Knowledge Update | Horizon University UAE – Essential Insights

Beijing, Jan 30 (IANS) China's plans for deep space exploration include two Mars missions and one Jupiter probe.

China plans its first Mars probe by 2020, Wu Yanhua, Vice Director of the China National Space Administration, was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency. 

A second Mars probe will bring back samples and conduct research on the planet's structure, composition and environment, Wu said.

Also on the agenda are an asteroid exploration, and a fly-by of the Jupiter system.

China aims to become a space power around 2030, with an advanced and open aerospace industry and space infrastructure.

​New York, Jan 30 (IANS) Although the sales of Microsoft's Augmented Reality (AR) headset HoloLens has not been very promising yet, it is helping put civil engineers build blueprints of a building, making their work easy and less time consuming.

​New York, Jan 30 (IANS) Instant messaging app WhatsApp is working on a feature that will track the live location of members, allowing users to track the whereabouts of their friends in real time.

​New Delhi, Jan 30 (IANS) Ending months of speculation, Vodafone on Monday confirmed it is in talks with the Aditya Vikram Birla group for the merger of its Indian entity and Idea Cellular in what will be the largest such deal in the country's telecom space once it materialises.

​Kathmandu, Jan 30 (IANS) Senior officials of the eight member states of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) will meet here this week to attend the Programming Committee.

Amman, Jan 30 (IANS) Jordan signed a $14.1 million grant agreement with the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development.

Jordan's Minister of Planning and International Cooperation Imad Fakhoury on Sunday, who signed the agreement, said the agreement will finance projects in the field of

​New Delhi, Jan 30 (IANS) Hit by a high-profile exit amid falling numbers in China, Xiaomi -- once touted as the Apple of China -- will not showcase any product at the upcoming Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecom industrys largest event in Barcelona, Spain next month. First Hugo Barra, Xiaomi's high-profile head of international operations, quit and announced joining Facebook to lead its virtual reality (VR) efforts last week and then came fresh figures from China for 2016 where the company slipped to fourth spot as the demand for its smartphones declined 22 per cent annually in the country. According to a report in Tech Crunch, a company spokesperson has confirmed that Xiaomi will skip the MWC event entirely. "The move is an unexpected one since it was widely assumed Xiaomi would attend. Barcelona-based Mobile World Congress is one of the largest events for the global mobile industry, attracting over 100,000 attendees, and it has a reputation as the place to show off the latest developments in mobile," the report added. There are reports that Xiaomi doesn't have new devices to showcase during the MWC show. Xiaomi used last year's event to introduce Mi5, its flagship smartphone, through a press event that was live-streamed. On its slump in the Chinese market, the key reason is Xiaomi's rivals racing ahead with key features, innovation, bigger marketing budgets and wider online and offline distribution channel during the year, said the report by market analytics firm Counterpoint Research. Huawei, Oppo and Vivo emerged as clear winners with Oppo and Vivo registering significant growth. Hit by the Note 7 fiasco and a delay in Galaxy 8 launch, Samsung is another big player which will not roll out a new device at MWC.

​Tokyo, Jan 30 (IANS) Toyota Motors lost its title as the highest selling automaker in 2016 to German carmaker Volkswagen, a position the Japanese company had enjoyed since 2011, the media reported. According to figures published on Monday by the Toyota group, which includes its subsidiaries Daihatsu Motor and Hino Motors, the company sold a total of 10.175 million units in 2016, Efe news reported. Although the figure is 0.2 per cent higher than 2015, it is lower than Volkswagen's 10.3 million units (growth of around 3.8 per cent) sold in 2016 despite the German manufacturer's recent emissions scandal. The last time Toyota was world's No. 2 annual car seller was in 2011, when Japan's northeastern part was struck by an earthquake and a tsunami, severely affecting the firm's operations and cutting significantly its supply chains. Toyota was also trailing Volkswagen in the first half 2015. However, Volkswagen's emissions scandal in September severely affected its last quarter sales.

​Dubai, Jan 30 (IANS) Russian travelers will get visas on arrival in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) under a cabinet decree approved on Sunday, media reports said.

Under the decree approved by Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Russian citizens are granted an entry visa for 30 days for the first time, renewable one time only for another 30 days, Xinhua news agency reported.

The decree will "enhance strategic cooperation and the common ambitions" of the two countries, said the report.

The UAE is considered the 10th largest foreign investor in Russia, with projects valued at 66 billion dirham ($17.98 billion) up to 2014.

In 2015, non-oil trade between the two countries reached 9 billion dirham.

The UAE has also received more than 600,000 Russian tourists in the past two years.

​London, Jan 30 (IANS) An international team of scientists has found the first observational and substantial evidence that our universe could be a vast and complex hologram.

A holographic universe, an idea first suggested in the 1990s, is one where all the information, which makes up our 3-D 'reality' (plus time) is contained in a 2-D surface on its boundaries.

"Imagine that everything you see, feel and hear in three dimensions (and your perception of time) in fact emanates from a flat two-dimensional field, said Kostas Skenderis, Professor at the University of Southampton in Britain. 

"The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional surface, such as in the hologram on a credit card. However, this time, the entire universe is encoded!" Skenderis added.

Although holographic properties could be thought of as rather like watching a 3-D film in a cinema -- for example we see the pictures as having height, width and crucially, depth -- when, in fact, it all originates from a flat 2-D screen.

However, the difference in our 3-D universe is that we can touch objects and the 'projection' is 'real' from our perspective, the researchers said, in the paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"Holography is a huge leap forward in the way we think about the structure and creation of the universe. Scientists have been working for decades to combine Einstein's theory of gravity and quantum theory. Some believe the concept of a holographic universe has the potential to reconcile the two. I hope our research takes us another step towards this," Skenderis explained. 

The scientists now hope that their study will open the door to further our understanding of the early universe and explain how space and time emerged.