertog from KU Leuven, was submitted for publication before Hawking’s death earlier this year.

Modern theories of the big bang predict that our local universe came into existence due to inflation within a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang itself, and the universe expanded at an exponential rate. “The usual theory of eternal inflation predicts that globally our universe is like an infinite fractal, with a mosaic of different pocket universes, separated by an inflating ocean,” said Hawking in an interview last year.

In their new paper, Hawking and Hertog say this account of eternal inflation is wrong. “It assumes an existing background universe that evolves according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity and treats the quantum effects as small fluctuations around this,” said Hertog. “However, the dynamics of eternal inflation wipes out the separation between classical and quantum physics. As a consequence, Einstein’s theory breaks down in eternal inflation.”

On his part, Hawking said, “We predict that our universe, on the largest scales, is reasonably smooth and globally finite. So it is not a fractal structure.”

The theory of eternal inflation that Hawking and Hertog put forward is based on string theory concept of holography, which postulates that the universe is a large and complex hologram: physical reality in certain 3D spaces can be mathematically reduced to 2D projections on a surface.

Hawking’s earlier ‘no boundary theory’ predicted that if you go back in time to the beginning of the universe, the universe shrinks and closes off like a sphere, but this new theory represents a different interpretation. “Now we’re saying that there is a boundary in our past,” said Hertog.

 

Hertog now plans to study the implications of the new theory on smaller scales within the reach of our space telescopes. He believes that primordial gravitational waves – ripples in space time – generated at the exit from eternal inflation constitute the most promising “smoking gun” to test the model.

The expansion of our universe since the beginning means such gravitational waves would have very long wavelengths, outside the range of the current LIGO detectors, which can be heard by the planned European space-based gravitational wave observatory, LISA.