The Japanese government is considering growing "energy forest plantations" to produce biomass as fuel for power plants, Kyodo news agency reported Wednesday, citing officials. In their opinion, the country's increasing dependence on forest biomass will help smooth out climate change, since growing forests absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. In turn, the use of wood biomass obtained from...

The temporary license that the US government issued to an American business to work with Chinese companies Huawei and Honor expired on August 13. This will stop banking and payment applications and a number of video games on the company's devices. In the absence of such permission from the US authorities, Google cannot work with gadgets of these brands. When issuing such a document, Washington...

McAfee said they have found a potential vulnerability in the face recognition and identification algorithm. With the help of special neural networks, they were able to successfully download a person's face into the recognition system so that the computer mistook the image for the face of another person. In a number of developed countries, human rights defenders and members of the public are...

The social network Instagram has launched the video editor Reels, which resembles TikTok in functionality, reports The Verge. The tool allows creating 15-second videos, adjust the speed, add music or borrow an audio track from other videos, and apply various effects. The service was launched on iOS and Android operating systems in 50 countries, including the USA, UK, France, Germany, Australia...

Number of electric vehicles on UK roads could rise to 30 million by 2040, according to several scenarios of the gas and electricity operator National Grid. In 2019, only 3% of new car sales were from EVs and plug-in hybrids, according to the company. "Even under the slowest decarbonization scenario, combustion engine vehicles will not be sold after 2040," the report reads. The company predicts...

The Chang Zheng 5 (CZ-5) heavy vehicle was launched on Thursday with China's first Tianwen 1 mission to Mars, CCTV reported. The launch of a rocket with an automatic interplanetary station "Tianwen-1" with a total mass of about 5 tons, which consists of an orbiter and a landing platform with a rover, was carried out from the LC101 launch pad of the Chinese Wenchang spaceport, located on the...

In the near future, PayPal intends to launch its own service for trading and storing cryptocurrencies. To do this, the payment company entered into an agreement with the blockchain startup Paxos, Coindesk reports, citing its own sources. According to the publication, PayPal intends to offer its customers the ability to directly buy and sell cryptocurrencies through the Venmo mobile payment...

Instagram social network will launch video editor Reels in August 2020, Techcrunch reports, citing service representatives. Reels, similar in functionality to TikTok, will be available simultaneously in 50 countries at once, including the United States. The editor will allow creating 15-second videos, adjusting the playback speed, adding music or borrowing an audio track from other videos (like...

Amazon introduced smart shopping carts for offline stores. The carts independently scan the goods in the basket and automatically debit money from the buyer's card upon exiting. Amazon, owned by the world's richest billionaire Jeff Bezos, has introduced smart shopping carts in supermarkets, CNBC reported. They are called Dash Carts and will appear in a new Amazon grocery store in Los Angeles,...