A new, minimalistic £10 phone with features like digital payments and streaming unveiled by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio could help expand internet services to a wider audience in the country. The affordable feature phone, priced at Rs 999 (about £10), can help bridge India’s “digital divide” by introducing 4G internet for the first time to scores of users, experts said. “Reliance Jio’s persistence to bridge the ‘digital divide’ by putting 4G internet-capable phones in hands of 2G feature phone users or first-time users continues!” industry analyst Neil Shah from the research firm Counterpoint said. Jio said in a press release earlier this week that the beta trial for its first million Jio Bharat phones would begin this week on Friday. The low-cost 4G-enabled phone with a 2-inch display comes with a number of pre-installed features. These include mobile payments through the United Payments Interface (UPI) – a form of instant digital payments that are widely used in India – as well as access to Jio’s own on-demand video and music streaming services JioCinema and JioSaavn. The low cost of the new phone may also bring the internet further within the reach of women in households. In low-income households in India, mobile phones remain a shared device with internet access shared on an individual mobile phone, explained digital rights activist Nikhil Pahwa, founder of tech policy analysis website MediaNama. “Typically, there is one person in the household whose mobile phone has internet access because devices are expensive and internet access prices have increased of late,” Mr Pahwa told The Independent. “So, a low-cost device means it will become affordable for low-income households to have more than one handset. This is great for women because typically it is the men in the house that have access to the internet,” he said. Reliance Jio said the phone will also come with a Rs 123 (£1.2) data plan valid for 28 days, offering 14GB of internet access (0.5 GB or 500 MB per day) – a price the company claims is 30 per cent cheaper than plans offered by competitors. This move may lead to other network operators in India such as Bharti Airtel reducing their tariffs too. “Bharti recently raised 2G prices from Rs99 to Rs155 across all circles while Vi [Vodafone Idea] took this in one circle. This disruptive step can halt incremental tariff increases for 2G and help JIO gain share in that segment,” JP Morgan said in a report on Tuesday. Following Jio’s announcement, shares for Bharti Airtel and Vi slipped by 2 to 3 per cent in early trading on Tuesday. The move also brings internet-enabled phones within the reach of the masses, and as more people understand the utility of the internet, it may lead to the further conversion of featurephone users to adopt smartphones, industry experts said. “There are still 250 million mobile phone users in India who remain ‘trapped’ in the 2G era, unable to tap into basic features of the internet at a time when the world stands at the cusp of a 5G revolution,” Reliance Jio Chairman Akash Ambani said. Telecom analyst Tarun Pathak tweeted that the featurephone-to-smartphone conversion in India has slowed down due to some “upgrade barriers”, adding that “Jio Bharat aims to bridge that gap”. Read More India rolls out 5G cellular network for eight cities in ‘step towards new era’ France riots: Aunt of teenager shot dead by police in Paris pleads for violence and looting to end Civil conflict in India’s Manipur threatens food supplies to 100,000 people, warns non-profit

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For centuries we’ve been told that the Moon is made of cheese but now, it turns out, the Earth is more like butter. Or, at least, its inner core is. A new study led by experts at the University of Texas (UT) and collaborators in China found that iron atoms at the very centre of our world move around much more than previously thought, and the implications could be huge. Scientists have long sought to dissect the insides of our planet but it isn’t easy, given that we have no way of directly exploring its core. The deepest hole humans have ever dug – branded the "entrance to hell" – extended an impressive 12,263m (40,230ft) down, but even that doesn’t come close to breaking through the crust to the layers beneath. Still, thanks to techniques like seismic tomography – which analyses how waves of energy travel through different materials during earthquakes – we’ve been able to map out the world’s interior. Now, researchers have used lab experiments and AI algorithms to shed a striking new light on the heart of the planet. "Seismologists have found that the centre of the Earth, called the inner core, is surprisingly soft, kind of like how butter is soft in your kitchen," Youjun Zhang, a Sichuan University professor who co-led the investigation, said in a statement shared with Phys.org. "The big discovery that we've found is that solid iron becomes surprisingly soft deep inside the Earth because its atoms can move much more than we ever imagined. This increased movement makes the inner core less rigid, weaker against shear forces." The findings are significant because they could help explain the role that the inner core plays in generating the world’s magnetic field. They could also help us understand a number of the inner core’s key properties, which have long flummoxed experts. "Now, we know about the fundamental mechanism that will help us with understanding the dynamic processes and evolution of the Earth's inner core," Jung-Fu Lin, one of the study's lead authors, explained. Given that it is impossible for scientists to directly extract specimens from the inner core, Lin and his colleagues recreated it in miniature. They took a small iron plate, shot it with a fast-moving projectile, and collected the resulting temperature, pressure and velocity data, which they then fed into an AI computer model. Using this machine learning system, they were able to scale up the sample iron atoms configuration to mimic the atomic environment within the inner core. At this beefed-up scale, the researchers observed groups of atoms moving about while still maintaining their overall structure. Inner Core iron atom motion model University of Texas This movement could explain why seismic measurements of the inner core reveal an environment that's softer and more malleable than would be expected at such pressures, Prof Zhang explained. Around half of the energy that goes into generating the Earth's magnetic field can be attributed to the inner core, with the rest coming from the outer core, according to the UT team. Thanks to Zhang, Lin and their colleagues, we now have a clearer understanding of the inner core’s machinations at an atomic level, which could help inform how energy and heat are generated at the heart of the planet. This could also shed light on how the inner and outer core work together to generate the Earth’s magnetic field – a key ingredient in making a planet habitable. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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