GOOGLE'S CONTRIBUTION FOR NEPAL

Google has officially opened up its Person Finder Web-based tool in response to the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit Nepal this morning, giving those looking for information about friends and loved ones a way to get crowd-sourced information about their status—if it exists.

According to officials, the earthquake struck an area between Kathmandu and Pokhara. The current death toll stands at approximately 1,130 people so far, and more than 1,700 people were injured as a result of the earthquake—which reduced a number of buildings, temples, and other historic monuments in the Nepalese capital to rubble.

Google's Person Finder tool is relatively simple, and it's also accessible via mobile devices for those who don't have access to a computer just yet. If you're on the web, you just have to pull up the page and indicate whether you're looking for a person or you have information about a person in the affected area.

If the former, you'll enter a person's name—or parts of the person's name—and Google will let you know if there's a match with anyone in its database. If so, you can then select the particular person, which will take you to a miniature profile of-sorts that Google has created. Otherwise, you can create a new missing person profile yourself.

On said profile, those looking for a person can post any identifying information they know about the individual: his or her name, alternate names, sex, age, home address, or any helpful descriptions. You can upload a photo or enter one by its URL, add links to a person's other social network profiles, and a time at which you want the missing person record to expire (anywhere from a month to a year from the date you enter it). You can also enter your own information on the profile and ask to receive notifications if anyone else posts any updates about the missing person.

On the flip side, if you have information about a person that you want others to know about, you can enter their first and last name on Google's Person Finder to start filling in information for a pre-existing profile. (You can also make a new report for a person who isn't already in the Person Finder database.)

The reporting page lets you indicate the person's status, any message you want to leave for that person (or others looking for them), as well as the person's last potential known location. You can indicate whether you've physically spoken with the person after the disaster, and you can attach a photo as well. Like before, you are also asked to leave your contact information in case anybody else wants to get in touch with you about said person's status or whereabouts.

If you're in the area of the Nepal earthquake, you can probably also use Facebook's "Safety Check" feature to let others know you're OK.

AGE OF 4D PRINTERS

Washington, Apr 25 (ANI): As per a new research, with new technology that is taking 3-D printing to an entirely new level, we're onto 4-D printing now.

The fourth dimension is time, shape shifting in fact, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) at the University of Wollongong is helping to set the pace in the next revolution in additive manufacturing.

Just as the extraordinary capabilities of 3D printing have begun to infiltrate industry and the family home, researchers have started to develop 3D printed materials that morph into new structures, post production, under the influence of external stimuli such as water or heat, hence the name, 4D printing.

So, as in 3D printing, a structure is built up layer by layer into the desired shape, but these new materials are able to transform themselves from one shape into another, much like a child's Transformer toy.

This ground-breaking science promises advancement in myriad fields, medicine, construction, automation and robotics to name a few.

Researchers have turned their attention to the medical field of soft robotics, manufacturing a valve that actuates in response to its surrounding water's temperature.

Researcher Marc in het Panhuis, who said it was the cleverness of the valve's creation that was remarkable, noted that the cool thing about it is, is it's a working functioning device that people just pick up from the printer, adding there's no other assembly required.

The materials scientist said the valve, a 3D printed structure, possessed actuators that are activated solely by water and so it's an autonomous valve, there's no input necessary other than water; it closes itself when it detects hot water.

The study appears in journal Macromolecular Rapid Communications. (ANI)

DRONES TO FIND THE FOSSILS OF DINOSAURS

Drones and dinosaurs may seem like an unlikely combination, but scientists in Australia are using present-day technology to track prehistoric footprints. The prints were laid in Western Australia about 130 million years ago.

Taking advantage of modern technology, a team of paleontologists from the University of Queensland is using low-flying drones to get a bird's eye view of dinosaur tracks which are preserved in stone in a 200km stretch of the West Kimberley coast. This vantage point is hugely beneficial, as the footsteps are often hidden by jagged rock and are therefore difficult to identify.

"It's allowing us to get up above some of the more interesting track sites, and get lots of good video footage, which is really exciting, and lots of fun,” team leader Steve Salisbury told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

That footage will be processed through software, providing researchers with 3D imagery of the paths of sauropods, and potentially theropods. The different types of prints are easily distinguishable – sauropods left behind circular imprints and theropods made their mark with bird-like, three-toed tracks.

The fossilized footprints stretch from the coastal town of Broome to James Price Point, 60km north.

Although some of the dinosaur tracks are well-known, others have been kept secret by local Aboriginal people and scientists, who feared they could be stolen or vandalized. Such concern wasn't unwarranted – one dinosaur print was drilled from rock to be sold on the black market in the 1990s.

The footprints are part of the mythology of the local Yawuru people, who say they are keen to have the prints documented if it leads to better management and protection.

But some of the tracks are being discovered for the very first time, millions of years after they were laid.

"There are a couple of new ones that have emerged on this trip, and sometimes it's just mind-blowing just how much there is to document," Salisbury said.

But there's more to the documentation than one might think. The team has to battle with the area's enormous tides, which erode footprints and dictate when scientists can work.

HUGE SOLAR PROJECT OF APPLE

Apple commitment to 100 percent solar announced earlier this year will "propel the commercial market into a new dimension."

This unprecedented $850 million project is the largest solar power supply contract signed by an enterprise customer and represents over 12 percent of the entire commercial and industrial (C&I) capacity installed across the U.S. in 2014.

Here are some of the key takeaways from van Gerven's op-ed piece recently published by greentechmedia.com (GTM):

A Road Less Traveled

Although C&I solar projects have been commercially viable in many regions of the U.S., "It represents the smallest application when compared to residential and utility-scale solar systems," stated van Gerven. In fact, installations have been stagnant for the past three years, and surprisingly the MW total added for 2014 was even less than 2012.

Why So Slow To Grow?

The global financial meltdown in 2008 caused corporate decision makers to focus on core business issues and effectively put a freeze on corporate spending.

According to van Gerven, "When companies were fighting for survival, it was not the time to sign new long-term solar PPAs. Balance sheets did not justify such investments, and banks would have not approved loans for solar procurement."

Marketing Wrong Product Mix?

The solar industry may have overemphasized marketing rooftop PV panels to C&I customers. There just isn't enough rooftop area available on most buildings as compared to the electric load needed to be offset in order to make a project attractive to decision makers.

"Large-scale solar installations, located off-premises, provide some clear advantages over commercial rooftop solar," van Gerven said.

Large Scale Solar Projects

"First Solar's ground-mounted California Flats power plant, with a total capacity of 280 megawatts, covers 2,900 acres of land," van Gerven continued. "Electricity generated by the power plant will be shared between Apple and California utility Pacific Gas & Electric."

The 130 MWs of solar power that Apple requires to offset its entire corporate power profile is similar to a utility scale project.

These huge "utility-scale solar power plants" have a much better cost structure than typical on-site C&I systems.

Related Link: Cowen Previews Apple Earnings, Sees Upside In China

Green Corporate Image

In the case of Apple, the company was looking to offset its total power consumption, including: retail stores, data centers and corporate offices with renewable energy.

Apple's rationale to customers and shareholders was that "an energy-efficient facility is good, but a 100 percent renewable energy facility is better."

According to the letter, Apple was able to achieve "30 percent in 2010 and 94 percent in 2013, the addition of electricity from California Flats will bring Apple to 100 percent."

Corporate Budgets

Apple entered into a 25-year power-purchase agreement (PPA) from First Solar's 130-megawatt Monterey California Flats solar plant.

Apple CEO Tim Cook stated, "We expect to have very significant savings, because we have a fixed price for renewable energy, and there is quite a difference between that price and the price of brown energy."

Having a long-term, guaranteed price for energy becomes a hedge against future fossil fuel price increases.

Investor Takeaway

First Solar is hoping that an "Apple Factor" will help accelerate C&I solar adoption by other enterprise customers and government agencies.

HELLO AN APP TO REPLACE ANDROID DIALER

Phone calls may have fallen out of fashion, but Americans still make 1 billion of them every day. And yet the experience of making a call isn’t all that great: phones don’t always recognize numbers, contacts can be difficult to manage, and they rarely take advantage of newer technologies like Wi-Fi calling. Now Facebook is introducing an app designed to fix that: Hello, an Android-only dialer app that seeks to modernize phone calls while also working to put Facebook at the center of all your communications. Among other features, it lets you more easily make free calls over Wi-Fi.

Hello, which is available in the Google Play store as a free download, replaces the native Android dialer with a significantly more Facebook-centric version. The company is touting three key features: it uses Facebook to identify callers so you know who’s calling, even if you haven’t stored their contact information; it makes it easy to prevent unwanted callers from ringing your phone; and it has a powerful search feature that’s particularly helpful for finding the numbers of local businesses.

The app also promotes free calling over Wi-Fi using VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol. The feature, which has long been a part of Facebook Messenger, will likely see more use inside a dialer. And if you miss a call, Hello offers you the option of responding using Messenger.

There are dozens of free dialer replacements available for Android, though few have become massively popular. For most, the native dialer is good enough, or at least not worth the bother of replacing. Google’s Hangouts dialer, for example, has fewer than 5 million downloads. But there’s clearly an appetite for apps that replace some aspects of the phone: Viber has more than 100 million downloads on Android, and Skype has more than 500 million.

Meanwhile, Facebook is still stinging from the failure of Home, its ambitious project to replace the Android homescreen and lockscreen with the News Feed. Home, which appeared to represent the beginnings of a Facebook-centric smartphone operating system, launched with much fanfare in 2013. But users were cool to the idea, and the app topped out at fewer than 5 million downloads.

Hello represents a new attempt at bringing Facebook to the core of the operating system. The blue-and-white app uses Google’s Material Design principles, and is organized into four main tabs: recent calls, the dialer, contacts, and settings. When you receive a call from a new number, Facebook attempts to match it with a user profile. If it finds a match, and the user has chosen to let Facebook users find them by their phone number, the person’s face and a miniature profile will pop up on your phone. You’ll see their face, hometown, and whether you have mutual friends, among other info. After the call, you can view additional information, including their email address and a website, if they’ve added one.

Leaked screenshots of Hello from last month indicated the app would include some sort of automatic call blocking. It turns out Hello doesn’t actually block numbers, in the traditional sense. Instead, it simply sends them to voicemail. But Hello crowdsources a list of commonly blocked numbers, and will optionally send any calls from them to voicemail on your behalf. You can also "block" any other nuisance number with a single tap.

                         A USEFUL LOCAL SEARCH ENGINE

Hello’s final core feature: a search engine that ties into Facebook’s local listings for easy calls to local businesses. Need a restaurant’s phone number? Just type in the first few letters, and so long as the business has a Facebook page, Hello will surface its address, phone number, and an average star rating from Facebook users. It's a handy feature, but Google has included local search in its dialer since 2013, and it's unclear that Facebook's database of businesses has caught up to Google's quite yet. (Google offers caller ID from businesses, too.)

Facebook has no plans to make money from the app directly, says Andrea Vaccari, a product manager at the company. "Facebook is about making the world more open and connected," he says. "We think it’s core to our mission." Hello isn’t built to reach the scale of even Messenger — it isn’t likely to ever make it to iOS, given the system-level controls it needs to operate. But by improving on Google’s mediocre contacts app, it could gain a modest following — and give Facebook experience in building more modest mobile utilities. The path to a more successful version of Home may now be under construction, brick by brick.

INDIAN RAILWAY ON ANDROID

As of today, rail commuters can use a mobile phone app to obtain tickets in the unreserved or general category as the Indian Railways takes forward its initiative for paperless ticketing.

“We have launched a mobile-based paperless unreserved ticketing application,” said a senior Railway Ministry official.

Apart from being a green initiative, the paperless ticketing system would also save time for passengers as it allows them to avoid lining up at the ticket window.

Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu introduced the mobile app for paperless unreserved ticketing for commuters in Egmore and Tambaram suburban sections in Chennai under Southern Railway zone.

Developed by Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) “utsonmobile” – the paperless unreserved ticketing feature in mobile application aims to eliminate the need for printing of unreserved tickets.

“It was a budget proposal to provide paperless tickets in unreserved segment and we implemented it today,” Prabhu said after launching the system here.

The app, which is for both Android and Windows mobile-based platforms, can be downloaded from Google Play Store or Windows Store and used by the user.

The application provides necessary on-screen alerts to guide the passenger during the booking process.

An App for Blackberry will be available later.

Here is how you can use the app:

1. As per the plan, a traveller can download the app from the Google App store for Android-based mobile phones.

2. After the download, the user will get a registration ID number for creation of a railway e-wallet.

3. Money for buying tickets will have to be loaded through the e-wallet mobile payment system either online or at a ticket counter at any station.

4. Passengers have the option of topping up the e-wallet at ticket counters or on the IRCTC website using a credit or debit card.

5. Having booked a ticket using the App, a computer needs not take a print-out of the same and he can show its soft copy on the cell phone to the TTE.

6. Besides booking tickets, season tickets can also be renewed using the app.

7. The passenger has to use the ticket within an hour of booking the ticket as per the policy of suburban sections.

8. The ticket will have distinct colour scheme everyday and it cannot be forwarded to another mobile, they said.

On a pilot basis, the paperless ticketing system in unreserved segment will cover 15 stations in the suburban section of Southern Railway, officials said.

Railways plan to extend the paperless service in suburban section in all metros.

Expressing hope that the system will increase transparency and efficiency, Prabhu asked railway staff to come forward with new innovative ideas to improve passenger service.

He also appreciated the role of CRIS in making the system operational in the shortest possible time and also announced a reward of Rs 4 lakh to the organisation.

More than one crore passenger travel daily in unreserved segment and railways uses 1200 metric ton paper every year for printing unreserved tickets, they added.

With PTI Inputs

APPLE SUPPORTS EARTH DAY

Apple staff are also given green uniform shirts and name tags to wear on the special day. The only other day which sees Apple modify its logo is World AIDS Day, when the logo turns red.

CEO Tim Cook tweeted about Earth Day, posting a link to Apple’s environmental website and underlining the company’s intention to “leave the world better than we found it.” Apple’s website was updated a couple of days ago with the latest Environmental Responsibility Report, which stated that 100% of U.S. operations and 87% of global operations are now powered by renewable energy sources.

Tim Cook has done a lot to improve Apple’s environmental efforts, including recycling and renewable energy initiatives, reducing the company’s carbon footprint and partnering with The Conservation Fund in order to protect and create the forests from which its packaging materials are taken.

The next step for Apple is to clean up its supply chain, including its manufacturing processes and suppliers. “We’ve made a big impact in our own facilities, and now we’re tackling the global supply chain,” said Lisa Jackson, Vice President of Environmental Initiatives at Apple.

Apple’s supply chain has come under the spotlight thanks to the incredible growth of the company. One problem for tech companies is that they can easily be implicated in bad working conditions because supply chains are often spread all over the world. Other companies have been criticized for using bonded labor, where people are forced to work in order to repay debts, but Apple announced a ban on the practice in February.

The company has made progress by exerting pressure on international suppliers, who would presumably rather comply with Apple’s wishes than lose a huge client.

ANDROID 5.1.1 ROLLING OUT

Within a month of its latest Android 5.1 OS rollout, Google has started issuing new releases to patch bugs in the system.

Users of the Nexus 5 and 6 have raised complaints about the smartphones' camera apps malfunctioning after they updated to the latest Android operating system.

The latest release of version 5.1.1 will be a fix to the camera app that failed to launch in some cases, along with a few PNG security holes.

A report on Ars Technica says that there are only 34 merged changes in the release and not all devices will be able to get the update immediately. The first device to get the update is the Nexus player and the Android TV set-top-box.

Recently, Android users who updated their Nexus devices bricked after updating to various versions of the Android Lollipop OS.