Future Decoded: Microsoft boosts Aadhaar with Skype Lite

Claiming that e-commerce giants like Amazon import as much as 80 per cent of the items sold on their platforms, small manufacturers' body has said that their business models do not benefit local industry and are creating jobs of delivery boys only.

"Neither manufacturers nor traders are getting any benefit from the business models of Amazon and Flipkart because they largely import their products from China and Korea and sell here. Nearly 80 per cent of their products are imported," said Anil Bhardwaj, Secretary General, Federation of Indian Micro and Small & Medium Enterprises (FISME).

Bhardwaj said that the global e-commerce players generally source and sell products through their own preferred suppliers and as a result a large number of local manufacturers and traders get crowded out.

He listed out deep discounting and buying products from preferred companies as unfair practices.

"Even if they buy products from local suppliers the commission charged is very high," Bhardwaj said adding that the issues related to unfair practices have been raised with Commerce Ministry on multiple occasions.

FISME maintains that the technology-driven retail is way forward and one cannot be oblivious of the benefits it brings to consumers but at the same time the local industry can also not be ignored given its role in job creation.

"If both traders and local manufacturers are crowded out then how would the local industry survive and employment be generated?" asked Bhardwaj.

As Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is currently on his three-day visit to India, the local traders are up in arms against the "unfair" trade practices of the tech giant. Delhi-based Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has launched a countrywide protest against the company and has organised protests across 300 cities.

In a setback to Amazon and Walmart-backed Flipkart, the fair market watchdog Competition Commission of India (CCI) has ordered probe into the business operations of both the companies on multiple counts including deep-discounts and exclusive tie-up with preferred sellers.

"For the first time some concrete step has been taken against Amazon and Flipkart who are continuously violating the FDI policy in indulging in a vicious racket of controlling and monopolising not only the e-commerce but even the retail trade as well," CAIT National Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal said after the CCI order.

Tokyo, Feb 25: Japan's Chitetsu Watanabe, recognized at 112 years as the oldest man in the world, has passed away 11 days after he received the Guinness World Record certificate, his family said on Tuesday.

Watanabe died on Sunday night, Efe news reported.

He received the official certificate on February 12 at a nursing home in Joetsu in Niigata prefecture, where he resided.

Soon after being certified as the oldest man, he began to experience a lack of appetite and respiratory problems, the wife of his eldest son told public broadcaster NHK.

Born on March 5, 1907 in a family of farmers, Watanabe moved at the age of 20 to Taiwan, where he worked at a sugar refinery for 18 years before returning to Japan after the end of World War II.

A fan of calligraphy, custard and ice cream, Watanabe told the Guinness team that the key to his long life was laughter.

He was recognized as the oldest male in the world following the deaths in 2019 of German Gustav Gerneth (in October), aged 114 years, and Japan's Masazo Nonaka (in January), at the age of 113, three months older than the German.

It remains to be seen who will be recognized after the death of Watanabe, the only male on the list drawn up by the Gerontology Research Group of the 30 oldest people in the world.

Japan has among the highest life expectancy in the world and the number of centenarians in the country has crossed 71,000, according to the latest government figures.

Since 2000, the number of centenarians censored has quintupled, raising concern for the economic outlook and future workforce of the country - where the birthrate is on a downward trend.

Out of these, 88 per cent are women.

Washington D.C., Feb 6: An international team of astronomers has found an unusual monster galaxy that existed about 12 billion years ago when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old.

The team of astronomers was led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside.

Dubbed XMM-2599, the galaxy formed stars at a high rate and then died. Why it suddenly stopped forming stars is unclear.

"Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had already formed a mass of more than 300 billion suns, making it an ultra massive galaxy," said Benjamin Forrest, a postdoctoral researcher in the UC Riverside Department of Physics and Astronomy and the study's lead author.

"More remarkably, we show that XMM-2599 formed most of its stars in a huge frenzy when the universe was less than 1 billion years old and then became inactive by the time the universe was only 1.8 billion years old," Forrest added.

The team used spectroscopic observations from the W. M. Keck Observatory's powerful Multi-Object Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration or MOSFIRE, to make detailed measurements of XMM-2599 and precisely quantify its distance.

The study results appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

"In this epoch, very few galaxies have stopped forming stars, and none are as massive as XMM-2599," said Gillian Wilson, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCR in whose lab Forrest works.

"The mere existence of ultramassive galaxies like XMM-2599 proves quite a challenge to numerical models. Even though such massive galaxies are incredibly rare at this epoch, the models do predict them."

"The predicted galaxies, however, are expected to be actively forming stars. What makes XMM-2599 so interesting, unusual, and surprising is that it is no longer forming stars, perhaps because it stopped getting fuel or its black hole began to turn on. Our results call for changes in how models turn off star formation in early galaxies," the professor stated.

The research team found XMM-2599 formed more than 1,000 solar masses a year in stars at its peak of activity -- an extremely high rate of star formation. In contrast, the Milky Way forms about one new star a year.

"XMM-2599 may be a descendant of a population of highly star-forming dusty galaxies in the very early universe that new infrared telescopes have recently discovered," said Danilo Marchesini, an associate professor of astronomy at Tufts University and a co-author on the study.

"We have caught XMM-2599 in its inactive phase," Wilson said, who led the W. M. Keck Observatory data acquisition
Co-author Michael Cooper, a professor of astronomy at UC Irvine, said this outcome is a strong possibility.

"Perhaps during the following 11.7 billion years of cosmic history, XMM-2599 will become the central member of one of the brightest and most massive clusters of galaxies in the local universe," he said.

"Alternatively, it could continue to exist in isolation. Or we could have a scenario that lies between these two outcomes," he stated.

The study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA.