PARANOID ANDROID | Mithun Mohandas | Managing Editor
A startup for the next billion
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heading out because it’s an easy option for them. Even in the non-research oriented fields, we see the same feedback. Plenty of multinational firms have commented on the “skill-gap” that is characteristic of Indian engineering graduates. Having witnessed this in person, I’m afraid to say that I do concur. The whole thing about revamping the education system has been said a million times and it’s going to be decades before we sort that out. What is needed is a multipronged approach to help our students understand concepts better. We already have Massive Online Open Courses that aim to remedy this situation, however, the vast majority are in English and that’s no good for the vast majority of our students. Even the Indian educational startups are syllabus driven because that’s where the money is. A Math & Science video course on one of these websites can cost upwards of Rs. 25K. You can be pretty certain that this is well beyond the reach of most students. Aside from Khan Academy, there are barely any services to serve this vastly under served market. There is no money in it but it certainly would help the country grow by leaps and bounds. All we need is for some Indian or overseas organisation to take charge and solve this truly Indian problem.
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AUGUST HAS BEEN OUR INDEPENDENCE SPECIAL ISSUE for quite a few years. Being a tech magazine, it’s when we celebrate technology milestones that India has achieved in the last year. We’ve had plenty to write about the likes of apps and startups that have made their mark. Most often, these are heavily inspired replications of apps from existing global markets. I’m not saying that we don’t have anything original to show. Our space programme has bedazzled even the brightest minds as to how we can achieve similar objectives at a fraction of the cost. Videos and articles showcasing Desi jugaad often become viral across the globe. So we have innovations serving the undeserved and innovations serving the highest order but there seems to be an abject lack of innovation right down the middle of the spectrum - the one that serves the mainstream market. During one of my recent travels I had the privilege of sitting right next to a research scholar from IIT-Bombay. He was returning home after having presented a paper at a prestigious conference. Not wanting to miss the opportunity to dig into the research domain, I began to network with the individual. My aim, to identify a few researchers and colleges that I could reach out to for a few stories. Getting to cover cutting edge research isn’t a simple task so I set about prodding to find out which domains have the most exciting work going on for them. I wasn’t prepared for what came next. Apparently, there isn’t much original research emerging from Indian universities. The lack of infrastructure, motivation, incentive, mentors, lax standards of peer review, etc. seem to have brought about a culture that’s reminiscent of a government office. The ones who are truly passionate tend to hunt for universities where they can perform research under the guidance of a mentor who cares. Personally, all of my friends who went on to get into academic research have since long moved out of the country in pursuit of better opportunities. These aren’t even folks with deep pockets who’re
“Our space programme has bedazzled even the brightest minds as to how we can achieve similar objectives at a fraction of the cost. Videos and articles showcasing Desi jugaad often become viral across the globe.”
Let me know your thoughts on this column at: @mithun_mohandas | mithun@digit.in
www.digit.in | August 2019 | Digit | 1
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THE RSS FEED | Robert Sovereign-Smith | Executive Editor
My 5G life
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in a shack so long as it had a fast net connection and a place for my multiple monitor desktop setup… As luck would have it, I ended up with a house that was on an FTTN connection and almost a km away from the closest node, which meant a km of copper wire between me and fibre optics. All the houses I rented up to this point were either FTTP or FTTN with the node less than 100m away from the house. The result? I went from net speeds of 100/40 Mbps (up/down), to 50/19 Mbps. Heck, all of the guys in Digit have better connections at home than I did here, in a supposedly first world country. Needless to say, I was always complaining about this, and driving my wife up the wall. And then a ray of hope emerged… My home is actually less than 100m away from a large service provider’s satellite dish setup, and this means that a large compound with a lot of ISP equipment is (literally) a stone’s throw away. In February, they announced that they wanted to run a 5G trial, which was open to residents of a select few suburbs around Australia. My suburb was one of those and I jumped to sign up. Then silence ensued for a few months. In the beginning of July I got a call, and in a few days received a Nokia Fastmile 5G Gateway, spent two days fiddling about with it and carrying it all over the house to find the ideal spot. Heck, I even went on to the road (with a very long power extension cable), to try and find signal strengths in open air. That got me a few stares from the neighbours! Now I’m sitting here with a fixed wireless, 5G connection that I pay about Rs 3,500 a month for (I was paying Rs 4,500 a month for the earlier 50/19 FTTN connection), and get speeds of between 250 Mbps and 400 Mbps down and 40 to 60 Mbps up. And this isn’t even proper 5G on the millimeter wave (mmwave), it’s still just sub-8 GHz. I immediately disconnected the more expensive FTTN NBN as it was worthless to me, and this is something that’s going to happen all over Australia in FTTN houses once 5G really rolls out… This is something India is going through currently, as many players in large cities are trying to connect you via fibre. But are they too late already? With 5G coming, and making much more sense in crowded cities in India, is the idea of fibre or copper to your home just dead on arrival? Indian companies better learn from the Australian government’s mistakes...
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WE HEAR IT ALL THE TIME. 5G IS COMING, 5G will change everything. 5G will allow robot surgery. 5G will solve all of humanity’s problems! It’s the latest buzzword now, so of course everyone who can add it to their list of jargon does, just as AI was last year, and continues to be this year as well. And it’s not like we’re complaining. The promise of faster broadband speeds with lower latency is like a dream for all of us geeks. For me, living here in Australia, 5G was my only hope of decent net speeds. Let me elaborate. In 2007, the incoming Australian government promised that they would build a National Broadband Network (NBN) that would increase the rather pathetic speeds most Australians were used to. Since ADSL was the norm across the country at the time, speeds were slow – not as bad as the connection I had in India in 2007, but slow by the standards of most first world countries. In 2009, the government promised that 93% of the population would have fibre to the premises (FTTP) by 2020 at the cost of about 40 billion AUD to the taxpayer. Needless to say, because it was 2009, and because it was an infrastructure project of mammoth proportions, the installations went rather slowly. There were negotiations with private players holding it up, because NBN had to buy out their infrastructure to use wire pits and pipes the private companies had installed (at their own costs) in streets around Australia. Obviously, the opposition jumped at the opportunity to criticise the NBN, and came up with a plan that they claimed would speed up deployment and also save the taxpayer billions of dollars! In 2013, what was called the Multi-Technology Mix (MTM), was promised to the public by the opposition, and it basically promised fibre to the node (FTTN) connections, which meant optical fibre and existing copper would be used together to connect you to the internet, instead of drawing expensive fibre all the way to your house, and then installing a box inside your house, etc. When they won the election, this is exactly what they converted the NBN into, and thus, we come back to my predicament. In January, I bought a house, and despite my pleas to my wife to only consider those houses that had FTTP connections, she was more interested in the actual house, land size, proximity to schools and shops, and other such unimportant details. Personally I’d be happy living
2 | Digit | August 2019 | www.digit.in
“Personally I’d be happy living in a shack so long as it had a fast net connection and a place for my multiple monitor desktop setup…”
Liked or hated this column? Let me know at: editor@digit.in | facebook.com/raaabo | @raaabo
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GAMES REVIEWED THIS MONTH Judgement
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contents
COVER STORY PAGE 51- 64
The India Special
AUGUST 2019
Take a journey down the Indian technium with us, where we look into the landscape of Indian technology presently and in the future.
VOLUME 19 ISSUE 08
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TECH - PAGE 14-44
18 | BrainNet
A multi-person brain-to-brain interface that is bringing us closer to real-life telepathy
20 | Reviews
The latest products reviewed for you, including smartphones, graphic cards and headsets
30 | Agent 001
Upgrading to the latest from AMD requires a bit more thought than your usual PC building regimen
32 | Devworx
Building a Discord bot: Bobby-B to the rescue
38 | Teardown
Google Pixel 3a: Throwback to a more-repairable era in smartphones
40 | Origins: UPI
UPI (Unified Payments Interface) has played a crucial role in the journey towards a cashless society in India
42 | Top 5 Tech Careers for the next decade Tectonic shifts in technology mandate a slew of new jobs and the rise of a couple of old ones
AND MORE 8 | Digit | August 2019 | www.digit.in
CULTURE - PAGE 45-50
ALT - PAGE 84-95
ON THE DVD We have curated a list to celebrate some of the best Indian pop culture out there
50 | Boo Science!
Boo man has had enough of some aspects of the scientific community
Amazing communities clustered around oddly satisfying images
90 | Hero’s Journey
TECH Distro Debian 10 Buster
Also known as the Monomyth, we explore the journeys of various characters from pop-culture.
94 | Backtalk: Zoomcar & HP
Security Tools HD Cleaner Image C ryptomator Image F ile Shredder G lary Tracks Eraser Z HPLite S .S.E. File Encryptor P rivazer C rypter S imple File Shredder MD5 & SHA Checksum Utility
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AND MORE
92 | Eye-Candy subreddits
In coversation with Greg Moran, Zoomcar and Leo Joseph, HP
AND MORE
SKOAR! - PAGE 96-111
SCIENCE - PAGE 65-83
66 | Cryopegs
98 | Reevu: Judgement
68 | Optogenetics
100 | Rise of Auto Chess
70 | RNA-based therapies
102 | Minecraft Revisited
The Yakuza spin-off we didn’t know we wanted
SA
A glimpse into the potential habitats for life in the ice moons of the Solar System
An emerging science of controlling cells using a combination of light and genetics
RNA-based therapies display the potential to cure rare and common diseases alike
72 | Terraforming Mars
Making the Red planet habitable has been one of the most popular themes of Sci-Fi
74 | Breakthrough Listen
The goal is simple – finding signs of intelligent life in our stellar neighbourhood
AND MORE
CULT Games L ost Constellation G unbound D octor Who: The Adventure Games - City of the Daleks Dangerous Dave 2 K ingdom Rush C ounter-Strike 2D
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46 | Indian pop culture
Your doorway to the most trending video game genre of 2019
Before you say it, yes, we’re well aware it’s 2019
104 | Open world fatigue We’re so tired.
108 | Mobile Monthly
A mixed bag of mobile games, from challenging to infuriating, in this month’s mobile monthly.
AND MORE
Essentials 7Zip Adobe Acrobat Reader Avidemux Calibre Chrome CPU-Z Deluge Discord EasyBCD FFmpeg File Splitter and Joiner Firefox Foxit Reader Free Download Manager Free OCR Handbrake HDD Low Level Format Tool IrfanView K-Lite Codec Pack LibreOffice Mouse Recorder Premium Notepad++ Opera and more
Movies Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet Battle Beyond the Sun Music The Dark Room Calm Uplifting Optimistic Event Horizon SCI Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics M icrolensing, Astrometry and Other Methods D irect Imaging of Exoplanets T he Kepler Mission I ntroduction to Black Holes S pecial and General Relativity T ests of Relativity ALT Visual Novels Under What? Image To the Edge of the Sky Holoscope Image Nusantara Lieve Oma Image Black Image and more
www.digit.in | August 2019 | Digit | 9
WHAT’S NEW
Apple to obtain majority of Intel’s smartphone modem business for $1 Billion
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Apple will solidify its wireless technology patent portfolio which will become 17,000 strong. These include patents covering cellular standards, modem architecture and modem operations. Patents pertaining to nnon-smartphone applications such as IoT, PCs and autonomous vehicles will be retained by Intel. https://dgit.in/ModemApple
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DOES THIS SECTION EVEN NEED AN INTRODUCTION? FROM COMPUTERS TO MOBILES, AND HEADPHONES TO GPUs, IT’S ALL HERE...
ust months after shutting down its smartphone modem business, Intel has entered into a deal with Apple to sell the majority of its smartphone modem business. The deal will also see 2,200 Intel employees joining Apple along with IP, equipment and leases. Post finalising this deal, which is supposed to happen later this year,
THIS MONTH IN TECH: We take a look at BrainNet, and learn how to build a Discord bot. After that, head on over to Origins to learn about UPI, and then delve into the top 5 possible tech careers in the next decade.
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acebook’s $5 billion fine wasn’t the only highlight of the FTC verdict pertaining to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The FTC has also imposed a list of regulations on Facebook. It requires that Facebook exercise greater oversight over third-party applications and to terminate app developers that fail to certify with policies or can’t justify the need for user data. Facebook will no longer be able to use
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BMW and Tencent to develop autonomous driving solutions for China
Facebook’s laundry list of new regulations
Tencent and BMW are partnering up to open a new computing centre in China with the aim of developing self-driving cars that are suited to the specific driving conditions in China. BMW says L3 cars might be launched in 2021. https://dgit.in/ BMWTencentCar
Twitter launches major redesign
Twitter recently overhauled its desktop website and now has a significantly larger side-bar with all the key sections, DMs appear more like email inboxes, improved image lightbox, and it is now easier to navigate tweet threads. https://dgit.in/NewTwitter
14 | Digit | August 2019 | www.digit.in
the phone numbers which were obtained for 2-factor authentication for advertising
purposes. User’s consent has to be sought prior to using any user data that is not covered in a previous disclosure and a
Licensing ARM IP now easier
ARM launched a new licensing scheme called Flexible Access which enables startups to access ARM’s intellectual property without paying an upfront licensing free. Partners only pay per-unit royalty after entering production. https://dgit.in/ARMnewLicense
clear notice should be provided whenever Facebook uses facial recognition technology. Facebook is now prohibited from asking email passwords of other services when users sign up for FB services. It has to establish, implement and maintain a comprehensive data security program. And lastly, it has to encrypt user passwords and regularly check if passwords are stored in plaintext. https://dgit.in/FBs5Bslap
Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI
OpenAI, the non-profit turned for-profit AI company welcomed Microsoft’s $1 billion investment. The move is expected to bolster Azure’s AI offerings and help OpenAI get closer to its own goal of creating an AGI. https://dgit.in/OpenAIBillion
tech
Neurotechnology of music
Hail the Omnissiah!
Imagine algorithms that can detect the onset of depression, and play bespoke music to make you happy https://dgit.in/aug19-85
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FEATURE
With the advent of brain computer interfaces, will the human brain begin to communicate in binary? https://dgit.in/aug19-86
INCHING TOWARDS
TELEPATHY system that allows three people to collaboratively play a Tetris-like game by transmitting the ‘Sender’s’ thoughts to the ‘Receiver’.
MAKING THE CONNECTION
The theory of connecting humans minds was put to test in 2015 by Andrea Stocco from the University of Washington. Two people were connected to a prototype transmitter and receiver. The device placed on the test subjects’ heads similar to a shower caps, with a series of electrodes on the inside. The team achieved mostly positive results after the participants of the study played a game somewhat similar to 20-questions. BrainNet essentially builds on this contraption. A team led by Dr Rajesh Rao, a professor at the University of Washington, built BrainNet which borrows from Stocco’s work as well as Rao’s work back in 2014.
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BrainNet, a multiperson brain-to-brain interface is bringing us closer to real-life telepathy
Dhriti Datta | dhriti@digit.in
hen you think about telepathy as a concept, it is likely to be in a science-fiction setting. However, in the past few years, physicists and neuroscientists have developed an arsenal of tools that can sense certain types of thoughts and transmit information to other brains. We are approaching the possibility of brain-to-brain communication or telepathy becoming a reality. A group of neural engineers from the University of Washington have created a
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THE TECH BEHIND BRAINNET The system, as seen in Stocco’s work, seemed to work with two people, so
Rao went a step further and decided to incorporate yet another person in the process. In the new study, two people were dubbed ‘Senders’ and one person dubbed the ‘Receiver’ were made to play a game similar to Tetris. The senders can see both the block and the line but can’t control the game, while the receiver can only see the block but is the one that actually controls the game. Basically, each sender needs to decide whether they need to flip a block to complete a line (just like Tetris). The senders were hooked up to the EEG machine and by using real-time EEG analysis, the decisions of whether or not to move a piece were decoded and then sent to Receiver over the internet. Then, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used to activate the corresponding areas in the receiver’s brains. The message received by the receiver is translated and signals are then sent to the occipital cortex of the game. When the information has been processed by the receiver, he sends a command of
reviews
For better understanding of our ratings, here’s a quick guide to our overall score 10 to 30 to 50 to
51
to 70 to
71
to 90 to
Keep away!
Strictly OK.
Not recommended
Decent product.
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Extremely poor product.
to 100 91 to
Go for it, but there may be better products out there.
Very good product. Highly recommended.
Ground-breaking product.
We’ve never seen anything like it before. A definite must buy!
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The Digit Test Centre receives hundreds of products every month. Each of these products is put through a series of tests and is finally given a score. The final score is arrived at after considering a number of factors and evaluating them in terms of features, performance, value for money, build quality, and, in the case of software, ease of use.
THE LATEST PRODUCTS REVIEWED FOR YOU
INSIDE
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Xiaomi Redmi K20 Pro
Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e PLUS
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ASUS VG278QR 20 | Digit | August 2019 | www.digit.in
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Lenovo Yoga C930
21 AMD Radeon RX 5700XT 22 Sony X95G 55-inch 4K LED Smart TV 25 OnePlus 7 26 Jabra Elite 85H 29 Acer Swift 3 SF313-51
Apple-Intel deal
Reportedly, Apple will be acquiring majority of Intel's smartphone modem business for $1 billion. https://dgit.in/aug19-59
tech
Huawei CEO's flex
The Huawei CEO, Richard Yu was seen using the unreleased Huawei Mate X, foldable phone. https://dgit.in/aug19-60
REVIEWS
AMD Radeon RX 5700XT Graphics Card A competitor, at last
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Price 8 36,56
peak values. The base clock could go all the way up to 2130 MHz whereas the memory could Gaming go up till 935 MHz. With In Battlefield V, the RX both parameters set to their 5700 XT did better than peak values we couldn’t even the RTX 2080 across FEATURES.....................79 get a proper run and they all tested resolutions which PERFORMANCE...........80 would crash every single felt like an anomaly. On the VALUE............................75 time. We then lowered other hand, the RX 5700 DESIGN..........................78 the base clock all the way performed better than the down to 1950 MHz but Vega 64, RTX 2060 and the benchmark would still crash. So even the older RX 590. we set the base clock to 2100 and then When it came to running Far Cry 5 lowered the memory clock. At 930 MHz and Far Cry New Dawn, the RX 5700 memory clock, the OS stopped crashing XT performed better than the RTX but the benchmark was still failing So 2070 and even the older Vega 64. The after dropping the memory clock to 925 RX 5700 equalled the RTX 2070 at 4K MHz, we finally ended up with the first resolution but the differences became successful run of Time Spy with a score more apparent at lower resolutions as of 9598. Compared to the highest score the RTX 2070 creeped ahead. Even here, we’ve obtained thus far at stock clocks, we see the RX 5700 coming ahead of the which is 9193, this OC attempt got us a RTX 2060. 4.41% improvement in performance. The Witcher 3 was the only game where the RTX 2070 performed better than the RX 5700 XT with the latest Verdict driver update. The RX 5700 XT did AMD’s Navi is not only performing betperform better with the previous driver ter than competing solutions but is also that was initially seeded during the rebetter priced with the AMD Radeon RX view process. Only at lower resolutions 5700 XT priced at Rs.30,990+Taxes and did the RX 5700 XT get the better of the the RX 5700 priced at Rs.26990+Taxes. RTX 2070. The same pattern ensued These cards displace the RTX 2070 and with the RX 5700 and t he RTX 2060. the RTX 2060 from the sweet spot, and with their new RDNA architecture carve a good share of the GPU market for now. Overclocking First, we tried the Auto OC settings –Mithun Mohandas within WattMan and we tried messing around with the OC manually to extract SPECIFICATIONS STREAM PROCESSORS: 2560 | CU: 40 | BOOST CLOCK: 1905 MHz whatever we could. Here are the results | VRAM: 8 GB GDDR6 | BUS-WIDTH: 256-bit | CONNECTORS: for the 5700 XT while we continue to 1x8PIN+1x6-PIN | TBP: <225W work on the 5700: CONTACT Individually, the GPU and the Mem AMD (ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES) | PHONE: Web form | EMAIL: clock were bumped up to find out their Web form | WEBSITE: www.amd.com
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MD finally unveiled their Navi-based graphics cards at COMPUTEX 2019. AMD has been the favourite when it comes to providing gamers value for their hard-earned money. The Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 feature AMD’s new RDNA architecture. A design that’s primarily GCN with some elements of RDNA. Think of Navi as an augmented version of GCN with new Compute Units (CU), improved graphics pipeline and a multilevel cache hierarchy.
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT / 5700 Specifications
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Having moved to a 7nm manufacturing process, Navi allows for higher clocks while saving power. Thanks to smaller transistors, AMD managed to squeeze 10.3 billion transistors onto a die. The Compute Units still feature the same number of Stream Processors i.e. 64 but there have been other improvements. The improvement with clock speeds are quite considerable. The peak boost now goes all the way up to 1905 MHz with the total board power scaling up to 225W as per the specs. The other major switch happens to be the memory type which is now GDDR6 instead of HBM2 which is cheaper but has reduced bandwidth per chip.
Performance
We start with the synthetic benchmarks within 3D Mark. The Radeon VII is still better than both new cards but not by a vast margin. The Radeon VII launched at $699 whereas the RX 5700 XT costs $399 and the RX 5700 costs $349. So the new, cheaper cards coming this close shows how much more efficient the new Navi architecture is. Even in Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme, we see a similar pattern. Compared to the competition, the Radeon RX 5700 XT is better than the NVIDIA RTX 2070 and the RX 5700 scores lower than the 2070.
www.digit.in | August 2019 | Digit | 21
> code / creativity / community >
FOR THOSE GEEKS WHO LIKE TO GET THEIR HANDS DIRTY IN CODE
GET NODE.JS AND A DISCORD ACCOUNT This is fairly basic. Head over to discordapp.com and create an account for yourself. Building a bot and letting it operate within the Discord environment requires access to the Discord API and you require an auth token for the same. Once you’ve created a Discord account and have logged in to the account, navigate to discordapp.com/ developers/applications/me and create an application. If your account is logged in, you will be given a dialogue prompt to enter a name for your Discord bot. We put down “Bobby-B-DiscordBot”, a fairly long name for an app. Click on create and you should end up on the homepage of the app. Over here, you should see the name of the bot you’ve just entered, an icon (which can be updated with an image of your choosing), description panel, client ID and client secret. Copy the client ID which is a string of numbers and keep that for later. Add a description for your bot if you want to. On the left-hand side, you’ll see Settings panel with an option that reads “Bots”.
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Building a Discord bot
into the chat channel whenever it is evoked or if the bot is tagged by any user. Even we have a Discord channel for SKOAR!, you can join us using this link - (discord.gg/2qdfk4tt). Here’s how you can go about building your own bot for Discord.
Bobby-B to the rescue
Mithun Mohandas | mithun@digit.in
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ne of the most ridiculously popular gaming chat clients to have breached into the mainstream is Discord. There are servers for practically every topic under the sun, and the addition of numerous features is what really differentiates Discord from the rest of the chat clients. One of the key features that makes Discord so versatile are the bots and there are plenty of those to go around as well. Bots have a number of functions such as greeting new users, performing crowd control, moderating chat channels, performing giveaways, playing music, playing mini-games, etc. in your chat channels. Practically any task can be easily automated using just a bit of javascript. We’re all big fans of Game of Thrones here at Digit, except for the last season. And one of our favourite
subreddits is /r/freefolk. If you’ve been to that subreddit then you should be familiar with the resident Bobby-B-Bot who happens to be a bot that spews Robert Baratheon’s quotes each time it is evoked. Folks can never really have enough of Bobby-B and it can be clearly seen that the bot really adds to the interactivity of the subreddit and makes conversations a lot more entertaining. Naturally, when we couldn’t find a bot for Discord, we thought of creating the same. All it has to do is pull a quote from a list and send it
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Developer Portal on Discord
WHAT’S NEW
Marvel reveals Phase 4 slate
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Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain Marvel are also coming. On the other hand, Disney + series include The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2020), WandaVision (2021), Loki (2021), What If (2021), and Hawkeye (2021). https://dgit.in/Phase4
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GEEK CULTURE IS OUR WAY OF LIFE, AND ENCOMPASSES MOVIES, GAMES, COMICS, AND TRENDS FROM ACROSS THE GLOBE
arvel Studio’s Phase 4 film and Disney+ TV series slate seem to be something out of our dreams. Kevin Fage, President of Marvel Studios, appeared at San Diego during the Comic-Con for Marvel’s 90-minute presentation, where he announced a total of 10 films and Disney + series. The films in Phase 4 have everything from prequels, sequels and a bunch of entirely new arcs. Black Widow (2020), starring Scarlett Johanson, is a prequel. Thor: Love and Thunder (2021) will see the return of Natalie Portman to the MCU. Other films include The Eternals (2020), Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2021). Sequels for Black Panther,
Endgame finally breaks Avatar’s box-office record
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fter months of anticipation and a re-release of the film with six minutes of additional footage, Avengers: Endgame has finally managed to surpass Avatar to become the highest-grossing film in box office history. The film crossed $2.7892 billion at the global box office on July 20, which tops Avatar’s total gross amount and dethrones the film after a period of nine years. The re-release of Avengers:
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THIS MONTH IN CULT: We explore everything in Indian Pop Culture, find out what the Digit team was up to this month, and what is happening in the Digit Forum.
Big Bang Theorythemed Cards Against Humanity There’s a fan-made Big Bang Theory-themed Cards Against Humanity named Box against Big Bang which features some of the most memorable quotes spoken by the iconic cast of the show. There are a total of 298 cards in the box. https://dgit.in/BoxAgainstBigBang
Gwendoline Christie nominates herself for Emmy Gwendoline Christie, who plays Ser Brienne of Tarth, in GoT nominated herself for an Emmy after HBO failed to do so. Christie, reportedly, paid $225 for a self-entry fee. https://dgit.in/ BrienneEmmy
Endgame on June 28 featured a deleted Hulk scene, a Stan Lee tribute and a post-credit scene with characters from Spider-Man: Far From Home. However, James Cameron’s Avatar 2 is scheduled to release on December 17, 2021, which
Marvel is rebooting Blade
During Marvel’s presentation at Comic-Com, the studio revealed that they are going to be rebooting Blade, starring Mahershala Ali. The original film became a hit in 1998, and saw two sequels. https://dgit.in/ BladeMarvel
will, no doubt, give the record set by Avengers: Endgame a run for its money. The recordbreaking success of Avengers: Endgame was celebrated by Kevin Feige at Comic-Con in San Diego where the addressed the crowd and confirmed that the film had finally beat Avatar’s long-standing record. Feige stated, “Thanks to you, Avengers: Endgame is the biggest film of all time”. https://dgit.in/EndgameHurrah
Top Gun: Maverick trailer
Cruise revealed the trailer for Maverick which features the Ray-Ban wearing hero pulling off stunts in jets and being scolded by a commander. The stunts are all actually performed by Cruise himself. https://dgit.in/ TopGunMav
www.digit.in | August 2019 | Digit | 45
culture
Streamers teaching languages
AT&T to launch AT&T TV
Duolingo and Twitch are launching a Streamer Program that broadcasters can use to teach new languages. https://dgit.in/aug19-53
FEATURE
In addition to DirecTV Now, HBO Max and Watch TV, AT&T has one more streaming service in the works. https://dgit.in/aug19-54
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by this. Pop culture in India is becoming increasingly intriguing, new-age, and radical. Gone are the days of Ekta Kapoor TV series being one of the few media content you could consume, Indians are now served a plethora of content spread across several media outlets such as streaming series, films (we will cover short films), standup comedy, books, comics and many more. So, without much further ado, let’s delve into some of the best Indian-origin pop culture that you can get into.
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MAKE WAY FOR
DESI POP
CULTURE infected with the pop culture bug. Industrialisation, affordable data and social media are catalysts for the pop culture craze in India. Everyone from pre-teens, teens, adults and even elderly people have submerged themselves in the giant tsunami that is western pop culture. However, Indian pop culture often gets eclipsed
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Since Independence Day is just around the corner, we decided to curate a list to celebrate some of the best Indian pop culture out there.
With the rise in adoption of western streaming apps in India, such as Netflix and Prime Video, streaming series have become extremely popular and tons of content is being generated on a daily basis for these platforms. Indian streaming apps, such as Hotstar, Voot, Sony LIV and MX player, have also seen a popularity boost in the past few years since consumers can catch up with TV series and cricket or football matches on these platforms on-the-go. Netflix, on the other hand, is home to some of the most critically-acclaimed Indian streaming series such as Sacred Games, Ghoul and Little Things. Radhika Apte is present in 2 out of these 3 shows we have listed, and the meme about her being ‘Omnipresent’ in Indian Netflix series went viral and stayed around the internet for quite some time. Regardless, we encourage you to check
Dhriti Datta | dhriti@digit.in
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ver scoffed at someone who hasn’t watched GoT? Are you always up to date with all the latest and catchiest music that hits the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ list? Are you patiently (NOT) waiting for the next season of your favourite series on Netflix? Well, then you have been
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Sacred Games has achieved massive popularity in India
Imaging: Anil VK
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TECH IN INDIC LANGUAGES
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THE LANGUAGE BARRIER IS KEEPING MILLIONS OF INDIANS FROM ENJOYING THE BENEFITS OF TECHNOLOGY, AND NOW CUTTING EDGE TECH IS BEING USED TO OVERCOME THAT BARRIER.
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ll around the world, most people use technology in their native languages. However, in India, the population remains underserved because of a number of reasons, even though 6 Indian languages are in the top 20 of the World, when considering the number of speakers. More people speak Panjabi as compared to say Korean, Italian or French. There are more than sixty languages in India with over 100,000 speakers, and 30 with over a million. The 29 states in India use 22 scheduled or constitutionally approved languages. The sheer linguistic diversity is staggering. Only about twelve percent of the population speaks English, and for most of them, it is a second language.
Aditya Madanapalle | aditya@digit.in
MACHINE TRANSLATION
One of the most elementary services for Indic language users is that of translation. Several other services, including applications, intelligent keyboards, voice assistants and chatbots can, at times, depend on good machine translation to work their magic. Translation services can mess up in ridiculous ways, but over the past decade, there has been a sustained effort
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to bring machine translation closer to human levels. These efforts are primarily driven by advances in AI. Older generations of translators used what is known as phrase-based translations, where sentences were translated into bits and pieces. Newer methods replicate the ways people understand connections between words and context within neural networks, and then use those for translating entire sentences. Typically, the machine learning models are trained on pairs of translations, say legal contracts, news reports, or politi-
cal documents which are available in Chinese and English, and translated by humans. These data sets contain millions of parallel sentences in the two languages. Now these translation models are based on just feeding in as much data as possible. The more data the neural net is trained on, the more accurate the translations are. However, many of the Indic languages are low resource. Such datasets are not available for all the possible language pairs in the world. Even if the resources are available, they may not be in the
WHAT’S NEW
Moon rocks continue to drive science
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NASA is now releasing some of these stored samples from the Apollo 17 mission to educational and research institutions. As far as researchers are concerned, it is as if there has been a new sample return mission to the Moon. The science based on the Apollo mission continues, even after half a century. There are still questions to be answered, for example researchers don’t know if the Moon is still geologically active. https://dgit.in/moonrocks
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SCIENCE IS THE PATH TO KNOWLEDGE, AND FINDING OUT ABOUT HOW OUR UNIVERSE WORKS. YOU CAN’T BE A GEEK AND NOT KNOW YOUR SCIENCE!
n July 20, 1969, the Eagle landed on the Moon, with two astronauts on board. One primary objective was to return samples of Moon rocks to Earth. The astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, collected these samples using hammers, tongs and scoops. The subsequent Apollo missions were also used to collect samples. In all, the missions collected over 380 kg of lunar samples. These samples were not studied immediately. NASA stored away some of the samples, in vacuum-sealed containers. For fifty years, these samples were never exposed to the atmosphere. The idea was to keep the samples stored till there were more advanced technologies to study them.
Acoustic levitation allows for studying chemistry
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ound waves propagate through air by creating high pressure and low pressure areas. An array of transducers can control these areas, using ultrasonic sound waves. However, bats in the area would be disturbed by the noise. By controlling the alternating high and low pressure areas, objects can be trapped or levitated. Such devices can be made at home, using cheap components from a hardware store.
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This month we look at hypothetical particles, Cryopegs, RNA-based therapies, Breakthrough Listen and more. We also have a fun slime DIY section. We also delve into an emerging science known as optogenics which can pave way for new treatments for multiple disorders.
Musk announces Neuralink plans
Elon Musk has revealed more details about Neuralink, a company that intends to create brain computer interfaces, with the ultimate goal of merging humanity with AI. The company intends to start with neural implants that will help paralysed people control devices such as computers and smartphones. https://dgit.in/nrlnk
How mosquito brains work
Carbon dioxide exhaled by humans and other animals are a trigger, which activates the visual centers of the mosquito brain. The mosquito begins to scan the surroundings for shapes that could match the target, or the source of carbon dioxide, and begins flying towards it. https://dgit.in/mosbrn
In a new study, Caltech scientist Jack Beauchamp described the use of acoustic levitation to study the chemistry of skin cancer drugs. Beauchamp calls the approach “lab-in-a-drop”. A 1mm water droplet was coated with lipids. When introduced to
The “Unknown Pleasures” Pulsar
Astronomers observed PSR B1919+21 on the anniversary of the Joy Division album. When first released, little was known about pulsars. Changes in the brightness of radio flashes were thought to be chaotic. Scientists can now see periodic waxing and waning of the brightness of some pulsars. https://dgit.in/jdpsr
the suspended water droplet, the lipids rose to the surface to form a thin membrane around the drop. The drug Temoporfin was introduced to the suspended droplet. When excited with a red laser light, Temoporfin destroys molecules it comes in contact with. In potential skin cancer treatments, a laser can be shone on the affected areas, to selectively eliminate the cancerous tissue. https://dgit.in/auclev
Hubble discovers erratic black hole
The Hubble Space telescope found a disk around a black hole that shouldn’t be where it is. The disk is very close to the supermassive black hole, and lets scientists take a peek at the interesting physics in the accretion disk, where particles travel at relativistic speeds. https://dgit.in/hblbh www.digit.in | August 2019 | Digit | 65
sci
Mining in space
Apollo astronauts dealt with customs
A new investigation on the ISS tests BioRock, extraterrestrial biomining by harnessing the power of microbes. https://dgit.in/aug19-20
SPACE AGE
Apollo 11 astronauts had to deal with customs after returning from the first Moon mission 50 years ago. https://dgit.in/aug19-19
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Breakthrough Listen is an ambitious project spanning 10 years to use the most powerful astronomical instruments and computers for one purpose - finding signs of intelligent life in our stellar neighbourhood. Aditya Madanapalle | aditya@digit.in
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reakthrough Listen is the biggest ongoing SETI project, and is using a number of astronomical instruments over a period of ten years to detect for signs of advanced extraterrestrial civilisations. There is an ongoing radio and optical survey of 1,000,000 million stars closest to the Earth, the galactic plane of the Milky Way and the 100 nearest galaxies for signs of technologies deployed by advanced civilisations, also known as technosignatures.
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Breakthrough Listen was co-founded by Stephen Hawking collaborates with a number of observatories around the world, including the Jodrell Bank Observatory, the Green Bank telescope and the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope. Apart from looking for technosignatures, the initiative also contributes to finding exoplanets, detecting fast radio bursts and studying interesting objects such as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Oumuamua.
FAST RADIO BURSTS Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are radio pulses that last anywhere between a
The VLT
fraction of a millisecond all the way to a few milliseconds. Within this short period of time, FRBs release as much energy as the Sun does in an entire day. FRBs are made up of extremely high-energy radio waves, and are relatively new to science. The first FRB was observed only in the year 2007. Since then, several additional FRBs have also been detected. The process behind this and the exact sources of these FRBs are not yet fully understood. All the known FRBs are extragalactic in origin. Possible explanations for FRBs include cataclysmic deaths of the sources, neutron stars that are spinning at incredible speeds, a neutron star adjacent to a supermassive black hole, or advanced extraterrestrials using directed energy beams to power up their spacecraft. In 2015, a FRB was known to repeat, ruling out the destruction of the source explanation, at least for the repeating source.
Credit: ESO
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How Black Holes shape galaxies
LightSail 2 has been deployed
New data has revealed how supermassive black holes shape galaxies with strong winds . https://dgit.in/aug19-01
FEATURE
The spacecraft by Planetary Society will harness the energy of the sun to change its orbit around Earth. https://dgit.in/aug19-02
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A simulation of a what a miniature black hole decay event would look like within the ATLAS experiment at the LHC
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PARTICLES We have discovered the Higgs Boson, what is next?
Aditya Madanapalle | aditya@digit.in
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he discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 was the final piece of the puzzle in the Standard Model, the theory that is widely accepted to explain almost everything we understand about the physical universe. The Standard Model predicted the existence of such a particle, but
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without confirmation of its existence, researchers had to come up with an explanation for why the particle did not exist. When announcing the discovery, CERN physicists made it clear that the discovered particle could only be the lightest of a family of Higgs Bosons, and that there might be other particles to be found, that cannot be fully explained by the Standard Model. After discovering the expected particles in the Standard Model, researchers are now looking at physics beyond the Standard Model. High energy particle physicists are now in the process of hunting for exotic particles that do not fit in the Standard Model, perhaps paving the way for a more fundamental understanding of nature. These searches are guided by
simulations based on models other than the Standard Model, which give an idea to the scientists on what kind of interactions to expect within the particle accelerators. As the search involves combing through mountains (or petabytes) of data on various collisions events, there are already some candidates identified for some of the exotic particles hypothesised to exist. Within these events, researchers may even find particles that no current theories or models have anticipated. These experiments may one day help answer questions that science cannot at this point of time, such as: Why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe? What makes up dark matter? Why does the Higgs Boson weigh as much as it does? Are there more than
Credit: CERN
HYPOTHETICAL
WHAT’S NEW
Capuchin monkeys are in the stone age
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used by the capuchin monkeys, provides insight into the stone tool used by humans and other species of the homo genus. The stone tools can guide researchers on what kind of stones to look for when investigating the oldest archeological sites for human tool use. The capuchin monkeys are not the only primate species to use stone tools. Others, such as the macaques chimpanzees use stone hammers to crack open nuts. https://dgit.in/capusa
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esearchers have found an archeological record of stone tool use in capuchin monkeys from Brazil. The record goes back 3,000 years, indicating that these monkeys have been in their stone age for that long. The sizes of the stone tools have changed over time, indicating that the monkeys had been adapting to accessing different kinds of food. It is unknown why the diet changed, maybe the groups of monkeys in the site had different tastes, or there were changes in the local flora. The monkeys also accidentally create flakes from the stones during their hammering. Ancient humans used to deliberately create such flakes, and use the flakes for cutting and scraping. Studying the stone tools
Regulating tech giants makes them stronger
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pple, Google, Facebook and Amazon have grown so big, that regulators see them as companies that will dominate the technology landscape for a long time. Regulations coming in place would require these companies to police their users, make sure there are no copyright violations, and ensure their privacy. These are powers that were traditionally assumed by the state. The introduction of new regulations will be expensive for most smaller com-
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We take you down the Hero’s Journey, or the monomyth featuring famous characters from pop culture and we share some SFW porn. We also give you our reviews for a latest film, streaming series, comic and anime.
The changing human skeleton
Modern life is changing human skeletons, and researchers can almost see it happening in front of their eyes. The bases of skulls are developing support structures for prolonged smartphone use. Because of a more sedentary lifestyle, our skeletons are becoming fragile, and our elbows are shrinking. Because of an increase in soft foods, our jaws are becoming weaker. https://dgit.in/aistudy
Uber’s road to perdition
Uber has grown aggressively, but has never made a profit. The idea was to become a monopoly, then take in the profit. Uber has not achieved the status of platforms such as Facebook or Amazon. Uber has not yet reduced the cost or improved the productivity of taxi services. https://dgit.in/uberdes
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panies to comply, which leaves only the biggest tech companies. As a consequence, the smaller companies trying to get a piece of the cake will face an unfair disadvantage. The recent spate of regulations have only worked
The invention of the bicycle
The bicycle is a pretty simple machine, and a vital one for mobility. Why did it take so long for the bicycle to be invented? While there are many contributing factors, the main reasons were that the design was not obvious, neither were the materials needed, and it had to be economically viable. https://dgit.in/bykhistry
to consolidate the power of these companies, which have implications for privacy, free speech and safety of the users. The regulations imposed by the EU and the US have in effect, given a license to these companies to continue to dominate the market. The problem arises because the regulations have to keep up with the advancement in tech, and no one really has experience in breaking up a technology monopoly. https://dgit.in/regtec
AI-driven discoveries
An AI trained to go through scientific papers made connections that were missed by scientists. The AI came up with new materials for heating and cooling. Another test, allowed the AI to come up with a discovery that had been made by humans in 2012. The approach is used in a number of fields. https://dgit.in/skelegro
DGT DESIRE
Super FlashCharge 120W
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fter creating an artificial brain, IBM have now moved on to another body part, the tongue. They have created an AI assisted tongue called the e-tongue. This is a portable device which is equipped with sensors that allow it to “taste” and identify liquids. The advantage is that since it’s not actually a human tongue, it can be used to distinguish liquids we wouldn’t dare bring our tongues close to. The tongue is made up of a sensor array that uses pattern matching tech improved upon by
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he Super FlashCharge 120W technology developed by Chinese phone manufacturer, Vivo, takes only five minutes to charge a 4000mAh phone battery to 50%. Prior to this, Huawei had showcased the Mate X’s 55-watt fast charging which took just 30 minutes to charge a phone from 0 to 85% but this new tech from Vivo blows that out of the park. The Super FlashCharge can fully charge a 4000mAh phone from 0% to 100% in just 13 minutes. Vivo uses a 120W travel charger and a customised Type-C data cable for its fast charger. Vivo’s fast charger also trumps Xiaomi’s new 100W charging technology, which claimed to be able to charge a 4000mAh battery in just 17 minutes. However, neither company’s fast chargers are out in the market yet. There’s also the chance that the companies are trying to figure out the long term effects with such fast chargers. It’s well known that fast charging can deteriorate the battery of a phone, significantly dropping their capacity. At these speeds, that deterioration will also probably be accelerated. We might not see this tech until a solution has been found, but we still can’t wait to actually see our phones batteries zooming to full.
IBM e-tongue
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machine learning to figure out the composition of the liquid. Once it has gathered data on a liquid, it matches that data to different liquids already existing in its data set. The e-tongue has been able to successfully distinguish between different brands of bottled water and replicate these results consistently. For now, IBM Research say the goal is to grow the database of liquids. This way, the e-tongue can be modified depending on use case. There are a wide variety of possible uses for the e-tongue, from the culinary industry to the health industry. While it’s great that it can help provide better healthcare, it’s still weird thinking about using an e-tongue to sample urine.
Lightyear One
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here should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that electric is the way to go. Anything that doesn’t make use of fossil fuels is a step in the right direction for us and the environment. Electric cars, however, still rely on the grid for power. And as we know, grids aren’t always powered by clean sources. This won’t be an issue with the Lightyear One prototype. The Lightyear One is a car that collects the power it needs to run directly from the sun. The prototype is the creation of Lightyear, a startup based in the Netherlands, and was born under the name Stella. Lightyear One, then Stella, even won the Crunchie award in 2015, but has come a long way in the four years since. Lightyear One now looks pretty much road-ready. The Lightyear One works by having the battery gather energy via the solar cells embedded in 16 sq feet of the car’s safety glass on the roof. If it’s not a particularly sunny day, don’t worry, it can
be charged from regular outlets as well. Another thing that makes the Lightyear One standout is its range. The One boasts a range of a whopping 450 miles on a single charge. For a solar powered car that’s a first. It also indicates that the car should hopefully be ready for the consumer market. According to Lightyear, production for the One won’t start until 2021, but that hasn’t stopped people from buying it already. The startup claims that “over a hundred vehicles” have already been sold. Reservations for the electric solar-powered car do cost a whopping $136,000 USD though. www.digit.in | August 2019 | Digit | 85
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