FB anniversary as friendship day: mark
Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has urged nearly 1.5 billion users on the platform to celebrate the social networking giant’s 12th anniversary on February 4 as friendship day.
Zuckerberg who wrote the first code for Facebook in January 2004, in a hope to help students at his college connect and bring the community together, is overwhelmed as millions of people around the world today use Facebook to stay connected with friends and loved ones. “On February 4, I hope you’ll join me in celebrating#friendsday — a moment to celebrate the friendships that have made a difference in your life,” the 31-year-old billionaire wrote in a Facebook post.
“If you have a story about friendship, I’d love to hear it. Please share and I’ll read as many of them as I can!” he added. According to Zuckerberg, the acts of friendship, love and kindness we all share on Facebook are changing the world every day in ways we can’t fully measure.
This app lets you access US Netflix
At the recent CES 2016, Netflix announced that it is extending its services to 130 countries, including India. What followed the notification by Netflix was the concern that the company cannot offer the same library of shows and movies to the rest of the world as it does not have global rights to some of its shows, like House of Cards. While the company is currently negotiating for global licenses, users around the world are deprived of the shows Netflix is famous for.
The situation is same for India as well. While Netflix is available, a lot of its shows aren’t. However, those who do wish to access the shows on Netflix that aren’t available in their country can use VPN (Virtual Private Network) services. A VPN can connect the user’s computer and internet to the country of their choice, making them appear in the US while they are actually in India. Additionally, a VPN network is also more secure as it encrypts all the data shared between the internet and the user’s system.
NordVPN has released a Mac app that enables users to connect to the fastest server in the country of their choice just by clicking the ‘on’ button. It further offers a SmartPlay option that lets users connect to any server and see all available resources ready for streaming without having to connect to different servers for each option.
Science behind XY and XX chromosomes
A recent study has revealed the evolution of X chromosome and why it contains an unusual mixture of genes. In humans, males have XY chromosomes, females have XX but only one of these is active, meaning that both sexes only have one active copy of the X chromosome.
Scientists discovered in 2002 that the X chromosome is unusual because it contains very few of the most important genes needed for basic cell function, dubbed ‘housekeeping’ genes.
Now the team led by Professor laurence Hurst has analysed the world’s largest compendium of data on gene activity (expression) and looked at how activity on the X chromosome compares with that on other chromosomes.
The team also identified which genes have moved from the X to the other chromosomes over evolutionary time and those that have gone the other way. This study has been published in PlOS Biology.
Ceres crater details are revealed
Dawn spacecraft, that recently reached its lowest-ever altitude at the dwarf planet Ceres, has sent fresh images that show Kupalo Crater, one of the youngest craters on Ceres, in a fascinating light. The crater has bright material exposed on its rim, which could be salts, and its flat floor likely formed from impact melt and debris. Researchers will be looking closely at whether this material is related to the “bright spots” of Occator Crater. Kupalo, which measures 26 km across and is located at southern mid-latitudes, is named after the Slavic god of vegetation and harvest.
“This crater and its recently formed deposits will be a prime target of study for the team as Dawn continues to explore Ceres in its final mapping phase,” said Paul Schenk, a Dawn science team member at the lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston. Dawn took these images near its current altitude of 385 km from Ceres. Dawn’s low vantage point also captured the dense network of fractures on the floor of 126-km-wide Dantu Crater. One of the youngest large craters on Earth’s moon, called Tycho, has similar fractures.
This cracking may have resulted from the cooling of impact melt, or when the crater floor was uplifted after the crater formed. Dawn’s other instruments also began studying Ceres intensively last December. The spacecraft will remain at its current altitude for the rest of its mission, and indefinitely afterward. The mission ends on June 30, 2016.
Dawn is the first mission to visit a dwarf planet and the first mission outside the Earth-moon system to orbit two distinct solar system targets. After orbiting another planet Vesta for 14 months in 2011 and 2012, it arrived at Ceres on March 6, 2015.