The Bright Channel

WhatsApp logo from whatsapp.com WhatsApp has come in handy especially in an era where we need to send messages fast and expect a quick reply, instant messaging. Still, this social mobile application can do more than just texting or updating Your Status or making calls; it can let you own your space! If you are a typical WhatsApp user and also love to write or publish material from time to time, you can use this social medium as a personal editorial desk, or even as a private library for your writings or other media content. Let's check out how to get your 'one in a room' on WhatsApp. 1. Create a Unilateral Group WhatsApp groups provide a common platform for families, friends, associates, etc. It is usually made up of two or more people. But did you know that a one member group is possible? Let's see how. -Ask for a WhatsApp-active friend's permission to be added shortly to a personal group. -Create a group page with yourself and the other contact as members, enter a

I Shared My Phone Number. I Learned I Shouldn’t Have. Our personal tech columnist asked security researchers what they could find out about him from just his cellphone number. Quite a lot, it turns out. By Brian X. Chen For most of our lives, we have been conditioned to share a piece of personal information without a moment’s hesitation: our phone number. We punch in our digits at the grocery store to get a member discount or at the pharmacy to pick up medication. When we sign up to use apps and websites, they often ask for our phone number to verify our identity. This column will encourage a new exercise. Before you hand over your number, ask yourself: Is it worth the risk? This question is crucial now that our primary phone numbers have shifted from landlines to mobile devices, our most intimate tools, which often live with us around the clock. Our mobile phone numbers have become permanently attached to us because we rarely change them, porting them from job to job an

 Scientists create the world's thinnest gold The image shows a gold nanosheet that is just two atoms thick. It has been artificially coloured. Credit: University of Leeds Scientists at the University of Leeds have created a new form of gold which is just two atoms thick - the thinnest unsupported gold ever created. The researchers measured the thickness of the gold to be 0.47 nanometres - that is one million times thinner than a human finger nail. The material is regarded as 2D because it comprises just two layers of atoms sitting on top of one another. All atoms are surface atoms - there are no 'bulk' atoms hidden beneath the surface. The material could have wide-scale applications in the medical device and electronics industries - and also as a catalyst to speed up chemical reactions in a range of industrial processes. Laboratory tests show that the ultra-thin gold is 10 times more efficient as a catalytic substrate than the currently used gold nanoparticle

Chase Dekker believes the photo he took of a humpback whale "swallowing" a sea lion is the first time that happening has ever been caught on camera . T h e 27-year-old wildlife photographer and marine biologist had taken a boat of whale watchers out on the water in Monterey Bay, California, on 22 July when the incident happened. "It wasn't a huge group, only three humpback whales and about two hundred sea lions," Chase tells Radio 1 Newsbeat. "We've seen it all the way up to 100 whales with 3,000 sea lions, so it can get really insane." The animals were feeding on a school of anchovies at the water's surface when the whale ended up with something a little larger in its mouth than it probably expected. "We were watching them feed for a long time and then eventually the event - as I call it the once-in-a-lifetime event - happened, and I still can't believe it," he says. "I had about a split second while the whale

File image Doctors have turned the brain signals for speech into written sentences in a research project that aims to transform how patients with severe disabilities communicate in the future. The breakthrough is the first to demonstrate how the intention to say specific words can be extracted from brain activity and converted into text rapidly enough to keep pace with natural conversation. In its current form, the brain-reading software works only for certain sentences it has been trained on, but scientists believe it is a stepping stone towards a more powerful system that can decode in real time the words a person intends to say. Doctors at the University of California in San Francisco took on the challenge in the hope of creating a product that allows paralysed people to communicate more fluidly than using existing devices that pick up eye movements and muscle twitches to control a virtual keyboard. “To date there is no speech prosthetic system that allows users to hav

Our solar system. PC: worldatlas.com Nasa has found three new planets – including a kind of world unseen in our own solar system. The mysterious planets, part of the TOI-270 system, are ”missing link” worlds and could be a huge gift to researchers looking for alien worlds, they said. The three planets orbit a star that is only 73 light years away. It makes them among the closest exoplanets ever found, as well as being among the smallest. Exoplanets will get real names rather  than numbers They were discovered by researchers using Nasa’s Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which was shot into space in 2018 and has been scanning the universe for stars and planets that could support alien life. TOI-270 has a rocky super-Earth, which is slightly bigger than our planet, and two gaseous planets that are lightly larger. That makes them a “missing link” – sitting between the smaller rocky worlds like our own Earth or Mars, and the much larger gaseous planets such as Saturn and

File Photo A “city-killer” asteroid whizzed by Earth on Thursday, startling astronomers who didn’t pick up the rock’s trajectory until days before it passed the planet, according to a report. The rock, dubbed Asteroid 2019 OK, passed within 43,500 miles of Earth traveling at a speed of 15 miles a second,  the Sydney Morning Herald first reported. The asteroid, which was estimated to be between 187 feet and 427 feet in diameter, was discovered this week by two astronomy teams in Brazil and the US — and confirmed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. It’s the largest rock to pass by Earth this year — and possibly even this decade. “This is one of the closest approaches to Earth by an asteroid that we know of. And it’s a pretty large one,” Michael Brown, an associate professor at Monash University’s school of physics and astronomy told the paper. “It’s impressively close. I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet. It’s a pretty big deal.” Astronomers generally track asteroid