Knowledge Update

​Beijing, March 28 (IANS) The cloud-computing arm of Amazon on Tuesday launched its first joint innovation service centre in China's Qingdao.

The Qingdao-Amazon Web Services (AWS) centre aims to provide cloud-computing services -- including web services, new technologies such as cloud-computing and big data,

​Beijing, March 28 (IANS) Beijing plans to meet the national air quality standard by 2030, according to a blueprint for the city's overall planning 2016-2030.

The blueprint was submitted to the standing committee of the municipal People's Congress for deliberation on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported.

​In today's era of stiff competition, when companies are looking for marketing opportunities everywhere, and trying to market their products even in started markets through innovative ideas, rural market presents a huge opportunity. Rural market is large both in terms of number of potential buyers and demand for products and services. Rural markets are growing very rapidly in emerging econoimies.

New York, March 27 (IANS) Apple has won a trial against a Chinese phone maker in Beijing as a court overturned a ruling against Apple Inc. over iPhone patents, a media report said on Monday.

​New York, March 25 (IANS) 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.

Shanghai, March 27 (IANS) A China-made wearable robot, which can help disabled people walk, is expected to enter the market in one to two years, the developer has said. The Fourier X1, developed by Chinese technology start-up Fourier Intelligence, was unveiled in Shanghai earlier this month, Xinhua news agency reported. Gu Jie, CEO of Fourier, said the Fourier X1 weighed 20 kg and applied industrial design into the exoskeleton. It can assist with walking for people who have had a stroke or spinal cord injuries. He said the company aimed to make the robot more affordable than foreign models such as Israel-made ReWalk and Japanese-made Cyberdyne currently on the market. Prices of the Fourier X1 robots are expected to be a third cheaper than similar foreign models, which are sold between 600,000 yuan ($87,000) and 1 million yuan ($1,45000) each. Gu said the company was working to test and improve the robot's various functions such as sitting, standing, walking and climbing stairs. The Fourier X1 has four motors, two for the hips and two for the knees, as well as four batteries inside that enable it to work for seven hours. China has 80 million disabled people, many of them unable to walk. The global market for walk-assisting exoskeleton robots is estimated to exceed $1.8 billion by 2020.

Brisbane, March 27 (IANS) A team of palaeontologists has identified 150 tracks from 21 dinosaur species in Australia, the University of Queensland announced on Monday.

The discovery includes five different types of predatory dinosaur tracks, at least six types of tracks from long-necked herbivorous sauropods, four types of tracks from two-legged herbivorous ornithopods, and six types of tracks from armoured dinosaurs, the university said in a press release.

The diversity of the tracks is unparalleled, said Australian paleontologist Steve Salisbury, lead author of the study that was published in the 2016 Memoir of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Efe news reported.

"Among the tracks is the only confirmed evidence for stegosaurus in Australia. There are also some of the largest dinosaur tracks ever recorded. Some of the sauropod tracks are around 1.7 metres long," he said in the statement.

Salisbury called the discovery "extremely significant" as it forms the primary record of non-avian dinosaurs in the western half of the continent and provides the only glimpse of Australia's dinosaur fauna during the first half of the Early Cretaceous Period.

The footprints were found in a rocky area, 127 to 140 million years old, in Walmadany, a region in western Australia containing thousands of dinosaur tracks, and which was listed as a National Heritage in 2011.

The newly-identified 150 tracks are older than most dinosaur fossils unearthed in the eastern part of Australia and which are thought to be between 90 and 115 million years old, added the release.

Members of the aboriginal group Goolarabooloo, traditional inhabitants of Walmadany, approached Salisbury and his team to research the tracks in the region after authorities chose the area to build a liquid natural gas processing plant.

These dinosaur tracks also form part of the Goolarabooloo's songs about Marella, also known as Emu Man, a creator being whose ancient footprints they believe appear and disappear along the coastline.

Washington, March 27 (IANS) NASA has partnered with real-time visualisation platform Epic Games' Unreal Engine to create a mixed reality International Space Station (ISS) that can provide an 'out of this world' environment for its astronauts and engineers, a media report said on Monday.

Unreal Engine's applications are designed to allow people to work in environments that are practically impossible to access for training and development.

The mixed reality ISS app sweeps astronauts-in-training off their feet with an "active response gravity offload system" techcruch.com reported. 

It works in conjunction with a robotic crane that makes the trainee feel like he or she would in micro-, lunar- or Martian gravity. 

Besides using the mixed reality system to train astronauts and engineers for life and work in orbit, NASA will use it to design new habitats, the techcruch.com report said.

Previously, astronaut training meant dives in a "neutral buoyancy lab," a giant pool that holds 6.2 million gallons of water and spending time at NASA's "space vehicle mock-up facility," a life-sized model of the space shuttle orbiter and parts of the ISS. 

These physical facilities have limited capacity, thus adding a mixed reality mock-up, alongside the physical facility, could allow astronauts-in-training a lot more time to hone their skills in a convincing simulator, the report said.

​Brasilia, March 26 (IANS) China, one of the first countries to suspend imports of Brazilian meat following revelations that companies were selling unsafe produce for years, has decided to fully reopen its market, a top minister said.

​London, March 26 (IANS) A group of researchers has demonstrated that both humans and smartphones show a degree of error in distinguishing face morph photos from their 'real' faces on fraudulent identity cards.

Researchers at the University of York in Britain investigated what the success rate would be like if two faces were morphed together to create a "new" face.

"We use photo ID all the time, not just at borders, and we know that people are not very accurate when matching the photo to the real face," said Professor Mike Burton from University of York's Department of Psychology.

"In recent years, we have seen more examples of photo IDs that have been created by morphing two faces together, which can be used as fraudulent ID by both parties. Our research is important in highlighting the potential security problem with this and quantifying the risk of this type of fraud being missed," Burton added.

In their study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, the researchers found that initially human viewers were 68 per cent of the time unable to distinguish a 50/50 morph photo from its contributing photos.

However, after simply briefing the viewers to look out for manipulated, "fraudulent" images, the error rate dropped greatly to 21 per cent.

The team also looked at smartphone software, which achieved similar results to briefed human viewers, with an error rate of 27 per cent.

These rates, however, are still significantly higher than error rates when comparing two photos of entirely different people.

"Raising awareness of this type of fraud and including it in training schemes for frontline staff can help overcome these issues and with new technologies coming on line, it should be a challenge that can be tackled with some success," Burton added.