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Moto G6, Moto G6 Play, Moto G6 Plus to launch today: Here’s how to watch the live stream at 7PM IST

Lenovo-owned Motorola is all set to launch the Moto G6-series smartphones later today. The event is set to take place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and it will kick off at 10:30AM (Brazil local time), which is 7:00PM in India. Motorola will also live stream the event on its Facebook Page here.

The Moto G6-series will include the Moto G6, the Moto G6 Play and the Moto G6 Plus variants. The Moto G6 Play is expected to be an entry-level variant with single camera at the back, whereas the Moto G6 and Moto G6 Plus are expected to feature dual cameras at the back. All three smartphones are expected to come with full-screen displays and 18:9 aspect ratio.

A home button with fingerprint sensor embedded inside it is also expected under the display. In the hardware department, the Moto G6 Play is expected to be powered by a Snapdragon 430 quad-core SoC, and feature a massive 4,000mAh battery.

The Moto G6 is expected to be powered by a Snapdragon 450 octa-core SoC paired with 3GB / 4GB RAM and 32GB / 64GB on board storage. Talking about dual cameras, one is expected to be a 12-megapixel primary sensor along with 5-megapixel secondary sensor to add DSLR-like bokeh effects to your photos. A 16-megapixel front camera is also expected to be in tow.

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Moto G6, Moto G6 Plus show up on retail website, revealing prices

Lastly, the Moto G6 Plus will likely be powered by a Snapdragon 630 or Snapdragon 660 octa-core SoC, with 4GB of RAM and 64GB onboard storage. It is expected to sport the same dual cameras at the back, as the Moto G6. All three smartphones in the Moto G6-series are expected to run Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box.

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Moto G6 Plus, Moto G6 and Moto G6 Play renders show off the phones in various color options

In terms of pricing, the Moto G6 Play is expected to be around $200, which is about Rs 13,000, the Moto G6 around $250, which is about Rs 16,300. There is no word on the pricing of Moto G6 Plus, but with the launch event less than an hour away, we will know more about it when Motorola officially makes the announcement.

[“Source-bgr”]

Watch The Launch: NASA’s TESS Blasts Off From Cape

TESS—NASA’s newest planet-hunter—is now in space.

Sitting atop a Falcon 9 rocket, the robotic probe launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 6:51 PM ET.

So far, there’s not a hitch in sight.

Says Sara Seager, MIT astrophysicist and the mission’s deputy director of science: “This is a wonderful celebration.”

And only the beginning.

TESS—$337 million and about the size of a stacked washer-dryer—will see “almost the entire sky,” says NASA.

And discover more worlds than ever before.

Credit: MIT

Artist impression of NASA’s TESS spacecraft.

During the two-year mission, NASA expects TESS to find perhaps 20,000 exoplanets.

Or more. The Kepler Space Telescope looked at less than one percent of the sky—and detected nearly 5,400 planets (with about 2,700 now confirmed).

But most Kepler planets “are too distant and too dim to do any follow-up observations,” says Jeff Volosin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Instead, TESS will point its four cameras at 200,000 of the brightest, closest stars—30 to 100 times brighter than Kepler’s targets, and “only dozens to hundreds of light-years away,” says Volosin.

In space, that’s close—even though a single light-year equals almost six trillion miles.

Among the thousands of discoveries, NASA hopes to find hundreds of worlds reasonably near the size of Earth.

“Bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune,” says Seager. “These planets are still a big mystery. Are they giant rocky planets? Or water worlds?”

Credit: ESO / M.Kornmesser

Artist impression of a super-Earth.

Don’t expect discoveries within days. Once in space, TESS scientists have to check out the probe. That takes two months.

Says Seager: “You have to wake up one part at a time to make sure everything works, and works together.” Detection announcements will follow, probably in a few more months.

To find a new world, TESS will look for “transits”—eclipse-like events, when a planet passes between its star and the spacecraft.

As that happens, the planet blocks a bit of the star’s light; that dip in the light, minuscule but measurable, tells scientists that something might be there.

But TESS can’t tell if the planets are life-friendly. Discerning those details will be left for future space probes.

That includes NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2020—and ARIEL, a new mission from the European Space Agency, slated for a 2028 liftoff.

TESS, says Giovanna Tinetti, ARIEL’s principal investigator, “will clearly provide most of our exciting targets.”

Webb and ARIEL will analyze the atmospheres of TESS planets, searching for biosignatures—gases that indicate the possibility of life, like oxygen.

“Within the next decade,” says Volosin, “we hope we can identify the potential for life to exist outside our solar system.”

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Chris Meaney

Artist impression. TESS in space.

But as NASA looks ahead, launch day is a time to look back.

Just two decades ago, many astronomers thought exoplanets were nearly nonexistent. Our solar system, with eight major worlds, was believed a quirk.

“Exoplanets were just considered silly,” says Seager. “Twenty years ago, it was insane to search for exoplanets.

“But the line between what’s considered mainstream and what’s considered crazy is constantly shifting.”

And now, TESS has launched. “And now,” says Seager, “it’s so mainstream.”

[“Source-forbes”]

With the launch of TESS, NASA will boost its search for exoplanets

NASA is stepping up its search for planets outside our solar system. Its next exoplanet hunting telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), is due to launch from Cape Canaveral on the evening of April 16.

Following the Kepler space telescope’s discovery of more than 5,000 possible exoplanets since 2009, TESS will continue the galactic census — flagging more planetary candidates for further study.

Astronomers expect TESS to find about 20,000 planets in its first two years in operation, focusing on nearby, bright stars that will be easy for other telescopes to investigate later. About 500 of those expected exoplanets would be less than twice the size of Earth — and therefore may be good places to look for life.

SMALL BUT MIGHTY NASA’s next exoplanet hunting telescope, TESS, is only 1.5 meters tall (shown here with engineers). Its size is partly due to the fact that it was designed to launch on NASA’s small Taurus rocket, but will instead launch on a larger SpaceX Falcon 9 on April 16.

ORBITAL ATK

The TESS mission is “a whole new opening for exoplanet studies,” MIT astronomer Sara Seager, TESS’ deputy science director, said during a news conference describing the upcoming launch.

TESS will be the first NASA science mission launched on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Once in orbit, the spacecraft will trace an unusual, elliptical path between Earth and the moon that will enable it to observe at least 85 percent of the sky — 350 times as much sky as Kepler saw.

Most of the planets found by Kepler orbit stars 1,000 light-years away or farther. TESS will focus on 200,000 stars that are a few hundred light-years away at most, and shine between 30 to 100 times brighter on average than Kepler’s.

The brighter the star, the easier it is to determine its planet’s characteristics, such as its mass and whether it has an atmosphere, Seager says. “Photons are our currency — the more, the better,” she says.

That follow-up will help TESS avoid some of Kepler’s pitfalls. Because Kepler’s stars were so far and so dim, some of its planet candidates were confirmed as actual planets only by statistics rather than by other telescopes. And not all those confirmations may stick. A recent paper posted at arXiv.org showed that Kepler 452b, an Earth-sized planet that orbits a sunlike star at the same distance Earth orbits the sun, may be a mirage (SN: 8/22/15, p. 16). Many of TESS’ planets won’t face the same uncertainty.

COASTING IN SPACE The TESS satellite’s unusual 13.7-day orbit uses the moon’s gravity to stabilize it, so it needs little fuel. During the part of the orbit colored blue, TESS will observe the sky. During the part marked in orange, it will transmit data back to Earth. The gray ring marks the moon’s orbit.

NASA

But the way TESS will search for exoplanets is the same as Kepler: The satellite will watch stars for signs of dimming, which can indicate that a planet is transiting, or crossing in front of, the star. Measuring how much starlight is blocked can tell astronomers the size of the planet.

Once TESS finds a planet, astronomers will need more information to understand its qualities, such as whether it’s rocky or gassy (SN Online: 6/19/17). For that, other telescopes will follow up. Ground-based telescopes will measure the gravitational tug of a planet on its host star to learn the planet’s density, which is a clue to its composition. Astronomers plan to measure masses for at least 50 TESS planets that are smaller than Neptune in the hopes that many of them will have rocky, and therefore potentially habitable, surfaces.

Undiscovered country

Before TESS, most known planets were more than 1,000 light-years away, with a few closer than 30 light-years (a parsec is 3.26 light-years). TESS (orange circles) will fill in the gap. The size of the circles represents how easy the planets are to find.

graph showing where TESS will be able to detect planets

ZACH BERTA-THOMPSON

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, now scheduled to launch in 2020, will then check some of those planets for signs of life (SN: 4/30/16, p. 32).

“This is one of the major questions that TESS is intended to answer: Where will we be pointing Webb?” said the mission’s principal investigator, MIT astronomer George Ricker, at the press conference. Webb will peer at the starlight filtering through planetary atmospheres to try to detect molecules that could be produced by something living on the surface.

It will take a few months for TESS to swing into its regular orbit before it begins collecting data. At that point, it will be able to use the moon’s gravity to stabilize itself for decades in orbit without using extra fuel. The mission is set to last two years, but could continue taking data almost indefinitely.

“TESS is not going to be limited by any expendable or other aspects,” Ricker said. “It will be basically limited by how long NASA has the patience to fund the mission.”

[“Source-sciencenews”]

Restructuring the public school system

The state governments should act as facilitators to the process of school rationalization. Photo: Pradeep Gaur/Mint

Indian public schools are seeing a systemic decline in enrolment, resulting in the massive growth of small and tiny government schools. According to a recent article by economist Geeta Kingdon, 419,000 (40%) of government schools had total enrolment less than 50, and 108,000 schools (10.3%) were “tiny” schools with enrolment of less than 20. Although the Indian public school system has addressed the problem of access, it has failed to withstand competition from private schools. These failures of the public school system call for an overhaul of the structure of schooling in India, especially at a time when the new education policy (NEP) is being drafted by the Kasturirangan committee.

Physical access to neighbourhood schools is now a reality, with 96% of the villages having an elementary school within a radius of 3km. However, physical access does not ensure adequate learning. Ten years of annual survey of education report (Aser) surveys and national achievement surveys by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) have revealed a nationwide learning crisis. The first to exit dysfunctional public schools are those from better socio-economic classes, and the disadvantaged suffer. Studies have revealed that students drop out mainly because schools are not attractive physically and pedagogically. Better learning outcomes need functional schools—not just mere physical access.

The right to education (RTE) Act has defined norms for providing functional access such as pupil-teacher ratio, teacher qualification and infrastructure facilities such as availability of toilets, drinking water, library and playgrounds. However, in addition, we need enough teachers and staff per school, subject teachers in the higher grades, and pedagogical support for the teaching-learning process to make the schools functional.

The complex school organization structure across different levels, such as primary, upper primary and secondary schools, and multiple managements (within government and private) break the continuity in schooling, leading to higher dropout rates. There is no need to have separate primary-only schools when the constitutional mandate is completion of primary and upper-primary classes up to class VIII. With universalization of secondary education on the table, schools from primary to secondary should be integrated and secondary education should integrate vocational education to provide gainful employment.

Composite schools can be created through vertical integration across levels and a consolidation of neighbourhood schools to increase school size, ensure better rationalization of teachers and avoid multi-grade teaching. Consolidation brings efficiency, provides better facilities, trained teachers, more comprehensive curriculum, broader extracurricular activities and diverse social experience.

Many states such, as Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha, Himachal Pradesh and Maharashtra, have attempted to consolidate the schools (under names such as school rationalization, mainstreaming, amalgamation and integration) at the primary and upper-primary levels. Rajasthan has undertaken school mergers on the largest scale. About 17,000 schools were ordered to be merged, out of which 12,944 primary and 1,728 upper-primary ones had been merged as of 2016. However, these attempts have been made without adequate study of the need for consolidation and its impact on children in local communities.

School location decisions have to consider the optimal match of schooling demand with supply in the neighbourhood without compromising functional access. The following guiding principles could be followed for consolidation and restructuring: 1. Create before you destroy—construct a functional school infrastructure and appoint teachers in the consolidated school prior to shutting down schools; 2. No child left behind—school consolidation should not result in denial of access to any child; all possible transportation options should be explored, in case consolidation leads to difficulty in physical access; 3. Consult before consolidation—consolidation must be done with the consent of the community through consultations, and the alternative must include consensus on school location, transportation, etc.; 4. Vertical integration—school consolidation should ensure vertical integration across different levels.

Current norms for neighbourhood limits for schools are at different levels: primary schools within 1km, upper-primary schools within 3km and secondary schools within 5km. A common norm for all levels of schooling, with adequate flexibility to suit local conditions, could ensure vertical integration. Administratively, this requires the merger of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) at the Centre (which the ministry of human resource development is contemplating), and primary and secondary education bodies under the departments of education in states.

The Central and state governments should act as facilitators for consolidation and desist from taking a one-size-fits-all approach. Consolidation should be a local exercise—best decided by local authorities. The state governments should act as facilitators to the process of school rationalization by providing technical and financial support and capacity-building of local authorities.

[“Source-livemint”]