Humans will find alien life within two decades: expert

June 13, 2017

Washington, Jun 13: Humans may be able to detect alien life within the next two decades, according to experts who believe that the hunt for life beyond our planet may soon yield results.Alien

In the next few years, researchers will be able to use the James Web Space Telescope and other detection devices to look for biomarkers such as oxygen and methane in the atmospheres of these Earth-like planets, said Chris Impey, from the University of Arizona in the US.

"This biomarker experiment could find evidence of microbial life indirectly," said Impey. The research should help us pinpoint the planets that are "the closest to Earth as possible, not in distance, but in character," he said.

Since Earth is the only place we know life exists, finding the most Earth-like planets is our best bet for finding life, he added.

Impey, whose research has been supported by NASA, believes that we are less than two decades away from finding extraterrestrial life. However, we are more likely to detect microbial life withing the next 10 to 15 years rather than intelligent life, he told 'Futurism'.

Not ruling out the possibility that life still exists on Mars, Impey said that those lifeforms are likely below the surface and are, therefore, much harder to detect. He believes that there is better chance of finding evidence of life that used to exist on the red planet.

"If we actually get Mars rocks back here to Earth from a place that we think could have been habitable in the past, then we might find evidence of prior life," Impey said.

Other bodies in our solar system could potentially host life as well including the water world Europa.

Future missions targeting the satellite could yield helpful - if not entirely conclusive.

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Agencies
June 26,2020

Facebook will introduce a new notification screen on its platform that will warn users if the article they are about to share is over 90 days old, the company announced on Thursday.

“We’re starting to globally roll out a notification screen that will let people know when news articles they are about to share are more than 90 days old,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.

The social media platform had previously introduced a context button in 2018 that provides information about the sources of articles in the News Feed. Building upon that, the new feature will inform users about the timeliness of the article.

“To ensure people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to share on Facebook, the notification screen will appear when people click the share button on articles older than 90 days, but will allow people to continue sharing if they decide an article is still relevant,” Facebook said.

The social media giant stated that timeliness is important in understanding the context of an article and curbing the spread of misinformation on the platform.

“News publishers, in particular, have expressed concerns about older stories being shared on social media as current news, which can misconstrue the state of current events. Some news publishers have already taken steps to address this on their own websites by prominently labelling older articles to prevent outdated news from being used in misleading ways,” Facebook added.

Apart from this, the platform will also be testing a similar notification screen for information related to the global Covid-19 pandemic. The notification screen will provide information about the source of the link shared in a post if the link is related to information on Covid-19. It will also direct people to its previously introduced Covid-19 information centre for “authoritative” health information, it said.

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Agencies
January 19,2020

New Delhi, Jan 19: Messaging service WhatsApp which on Sunday faced issues in transmitting multimedia content including pictures and images, prompting social media users to share hilarious memes and messages, resumed regular services after over two hours.

#WhatsAppDown was the trending hashtag on Twitter for most part of Sunday afternoon in India along with several other countries such as Brazil, Europe and also parts of Middle-East including UAE, reported downdetector.in, a realtime problem and outage monitoring website.

Users of the popular messaging app were unable to send media files, stickers and GIFs.

Most users immediately went to Twitter to find out about the problem and check if others were facing the same issue.

Numerous tweets and memes took over the internet as soon as the news broke about the WhatsApp tech issue. After around two hours of technical glitch, the app resumed full service.

Even after full recovery of media transfer, people globally still continued checking the status of the messaging app.

WhatsApp has been one of the prime messaging apps since May 2009 and has recently collaborated with Facebook.

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Agencies
April 4,2020

Kozhikode, Apr 4: In a bid to maintain the lockdown amid COVID-19 outbreak, Police in Kozhikode is monitoring the situation using drone cameras and making sure that people are not breaking the law.

The police have so far arrested 41 persons who were out on a morning walk on Saturday during the lockdown in the backdrop of coronavirus outbreak.

The SHO of Town South Police Station informed that the accused were later released on bail.
At least 295 cases have been reported in the state so far.

Talking about COVID-19 testing, State Health Minister KK Shailaja told media: "Nine labs are conducting polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests in Kerala. We've received 2000 rapid test kits and will start rapid tests from tomorrow. If a person tests positive in rapid test, we need to confirm it with PCR test."

The total number of COVID-19 positive cases in India climbed to 3072 on Saturday, according to Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

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