MOSCOW: On June 16, 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly into space in a scientific feat that was a major propaganda coup for the Soviet Union. Two years after Yuri Gagarin’s historic first manned flight, Tereshkova blasted off in a Vostok-6 spaceship, becoming a national heroine at the age of 26. She remains the only woman ever to have made a solo space f

  SAN FRANCISCO: Once on the cutting edge of consumer electronics, Sony lost its mojo years ago. But every so often, it still comes up with something that reminds you of what it was, and maybe could be again. Meet the new Xperia Tablet Z, the sleekest Android tablet ever. It’s ultra-thin, ultra-light, and it’s even waterproof. Yes, waterproof. I left my test unit

A Sony SmartWatch connected to a Sony mobile phone. SAN FRANCISCO: Internet giants from Google and Facebook to Yahoo and Zynga are scrambling to adapt to an online world where people reach for smartphones or tablets instead of traditional computers. Social games pioneer Zynga, which rose to stardom making titles played at Facebook’s website, is cutting nearly a fifth of its sta

DELFT, Netherlands: Two Dutch entrepreneurs have found a novel way to make money out of the thousands of bicycles abandoned in the Netherlands each year, by turning them into designer fashion items and furniture. Industrial design student Lodewijk Bosman, 25, and Hidde van der Straaten, 28, founded ‘The Upcycle’ in university city Delft in January 2012 to exploit a typicall

By Michelle Fay Cortez Gianna Chien is somewhat different from all the other researchers who reported on their work to more than 8,000 doctors at the Heart Rhythm Society meeting in Denver. Chien is 14, and her study — which found that Apple’s iPad2 can, in some cases, interfere with life-saving heart devices because of the magnets inside — is based on a science-

By Rich Jaroslovsky Chances are you can’t run Google Now on your Android phone. That’s because the search giant’s intelligent assistant only works on the minority of devices that use the current “Jelly Bean” version of its mobile operating system. But there’s a new, easier way to access Google Now: On an iPhone. A recent update to Google&rsqu

A view of the explosion seen after the crash of an aeroplane of the 50’s, during an exhibition held at Cuatro Vientos airport in Madrid, Spain, yesterday. The pilot died in the hospital and 18 people were wounded in the accident.

A science fiction enthusiast dressed as Cyberman from the television series Dr Who gets some help with his costume as he waits for a parade to start outside the 12th annual Sci-Fi London Festival in east London, yesterday. The international festival of science fiction and fantasy films runs from April 30 to May 6. 

Tablets are becoming popular as e-readers, for books, documents, PDFs etc. I’m wondering if there is an ideal screen resolution for long hours of reading text. Will the difference in ppi of the Google Nexus 10 and Apple iPad 4 produce a different reading experience? In particular, can the lower resolution Atom-based tablets with detachable keyboards such as the Lenovo ThinkPad 2 (wit

NEW YORK: Sante D’Orazio, a photographer at the heart of the supermodel era, said that the switch to digital cameras means greater detail than ever before, but the loss of something more important: beauty. “The sense of emotion is gone. It creates a detachment from the subject. The character of the personality is gone,” D’Orazio said of the digital production chain a

A man holds up Samsung Electronics Co’s latest Galaxy S4 phone during its launch at the Radio City Music Hall in New York on Thursday.

Automobile giants at the world’s biggest mobile fair are showing off a new technology that turns a car into a smartphone accessory, allowing a driver to use cutting-edge apps without veering off the road. Called MirrorLink, and adopted by 85 big manufacturers from Ford to General Motors, Chrysler, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, BMW, VW, Fiat or Renault, it connects a smartphone and car

People walk under a promotional billboard for Ram Gopal Varma’s film The Attacks of 26/11 by a roadside in Mumbai, yesterday. MUMBAI: A dramatised Bollywood account of the Mumbai attacks of 2008, when 166 people died in a three-day rampage, opened in Indian cinemas yesterday to present an unusually emotive tale told from the perspective of a police officer. The Attacks of 26/11

BARCELONA: A transparent film that costs just ¤1 ($1.30) to make could bring an end to the anguish of mobile phone users facing the dreaded dead-battery message. Wysips, a startup based in Aix-en-Provence, southern France, has developed a photovoltaic film which can be built seamlessly into a mobile phone screen and deliver the joy of life to a flat battery. At the world&rsq

By Paul Sandle and Clare Jim Taiwan’s HTC Corp has unveiled the new smartphone that it hopes will set it apart from the crowd of Google Android devices on the market and help it make up ground lost to Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Apple Inc. It has distinguished the phone, the HTC One, from rival Android devices by using new software — the BlinkFeed feature — to

WASHINGTON: Hold on to your hats: An asteroid will zoom within spitting distance of Earth next week, in what Nasa said is the closest flyby ever predicted for an object this large. The 2012 DA 14, discovered by chance by astronomers after passing nearby last February, will be just around 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometres) above Earth’s surface when it speeds by, the US Space Agency

This undated picture released by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on January 27, 2013 shows leader Kim Jong-Un (right) attending a consultative meeting of officials, with a smartphone to his right. SEOUL: A picture of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un with a smartphone has triggered fevered speculation about which brand is favoured by the leader of one of the

  By Malathi Nayak When nWay began a trial of its dark, sci-fi combat game ChronoBlade on Facebook last year, the San Francisco-based startup felt sure it had a hit on its hands. “First of all, what comes is, ‘Wow, I had no idea you could actually do a game of this quality on Facebook,’” said Dave Jones, Chief Creative Officer of nWay, who has worke

By Rich Jaroslovsky BlackBerry has done a lot right with the Z10, the first smartphone to run its new, bet-the-company operating system. The touch-screen phone — a version with the traditional BlackBerry physical keyboard is expected, too — is handsome, intuitive to use and a whiz at multitasking. The key question, which the market will answer, is whether all that will

SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft yesterday began letting people subscribe to Office as a service in the Internet cloud, shedding the need to buy the popular productivity software on a disk. “It’s kind of a reflection of how most of us live nowadays,” said company official Oliver Roll. “The same way you get instant access to movies or music at Netflix or Spotify, you acce