IntellectBeat

The government is working on a scheme to provide electric cars on zero down payment for which people can pay out of their savings on expensive fossil fuels, with the aim of becoming 100 percent electric vehicle nation by 2030. "India can become the first country of its size which will run 100 per cent of electric vehicles. We are trying to make this programme self financing. We don't need one rupee support from the government. We don't need one rupee investment from the people of India," Power Minister Piyush Goyal said at an event organised by CII Young India. Elaborating further, he said, "We are working (on the scheme). Can we actually give electric car for free (zero down payment) and people can pay for that out of the savings on the petroleum products. Innovation is possible, it just needs an open mind. You need to think of scale and be honest." The minister informed that a small working group under the leadership of Road Minister Nitin Gadkari has ...

When Microsoft's $3000 HoloLens comes in the hands of every consumer, it might be able to truly dissolve the difference of space and time for people living anywhere in the world. In a latest video posted by the software giant, research manager Shahram Izadi demonstrates how the augmented reality device could 'holoport' in real-time. The video shot on HoloLens shows Izadi interacting with people from different zones which appear to be in the same room as Izadi. The technology uses 3D images captured by the cameras placed in respective rooms of the participants and are stitched together to be projected to the HoloLens wearer in real-time. To put it into perspective, Izadi talks to his daughter back home and while he could see his daughter in front of him, the daughter is only able to listen to his voice. With this technology, it is also possible to play back the entire interaction which basically feels like walking into a living memory. One could also reduce the size of the...

Chinese scientists have developed a light weight, low-cost battery which performs better than lithium ion batteries that currently power smartphones and other portable devices. The new aluminium-graphite dual-ion battery (AGDIB) developed by researcher of the Chinese Academy of Sciences offers significantly reduced weight, volume, and fabrication cost, as well as higher energy density, in comparison with conventional lithium ion batteries (LIB). AGDIB's electrode materials are composed of environment friendly low cost aluminium and graphite only, while its electrolyte is composed of conventional lithium salt and carbonate solvent. The discovery is particularly important given rising battery demand and existing LIB technology, which is reaching its limit in specific energy (by weight) and energy density (by volume). LIBs are widely used in portable electronic devices, electric vehicles and renewable energy systems. Battery disposal creates major environmental problems, since mo...

Netflix said that it will introduce a data-saver feature for mobile apps which will allow users more control over their data usage while streaming on mobile networks. This feature will be available to users sometime in May, Netflix added. The dominant online video company also said it had been lowering the quality of its video for customers watching its service on wireless networks such as AT&T and Verizon Communications for more than five years, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The company also said that it does not downgrade videos for T-Mobile US and Sprint Corp users because they had "more consumer friendly policies," the Journal added. In response to requests for comment, Netflix said it had posted a blog on Thursday. In the blog, it said it had limited its video quality for mobile viewers globally, capping them at 600 kilobits-per-second, to protect consumers from exceeding mobile data caps. "We're outraged to learn that Netflix is appar...

A US-based company has designed a portable device that lets you turn any smartphone into a 3D printer using the light from the touchscreen to process your plastic creations, a media report said. The gadget called OLO is designed to be simple to understand and operate, and is battery-operated and fully portable, weighing just 780 grams, ScienceAlert reported citing Kickstarter, the company which helped develop the creative device. The device consists of three parts: A reservoir, which holds 400 cubic cm of printing volume; 100-gram bottles of coloured photopolymer resin to build your objects with; and a mechanised lid, under which the build plate and control electronics are tightly arranged. First, you have to load a schematic of your object into the OLO mobile app (available for iOS, Android, and Windows) and then fit your smartphone into the base under the reservoir. A piece of polarised glass is installed into the base, which your phone’s touchscreen will be facing when set ...

Google Maps, which in the past has been attacked with several bogus edits, appears to have been marred again by another embarrassing incident. The latest goof in Google Maps comes in the wake of the recent Jawharlal Nehru University (JNU) controversy that led to the arrest of JNU Students' Union President Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, and Anirban Bhattacharya, on charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy. Type in words like "anti national", "sedition" or "leftist" in Google Maps, and it will take you to Jawharlal Nehru University. While there could be more keywords redirecting you to the same location, but we, so far, have been able to verify only these three apart from the legitimate ones. While in the past many such incidents where Google provided users with botched up results appeared to have occurred because of the phoney edits suggested by users via the company's crowd-sourced map making tool, the latest incident doesn't seem to have ...

Unless you take a lot of selfies or need a bigger phone, Apple's new 4-inch iPhone SE is a good choice at a good price. You get the same 12-megapixel rear camera that's in the much larger iPhone 6s, but for $250 less, at about $400. You also get the same speeds and graphics capabilities. Of course, you don't get everything. The SE isn't going to be right for everyone, especially power users. Now that Apple has started taking orders, with shipments due in a week, keep these differences in mind: - Most noticeable is the front camera. The SE has an older 1.2-megapixel camera - not the 5 megapixel one in the 6s. But with software improvements, selfies taken with the SE came out better compared with the iPhone 5s it replaced. In addition, the SE's screen turns into a front-camera flash. That's more important than megapixels in darker settings. - Though you get the same rear camera as the 6s, you don't get an image-stabilizing feature found in the jumbo iPhon...