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Music streaming service Spotify is running a time-limited offer for its Premium subscription. It’s offering a year’s subscription at Rs 699 which is half the standard price. The discount will be active until 31 December 2019.
Spotify has listed the offer on its website. This offer only stands for a 12-month subscription and not on a monthly basis. Spotify clarified that the discount isn’t available for Premium Family users or people who have registered to the service via third-party services.
The company offers its Premium service for Rs 119 per month in India that sums up to Rs 1,189 annually. Users can avail three months of a free trial before getting a subscription. In the current deal, users can get a year’s subscription for only Rs 699.
If you’re already subscribed with the Premium plan, your regular monthly fees will be resumed and charged once the annual plan is over. For those who weren’t subscribers, their accounts will go back to being free accounts.
Spotify had introduced its Family subscription plan in India last month that was priced at Rs 179 per month. The subscription allows access to the premium version of the music streaming app and the plan accounts for up to six people. Each member can use the account individually, and the master account holder will be billed at the end of each month.
Starting from 15 December, FASTag is going to be mandatory across a total of 525 toll plazas. This means all four-wheelers have to attach FASTag RFID stickers on their vehicle’s windscreens. Failing to do so will result in vehicle owners without the FASTag to pay double the toll fare as a form of penalty. A separate lane will be present at the plazas for non-FASTag vehicles. Earlier, the deadline was on 1 December that has been given an extension to 15 December, according to PTI, to provide citizens some more time to acquire the FASTags.
The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) sanctioned the Electronic Toll Collection program using FASTag as a pilot project back in 2014. It was implemented for the first time in the Delhi-Mumbai stretch of the Golden Quadrilateral towards the end of 2014. Aimed at making toll plaza payments on highways automatic with the ‘One Nation One Tag’ mission, it will also reduce congestion and sometimes long waiting times at tolls. As already mentioned, this was meant for all the toll plazas at the national highways that would gradually include all state highways as well.
It works by using an RFID chip that’s stuck on a four-wheeled vehicle’s windscreen. Sensors on the FASTag lanes at toll plazas will detect the sensor and automatically deduct the toll fare from the vehicle owner. This means no more waiting at the toll and you could simply slow down and continue driving without having to stop to pay the fare.
The service started with ICICI bank and now it is available with up to 22 certified banks including Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, IDFC Bank, State Bank of India and Syndicate Bank. A FASTag lane is valid for five years and you have to continue recharging the NHAI payment wallet that will be linked to your bank account. When the fare has been deducted, the user will receive a confirmation over a text message. In the future, you will be able to pay fuel bills and for parking at places enabled with FASTag.
Car dealers are already selling FASTag stickers to people buying new cars since around 2016. Otherwise, you can buy new stickers from NHAI toll plazas where you will need to submit your vehicle’s registration certificate (RC), a recent passport-size photograph of the vehicle owner, and KYC documents depending on whether the tag is meant for commercial or private use. It can also be bought online from Amazon and PayTM.
After you’ve bought a FASTag, you need to download the My FASTag app to link your bank account. You can use the same app to recharge your FASTag wallet or visit your bank’s websites to recharge your account.
Blue whales have a flair for paradox. They live in water but breathe air. They’re enormous — the biggest creatures that have ever lived, as far as anyone knows — but subsist almost entirely on tiny krill.
And as new research reveals, even the animal’s dunk tank-size heart jumps between extremes. In a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers for the first time attached an electrocardiogram tag to a free-diving blue whale to trace its heart rate.
They found that the rate ranged as low as two beats per minute and as high as 37. Such numbers paint a picture of an animal frequently pushing its own limits and suggest that the whale is not only the largest animal ever but perhaps as large as an animal with a circulatory system can possibly be.
To learn the secrets of the blue whale’s heart, Jeremy Goldbogen, a marine biologist at Stanford University, led a team that attached a noninvasive suction-cup tag to a blue whale in Monterey Bay, California. The tag contains electrodes, a depth measurement sensor and a GPS tracker. It stayed on for 8 and a half hours and recorded data from a number of dives before it detached and floated to the surface. The researchers then tracked it down and reviewed its readings.
Such tags are part of a suite of technologies that make it easier for researchers to study the lives of whales without disturbing them too much. When the tags are attached, a whale likely just feels something akin to a tap on the shoulder, Goldbogen has said.
The data showed that when this whale descended, its heart rate plummeted, too. At the bottom of the dives, the whale’s heart rate hovered around four to eight beats per minute. At times, it fell all the way down to two.
In general, sticking to a slow rhythm while diving lets marine mammals conserve oxygen, so they can stay underwater for longer. But this is “just amazingly low” — far lower than the 11 beats per minute scientists had predicted, said Goldbogen. And it stays down around 8.5 beats per minute even when the whales are feeding, an energy-intensive process that involves lunging into clouds of krill.
Goldbogen credits the blue whale’s flexible aortic arch, which is able to hold about 90% of the animals’ blood and slowly release it even when the heart isn’t actively beating.
As a whale climbs back to the surface, its heart rate rises again. By the time it reaches the surface, its blood is moving much more quickly, reoxygenising in preparation for the next dive. This whale’s heart rate reached a peak of 37 beats per minute.
“That’s about as fast as that heart can physically beat,” Goldbogen said.
These rapid shifts happen quite quickly — sometimes within the span of a minute or two — and repeat often. It’s sort of like if you tried moving from a comfortable recliner straight into a set of wind sprints over and over again. “They’re doing this all day long,” said Goldbogen.
The blue whale’s heart still keeps some secrets.
“It would be interesting to know how the whale nervous system controls such rapid changes in heart rate,” said Travis Horton, an associate professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, who was not involved in the study but has undertaken his own investigations of humpback whale heart rates using drones and infrared light.
And Goldbogen and his team hope to plumb other unfathomed depths. “Sperm whales, beaked whales — some of those species can dive for an hour or more,” he said. “We would like to understand what their hearts are doing.”
Cara Giaimo © 2019 The New York Times Company
Although Black Friday isn’t quite relevant to this side of the hemisphere, more companies have started hosting sales to ride the western trend. However, gamers have always been able to get some sweet deals every year, no matter where they are. It’s the same this year and we have several really good discounts running across different digital platforms.
Steam has its own Autumn Sale running simultaneously with Black Friday that’s offering some amazing deals running for PC games. There are a few good deals for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as well in their respective stores.
Here are some of the best Black Friday deals for PC games on Steam:
Here are some of the best Black Friday deals for the PlayStation 4:
Here are some of the best Black Friday deals for the Xbox One:
Xioami launched its Redmi Note 8 series earlier this month. The phone comes with a 64 MP quad rear-camera setup that's priced at Rs 14,999 for its 6 GB + 64 GB configuration.
A new colour variant of the Note 8 Pro called Electric Blue has been announced by the company. This smartphone was already available in Halo White, Gamma Green and Shadow Black colour variants.
It will go on sale today at 12 pm on Amazon and the company's website. It will be the first time that the Redmi Note 8 Pro (Review)'s Electric Blue colour variant goes on sale.
#RedmiNote8Pro, the #64MPQuadCamBeast gets a new striking Electric Blue colour variant. Hit 🔄 if you ♥️ it!
First sale tomorrow at 12 noon on https://t.co/cwYEXdVQIo and @amazonIN. #BlackFridaySale pic.twitter.com/LJnMVQsMZ2
— Redmi India for #MiFans (@RedmiIndia) November 28, 2019
Xiaomi has also announced a Cosmic Purple colour variant for Redmi Note 8 (Review) which will also go on its first sale today at 12 pm.
The Redmi Note 8 Pro comes in three RAM and storage variants. The 6 GB RAM + 64 GB storage variant is priced at Rs 14,999, the 6 GB RAM + 128 GB storage variant will cost you Rs 15,999, and the highest storage variant of 8 GB RAM + 128 GB storage is priced at Rs 17,999.
As for sale offers, Xiaomi is offering double data benefits on recharge of Rs 249 and Rs 349 for 10 months for Airtel customers. On Amazon, you can also get a 10 percent cashback of up to Rs 2,000 on HDFC Bank debit cards.
The highlighting feature for the Redmi Note 8 Pro has to be the new 64 MP Samsung ISOCELL Bright GW1 sensor that is part of a quad-camera array on the smartphone. The phone has a 6.53-inch IPS LCD display and has an FHD+ resolution. The phone harbours a teardrop-notch on the top and a very small chin on the bottom of the device. The Redmi Note 8 Pro is the first phone in India which has in-built Alexa voice assistant.
The highlighting feature for the Redmi Note 8 Pro has to be the new 64 MP Samsung ISOCELL Bright GW1 sensor that is part of a quad-camera array on the smartphone.
As far as storage and RAM options go the phone happens to have a 6 GB + 64 GB starting variant and it goes up to 8 GB RAM + 128 GB storage. Processing on the phone is handled by the MediaTek G90T chipset.
Talking now about the optics on the phone, the Note 8 Pro happens to have a quad-camera setup with a 64 MP primary lens along with an 8 MP ultra-wide + 2 MP depth sensor and 2 MP macro lens. The phone also has a 4,500 mAh battery which comes equipped with 18 W fast charging capabilities. The phone comes in Black, Green, and White colour options.
Amazon Fab Phones fest is also ongoing right now and during this sale, smartphones like iPhone XR (Review), Samsung Galaxy M30, Oppo A5 2020 are available on discount.
If you want to buy a Xiaomi phone or accessory, you can buy it now during the ongoing Xiaomi Black Friday sale.
Realme is also hosting its own Black Friday sale and giving offers on the Realme X2 Pro (Review), Realme C2 (Review) and more.
OnePlus is celebrating its five-year anniversary on Amazon by giving discounts on the OnePlus 7 Pro (Review) and OnePlus 7T (Review) till 2 December.
In an unexpected discovery, astronomers have spotted a black hole in the Milky Way galaxy that's so large, it defies existing models of how stars and galaxies evolve.
The black hole in question, which researchers have dubbed 'LB-1', is roughly 15,000 light-years from Earth, and has a mass that's 70 times that of our Sun, claims the study published in Nature.
The Milky Way is thought to contain stellar black holes that number around 100 million. And LB-1 is twice as large as the largest stellar-mass black hole that scientists imagined possible, according to lead researcher and astronomer Jifeng Liu from the National Astronomical Observatory of China.
"Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution," Liu said in a statement. "LB-1 is twice as massive as what we thought possible. Now theorists will have to take up the challenge of explaining its formation."
So far, researchers have arrived at two distinct kinds of black holes. The more common ones are stellar black holes, which can be up to 20 times as massive as our Sun (the oddity in question is 70x the mass of our Sun). These can form when the core of a massive star collapses in on itself.
The second kind of black hole, supermassive black holes, are at least a million times bigger than the Sun. Their origins? Unknown. Researchers think that the typical star in the Milky Way will shed most of their gas through stellar wind — naturally preventing the formation of a black hole as massive as LB-1.
"The abundance of black holes and the mechanisms by which they form" remains something astronomers today are grappling with, David Reitze, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology not involved in the discovery, told AFP.
"LB-1's large mass falls into a range known as the 'pair-instability gap', where supernovae should not have produced it," Reitze said. "That means [LB-1] is a new kind of black hole, formed by another physical mechanism!"
Liu and his colleagues made their observations using the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) in China, seeking out "wobbly stars" that might point to a nearby black hole (which otherwise appears invisible).
LAMOST pointed them to a giant blue star. It took some follow-up observations with the more powerful Gran Telescopio Canarias in Spain and the Keck Observatory in USA to really uncover what they had found.
The star they spotted was around 35 million years old, clocking in at around eight times the mass of the Sun. It was also orbiting LB-1 every 79 days on what the researchers describe as a "surprisingly circular" orbit.
This circular orbit of LB-1's companion star is puzzling because there's no scenario that the scientists could imagine that fits both — the formation of the black hole and the existence of a companion star that's orbiting it in a circular orbit.
If LB-1 formed when two black holes collided, after which it captured a star, the circular orbit of its companion would be highly unlikely. What's expected is a very eccentric, elliptical orbit. Sure, time could smooth this orbit out and turn it "more circular", but that would take longer than the star's age (so... over 35 million years of time — again, an unlikely possibility, per the study).
A possibility that researchers are pursuing is that LB-1 is a "fallback supernova" — material was ejected from the dying star at some point, after which it fell immediately back into the star, directly producing a black hole. While this is a little-understood, theoretical possibility, scientists haven't found any direct evidence for black holes formed this way till date.
"This discovery forces us to re-examine our models of how stellar-mass black holes form," Reitze said. "This remarkable result along with the LIGO-Virgo detections of binary black hole collisions during the past four years really points towards a renaissance in our understanding of black hole astrophysics."
Last month, Xiaomi launched the Note 8 duo — Redmi Note 8 and Redmi Note 8 Pro — in India. At the time of launch, the Redmi Note 8 was released in three colour variants: Neptune Blue, Moonlight White, and Space Black.
Now, over a month later, Xiaomi has announced a new colour variant for the smartphone called Cosmic Purple, after teasing the same in a tweet yesterday.
The new Redmi Note 8 Cosmic Purple colour variant was made official via a tweet by Redmi India, which also reveals that the new variant will go on sale for the first time on 29 November at 12 pm during its Black Friday Sale on mi.com. As per a listing on Amazon India, the new colour variant will also be available on the e-commerce website on the same day, at the same time.
Mi fans, presenting a new avatar of the #RedmiNote8. The all-new Cosmic Purple colour variant. Like it? You can soon own it.
Get it during the #BlackFridaySale from 29th November.
RT if you love this new colour! pic.twitter.com/CE0d5o6xcO
— Redmi India for #MiFans (@RedmiIndia) November 27, 2019
Notably, the Redmi Note 8 Cosmic Purple variant is only new in terms of the colour option and does not offer any new software or hardware specification.
The pricing of the variant also remains the same. The 4 GB RAM + 64 GB storage model is priced at Rs 9,999, whereas the 6 GB RAM + 128 GB storage variant is priced at Rs 12,999.
You can also read our review of the Redmi Note 8 Pro here.
The Note 8 comes with a 6.3-inch FHD+ IPLS LCD panel with a teardrop notch on the front and a minuscule chin at the bottom. The phone uses the Snapdragon 665 chipset to power the device and it has RAM options starting from 4 GB going up to 6 GB with storage options of 64 GB and 128 GB.
There is also a quad-camera setup on the Note 8 with a 48 MP primary sensor including a wide-angle, macro and telephoto sensors which have resolutions of 8 MP, 2 MP and 2 MP respectively. The phone has a 4,000 mAh battery and it supports 18W fast charging in-built along with a Type-C port. The Redmi Note 8 also comes with Alexa smart assistant integration.
Amazon Fab Phones fest is also ongoing right now and during this sale, smartphones like iPhone XR (Review), Samsung Galaxy M30, Oppo A5 2020 are available on discount.
If you want to buy a Xiaomi phone or accessory, you can buy it now during the ongoing Xiaomi Black Friday sale.
Realme is also hosting its own Black Friday sale and giving offers on Realme X2 Pro (Review), Realme C2 (Review) and more.
OnePlus is also celebrating its five-year anniversary on Amazon by giving discounts on OnePlus 7 Pro (Review) and OnePlus 7T (Review) till 2 December.