IntellectBeat

In future, India and the US could jointly explore Mars and who knows an Indian astronaut could also head to the Red planet on a joint mission. India's maiden mission to the Red Planet, Mangalyaan, has opened the eyes of the world on ISRO's capabilities at undertaking low cost, high value inter-planetary mission. Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory or JPL, a part of NASA and an institution better known for piloting most of the American planetary exploration efforts with rovers like Curiosity, says India and the US could jointly explore Mars and even invited India to send astronauts to the Red Planet. Excerpts of an interview : Q: The US is interested in going back to Mars, so is India. Will India and America look at a joint robotic mission to explore Mars? A: We hope so that it will be the case in the future. At NASA, we are just beginning to plan for next mission to Mars for the next decade, which is 2020-2030. In fact shortly, there is a meeting in...

Government has asked Google to select a telecom operator as partner for testing the balloon-based internet technology, Loon Project, in the country. "Google wants to test the Loon Project in expensive and scarce spectrum bands. It has been asked to partner with any telecom operator that can meet its requirement and then approach the government for testing Loon," an official source told PTI. The official said that if Google wishes to conduct a test with BSNL, it can carry out the experiment in the spectrum held by the state-owned company. "This approach should resolve the spectrum band sought by Google as well as security, to some extent," the official added. An e-mail sent to Google went unanswered. In India, Google has approached the government to set up the Loon project that has the potential to replace mobile towers as it can directly transmit signal on 4G mobile phones. The Telecom Ministry has formed a panel under IT secretary and asked BSNL to look at p...

The two new Galaxy S7 handsets from Samsung were the most-tweeted about Mobile World Congress topics during the annual tech conference's 2016 edition. The Mobile World Congress has increasingly become a destination for technology manufacturers of all kinds, but at the eighth MWC in Barcelona, February 22-25, it was the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge that won out with Twitter users, according to trend tracking firm Hotwire. The pair of handsets were unveiled at the 2016 MWC as expected and accrued 35,360 tweets between them. Very close behind was LG's latest high-spec handset, the modular G5. Dropping down into the low 20,000s was the Sony Xperia line. Though the Xperia X was on display, the name was also applied to four concept designs: the Agent (a voice-controlled AI assistant), Ear (a voice-controlled earbud), Projector (a projector that turns its target surfaces into ad-hoc touchscreen displays) and Eye (a camera). Also causing a buzz at MWC was the Internet of Things,...

Reliance Retail Ltd, subsidiary of Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Ltd, has launched a dedicated website for its LYF range of products. The www.mylyf.com website is now live and lists the newest LYF smartphones- LYF Earth 1 , Water 1, Water 2, Flame 1, and Wind 6. Based on the five elements, these smartphones are 4G enabled and are offered at a price of Rs 6,699 onwards. The top-of-the-line model- the LYF Earth 1- carries a price tag of Rs 25,800 while the Flame 1 is the most affordable from the company's new offerings.