Iramb Zusha

“Please enjoy your meal,” says Nepal´s first robot waiter, Ginger, as she delivers a plate of steaming dumplings to a table of hungry customers. The poor Himalayan nation is better known for its soaring mountain peaks than technological prowess, but a group of self-taught young innovators are seeking to change that. Local start-up Paaila Technology built Ginger, a 1.5 metre (five-foot) tall robot, from scratch and programmed her to understand both English and Nepali. The bilingual humanoid robot — named Ginger after a common ingredient in Nepali cuisine — can even crack jokes like Apple´s Siri or Amazon´s Alexa. Three ´Gingers´ work at Naulo restaurant in the dusty capital Kathmandu, where pot-holed roads and crumbling buildings still bear the scars of a powerful earthquake that hit more than three years ago. “This is our testing ground. We are fine tuning it with responses from our customers,” Binay Raut, CEO of the company, told AFP. The team of 25 young engineers — Raut is the oldes...

WASHINGTON: Facebook on Thursday denied allegations in the New York Times that it tried to mislead the public about its knowledge of Russian misinformation ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, but severed links with a Republican consultancy. The Times detailed obfuscation by Facebook’s top bosses on the Russia front, said the company has at times smeared critics as anti-Semitic or tried to link activists to billionaire investor George Soros, and also tried to shift public anger away toward rival tech companies. In a statement in response, Facebook disputed “inaccuracies” in the story, but said it was ending its contract with a Republican lobbying company named in the article, Definers Public Affairs, which specializes in opposition research. The Times, in a lengthy investigative piece based on interviews with more than 50 people both inside the company and with Washington officials, lawmakers and lobbyists, argued that Facebook’s way of dealing with crisis was to “delay, deny an...

The race to build a better electric car battery is turning to silicon, with several companies working to engineer types of the material that can boost driving range and cut production costs. About 500,000 electric vehicles (EVs) were sold globally in 2016, a figure that is expected to jump sevenfold by 2022, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That increase is forecast to be helped by government mandates to cut tailpipe emissions by banning gasoline and diesel-powered cars. But many drivers have so far been put off by the high cost of EVs and worries about driving range, which so far is limited to a few hundred miles (kilometers) before needing a charge. But silicon could, if adopted en masse for EV batteries, help boost energy storage. One such company, California-based Sila Nanotechnologies, aims to have its technology in over a million electric vehicle (EVs) batteries by the middle of the next decade, Chief Executive Gene Berdichevsky said in an interview. Silic...

WASHINGTON: SpaceX got the green light this week from US authorities to put a constellation of nearly 12,000 satellites into orbit in order to boost cheap, wireless internet access by the 2020s. The SpaceX network would vastly multiply the number of satellites around Earth. Since the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, was launched in 1957, humanity has sent just over 8,000 objects into space, according to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. Between one quarter and one half of those are believed to still be operational. On Thursday the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced it had authorized SpaceX to launch 7,518 satellites, adding to 4,425 satellites it has already approved. None of the satellites has launched yet. Elon Musk’s company has six years to put half in orbit, and nine years to complete the satellite network, according to FCC rules. SpaceX wants most of the satellites to fly in low Earth orbit, about 208 to 215 miles (335 to 346 kilomet...

WASHINGTON: Imagine an airport where thousands of planes, empty of fuel, are left abandoned on the tarmac. That is what has been happening for decades with satellites that circle the Earth. When satellites run out of fuel, they can no longer maintain their precise orbit, rendering them useless even if their hardware is still intact. “It’s literally throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars,” Al Tadros, vice president of space infrastructure and civil Space at a company called SSL, said this month at a meeting in the US capital of key players in the emerging field of on-orbit servicing, or repairing satellites while they are in space. In recent years, new aerospace companies have been founded to try and extend the lifespan of satellites, on the hunch that many clients would find this more profitable than relaunching new ones. In 2021, his company will launch a vehicle — as part of its Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) program — that is capable of servicing two to...