News

Istanbul Fights Disease-Carrying Mosquitoes Using A Smartphone App

There are approximately 190,000 mosquito habitats in Istanbul, and 80% of them wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for humans creating ideal breeding conditions.

Published

9 months ago

April 22, 2021

Joanna

istanbul fights disease carrying mosquitoes using a smartphone app

Unsplash

With the world’s attention focused on the still ongoing coronavirus pandemic, it’s easy to forget that there are many other serious health problems affecting the lives of people around the world. Istanbul is one of the countless cities that have been invaded by disease-carrying mosquitoes, and the city’s civic body has recently decided to solve this problem using modern technology.

More specifically, the Istanbul Municipality has released a smartphone app whose purpose is to identify different mosquito species in the city and create a real-time map showing their location. The gathered information will allow city officials to take appropriate actions in order to stop, or at least slow down, the spread of mosquitoes in the city of hundred names.

The biggest challenge is the fact that not all Istanbul residents own high-end smartphones with high-resolution cameras capable of taking detailed pictures of tiny mosquitoes, especially under poor lighting conditions. That said, even less-than-ideal pictures can help officials map out the general presence of mosquitoes in Istanbul, which can go a long way in tackling the infestation.

Önder Yüksel Eryiğit, a senior municipal official, said that there are approximately 190,000 mosquito habitats in Istanbul, and 80 percent of them wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for humans creating ideal breeding conditions for mosquitoes.

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Academics have warned the Istanbul Municipality about the possibility of mosquitoes infected with Zika and West Nile viruses already making the city their new home. To prevent a deadly outbreak of these and other infectious diseases, it’s important to act quickly and avoid letting the problem get out of hand.

This certainly isn’t the first application of mobile apps in the Middle East for the purposes of solving pressing healthcare issues, and it’s safe to say that it won’t be the last. For example, during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, a group of 16 technology enthusiasts from Turkey developed a contact-tracing app to instantly alert users who had contact with infected people.

News

Samsung’s New Exynos 2200 Smartphone Chip Comes With AMD Xclipse GPU

The new GPU will enable next-level mobile gaming experiences, support 200 MP camera sensors, and ensure smooth performance under all circumstances.

Published

2 days ago

January 21, 2022

David

samsung's new exynos 2200 smartphone chip comes with amd xclipse gpu

Samsung’s Exynos smartphone series of ARM-based system-on-chips (SoCs) traditionally comes with Mali GPUs, but the company’s new premium SoC is breaking this tradition by featuring an Xclipse GPU with AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture.

The new GPU, together with 8 Armv9 CPU cores (1 powerful Cortex-X2 core, 3 balanced Cortex-A710 cores, and 4 efficient Cortex-A510 cores) and an upgraded neural processing unit (NPU), are supposed to enable next-level mobile gaming experiences, support camera sensors with a resolution of up to 200 MP, and generally ensure smooth performance under all circumstances.

“Built on the most advanced 4-nanometer (nm) EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) process, and combined with cutting-edge mobile, GPU and NPU technology, Samsung has crafted the Exynos 2200 to provide the finest experience for smartphone users” said Yongin Park, President of System LSI Business at Samsung Electronics.

Samsung named its new GPU “Xclipse” to reflect the fact that it’s positioned between console and traditional mobile graphic processors. The South Korean conglomerate believes that the GPU will bring an end to the old era of mobile gaming and usher in a new era characterized by features that have until now been associated primarily with PC gaming, such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing and variable rate shading.

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According to David Wang, Senior Vice President of Radeon Technologies Group at AMD, the Xclipse GPU is the first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos SoCs, so fans of Samsung smartphones have a lot to look forward to in the future.

In addition to the already mentioned performance-oriented improvements, the Exynos 2200 integrates a better 5G modem capable of achieving speeds of up to 10 Gbps by utilizing both 4G LTE and 5G NR signals at the same time. The SoC’s Integrated Secure Element (iSE) can safely store cryptographic information for enhanced data security and privacy.

The Exynos 2200 is currently being mass-produced, and it’s expected that it will be one of the main selling points of the upcoming Galaxy S22 smartphone.