The fate of billions of dollars in investments in Turkish bonds hangs in the balance as Moody’s Investors Service prepares to reveal whether it’s handing the country a second junk rating on its debt. Moody’s, which put Turkey on review for a downgrade immediately after a failed military plot to oust the government last month, currently ranks the nation’s debt at Baa3, its lowest rung within investment […]
Quantum computing remains mysterious and elusive to many, but USC Viterbi School of Engineering researchers might have taken us one step closer to bring such super-powered devices to practical reality. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering and Information Sciences Institute is home to the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center (QCC), a super-cooled, magnetically shielded facility specially built to house the first commercially available quantum optimization processors — […]
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan suggested that oil prices have probably bottomed out at about $40 per barrel after tumbling more than 20 percent in the past two months into a bear market. “It’s hard for me to imagine it going very much lower, but it could,” he said Wednesday, according to the transcript of a conference call organized by Rock Creek Group, an investment advisory […]
Nobody likes managing passwords — remembering, maintaining and regularly changing them is a chore that most computer users avoid. Now, Canadian software developer AgileBits is aiming to make that chore easier — or at least cheaper. AgileBits’ 1Password password manager now has a new subscription plan for individuals. AgileBits’ family and team password management platforms have been successful, so now it has introduced a service that’s aimed […]
Online business software provider Zoho has come out with new offerings for multichannel commmunication and marketing-focused email management. The tools are designed to help companies build better relationships with customers who communicate with them in a wide variety of ways. Released last week, the latest version of Zoho’s software for customer relationship management (CRM) features what the company said is the first email client designed specifically for […]
Today, Facebook officially took the wraps off what co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the “biggest and most advanced hardware lab” in the company’s history. Designed for Facebook engineers and designers working on everything from improved data center equipment to virtual-reality cameras, the Area 404 lab covers 22,000 square feet, “the size of half a football field,” at the company’s offices in Menlo Park, Calif., Zuckerberg said. […]
INTERNATIONAL. New research from Long Finance, sponsored by PwC and conducted by Z/Yen, shows the wholesale insurance* market is enthusiastic about implementing blockchain solutions**. The report is based on interviews with brokers, insurers, reinsurers, regulators and trade bodies from across the global wholesale insurance market. As well as cost reduction and improved efficiency, blockchain could be a transformative technology changing the way the industry operates, enabling revenue […]
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a flexible wearable sensor that can accurately measure a person’s blood alcohol level from sweat and transmit the data wirelessly to a laptop, smartphone or other mobile device. The device can be worn on the skin and could be used by doctors and police officers for continuous, non-invasive and real-time monitoring of blood alcohol content. The device […]
A Southwest Research Institute-led team has documented atmospheric changes on Io, Jupiter’s volcanically active satellite, as the giant planet casts its shadow over the moon’s surface during daily eclipses. A study led by SwRI’s Constantine Tsang concluded that Io’s thin atmosphere, which consists primarily of sulfur dioxide (SO2) gas emitted from volcanoes, collapses as the SO2 freezes onto the surface as ice when Io is shaded by […]
Ronan the sea lion can keep the beat better than any other animal, a study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience found out more. Whether it is Mozart, Hendrix, Miles Davis, or tribal drumming, few activities feel as uniquely human as music. And, indeed, for a long time, most scientists believed that Homo sapiens was the only species capable of creating and responding to rhythm and melody. This […]
INTERNATIONAL. – Higher GDP per capita alone does not determine real quality of life. This is according to the Social Progress Index (SPI) 2016 published recently by US-based nonprofit, the Social Progress Imperative. The Index ranks Finland the world’s most socially progressive country, Canada in second place tops the G7 nations. Economic growth is not the sole determinant of quality of life The 2016 Index finds that whist […]
INTERNATIONAL. Despite significantly increasing investment in compliance and being continuously under the scrutiny of regulators, economic crime in financial services has increased, showing new thinking is needed to make investment in compliance deliver more value and tackle economic crime. The views are published in a new paper by PwC examining how the financial services sector (including Banking & Capital Markets and Insurance) responds to economic crime. Financial […]
SAUDI ARABIA. JLL, the world’s leading real estate investment and advisory firm, today has released its Q2 2016 Riyadh and Jeddah Real Estate Overview reports assessing the latest trends in the office, residential, retail and hotel sectors. With Saudi Vision 2030 pivotal to the diversification and restructuring of the economy in lieu of decreasing oil prices, this report highlights that both Riyadh and Jeddah continue to maintain […]
Faster, higher, stronger: those are the three qualities captured in the official Olympic Games motto “Citius, altius, fortius”– to which some will want to add “dubious”. With doping seemingly rife in sport generally and the Russian Olympic team in trouble, it’s hard to see the Rio Games as the embodiment of the famous dictum of Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, that it’s not the […]
A new research replication project, involving 24 labs and over 2100 participants, failed to reproduce findings from a previous study that suggested that self-control is a depletable resource. The findings are published as part of a Registered Replication Report in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Over the last twenty years, numerous studies have provided evidence supporting the idea that our […]
Astronomers at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) discovered for the first time that the hot gas in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning in the same direction and at comparable speed as the galaxy’s disk, which contains our stars, planets, gas, and dust. This new knowledge sheds light on how individual atoms have assembled into stars, planets, […]
The death of King Albert I of Belgium in 1934 — officially a climbing accident — still fuels speculation. Forensic geneticist Maarten Larmuseau and his colleagues at KU Leuven (University of Leuven, Belgium), have now compared DNA from blood found on the scene in 1934 to that of two distant relatives. Their analysis confirms that the blood really is that of Albert I. This conclusion is at […]
DUBAI // Around 130 residents of Sulafa Tower took shelter at a nearby hotel after their apartments were damaged or destroyed in Wednesday’s fire. A blaze broke out in the 75-storey tower in Dubai Marina on Wednesday afternoon, spreading quickly around the residential building and damaging apartments on at least eight floors. Management at the nearby Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi Beach Resort & Marina tweeted an offer […]
DHAKA/NEW YORK Jupiter. That single word, by a stroke of luck, helped stop the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from paying nearly $1 billion (£757 million) to the cyber-criminals behind a notorious bank heist earlier this year, according to sources familiar with the incident. When hackers broke into the computers of Bangladesh’s central bank in February and sent fake payment orders, the Fed was tricked into […]
People play the mobile phone game Pokemon GO in a park in Central Jakarta, Indonesia July 21, 2016. Reuters/Iqro Rinaldi JAKARTA Avid players of smash-hit mobile phone game Pokemon GO in Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, are not letting religious decrees or security warnings get in the way of their mission to catch their next cartoon creature. Nintendo’s augmented reality app, in which players […]
|By Arabian Post Staff|Iran is exploring a return to international debt markets for the first time since 2002, a senior government official said, as the Islamic Republic seeks to finance an economic recovery a year after a historic nuclear deal that offered it a route out of isolation, Bloomberg reported. It quoted Economy Minister Ali Tayebnia, whose ministry is at the forefront of securing Iran’s access to […]
Data centers are notorious for how much energy they require. Now, however, Google thinks it has found a way to mitigate that problem. Over the last few months, the tech giant has been using an artificial intelligence (AI) system built by DeepMind to control certain parts of its data centers to make its vast server farms more environmentally friendly. DeepMind is the British AI company that Google […]
UAE. JLL, the world’s leading real estate investment and advisory firm, today has released its Q2 2016 Dubai Real Estate Q2 Overview report that evaluates the impact of Britain’s exit from the European Union on the Dubai Real Estate Market across office, residential, retail and hotel sectors. Dubai caters to the most open real estate market within the region and as a result is more susceptible to […]
Every day, modern society creates more than a billion gigabytes of new data. To store all this data, it is increasingly important that each single bit occupies as little space as possible. A team of scientists managed to bring this reduction to the ultimate limit: they built a memory of 1 kilobyte (8,000 bits), where each bit is represented by the position of one single chlorine atom. […]
