A NASA spaceship is zooming toward the farthest, and quite possibly the oldest, cosmic body ever photographed by humankind, a tiny, distant world called Ultima Thule some four billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away. The US space agency will ring in the New Year with a live online broadcast to mark historic flyby of the mysterious object in a dark and frigid region of space known as the Kuiper Belt at 12:33 am January 1 (0533 GMT Tuesday).

Spanish travel technology firm Amadeus IT Group signed a cooperation protocol with EG Gate portal to provide a range of logistic and digital services in the fields of e-commerce and tourism via its digital platform. The protocol was signed by Khaled Gad, the general manager of AMADEUS Egypt and Minas Ibrahim, CEO and managing director of EG Gate. This cooperation aims to make AMADEUS’s content available on EG GATE’s platform to attract international tourism to Egypt, in addition to promoting Egyptian tour companies’ content on EG GATE’s platform using the latest technological implements, in the tourism and traveling field. It also targets marketing Egyptian tourism globally via a database of 500,000 international tour companies, which cooperate with AMADEUS.

Japan said Wednesday it is withdrawing from the International Whaling Commission and will resume commercial whaling next year, sparking criticism from activists and anti-whaling countries including Australia. The announcement comes after Japan failed earlier this year to convince the IWC to allow it to resume commercial whaling. Top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said the commercial hunts would be limited to Japan’s territorial waters.

weed out inappropriate content. The US internet watchdog Common Sense says the combination of mature content and privacy risks means users should be at least 16. “Because the age limit is so low, you attract a greater assortment of dangerous characters, and users lying about their age,” Solis said.

Leading mobile messaging application WhatsApp told Ahram Online that the company "cares deeply about the safety our users," after being asked about an advertisement it unrolled in a number of Arab media outlets over the past few weeks. WhatsApp has addressed "security and privacy" in a number of full page ads in Arab newspapers, including Egypt s state-run Al-Ahram newspaper and Akhbar Al-Youm and pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat. “WhatsApp cares deeply about the safety of our users and these ads are designed to inform people about ways to protect their account," a WhatsApp spokesperson told Ahram Online on Monday.

The scientific journal Nature published a report saying that Egypt is among the countries with the highest increase in scientific research production in world in 2018, the state-owned al-Ahram newspaper reported on Monday. Emerging economies showed a significant increase in scientific research production for 2018, according to estimates of the publishing services company Clarivate Analytics. Egypt and Pakistan topped the list, where Egypt achieved a rise of 21 percent, while Pakistan’s increase reached 15.9 percent.

The total number of Spotify users reached over 191 million around the world. The company was prompted by the increasing number of internet users and youth under 30-years-old to enter the local market. The app has over 40m songs and 3bn lists. The platform receives revenues through subscriptions and ads. Michael Krause, general manager of Spotify in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), said that the focus on the Egyptian market was due to the growing number of youth under 30-years-old compared to Europe, as well as the increasing number of internet and mobile users.

Facebook Inc (FB.O) said it did not give some companies access to people’s data without their permission, after the New York Times reported on Tuesday that the social network allowed some large technology companies greater access to user data. The paper reported that Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without their consent, citing documents from 2017.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to blast off on Thursday after two canceled launches earlier this week due to last-minute technical problems, but poor weather is looming as a potential problem. The rocket will carry a roughly $500 million global positioning system (GPS) satellite built by Lockheed Martin Corp and is due to take off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral shortly after 9 am local time (1400 GMT).

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google of being biased in favor of opposition Democrats, a day after a report for the Senate revealed Russian agents had used social media in an attempt to sway the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. “Facebook, Twitter and Google are so biased toward the Dems it is ridiculous!” Trump tweeted. “Twitter, in fact, has made it much more difficult for people to join @realDonaldTrump. They have removed many names & greatly slowed the level and speed of increase. They have acknowledged-done NOTHING!”

We have long known that there is life under our feet, but now scientists have actually measured it. Visible only through a microscope, unicellular microbes that live underneath the Earth s surface account for between 15 and 23 billion tons of carbon — that s hundreds of times more than the amount of carbon in all the humans on Earth combined. This new knowledge is the result of a 10-year international collaboration initiative of the Deep Carbon Observatory.

Nations on Sunday struck a deal to breathe life into the landmark 2015 Paris climate treaty after marathon UN talks that failed to match the ambition the world’s most vulnerable countries need to avert dangerous global warming. Delegates from nearly 200 states finalized a common rule book designed to deliver the Paris goals of limiting global temperature rises to well below two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit).

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne is full of spaceship and rocket models. Walls are covered in logos of different space missions and pictures of the Europeans who made it into space. A huge, nearly 10-meter wide model of the International Space Station (ISS) hangs above our heads as we are sitting and waiting for the video call with German astronaut Alexander Gerst. He is the first German Commander of the ISS and has been in space for over than six months now. Eight days from now, he ll return to Earth together with two other astronauts. Just in time for Christmas! With all these models and pictures, the foyer of the DLR feels more like a museum than a conference room. More than a dozen journalists and around 50 employees closely observe the screen hanging under the ISS model waiting for the signal from space. Cameras are ready, questions prepared. The youngest participant of the press conference, a 10-year-old reporter from German TV channel Sat.1 sits in the front row.

Deutsche Welle: Mr. Reichart, transplanting a pig s heart into a baboon for the first time offers hope this might be possible for humans, too. Why are pigs particularly suitable as donor animals? Bruno Reichart: Ethics play an important role here. We ve been eating pigs for a long time, so it s socially acceptable to kill them. Also, pigs produce many offspring in a very short time — every four months — and they are fully grown and sexually mature after six months.

The Egyptian Competition Authority has ordered multinational technology company Apple to end their "anti-competitive practices" in the market, threatening to sue the mammoth corporation if it does not abide by the order within 60 days. In a decision that was published on Monday in the country s official gazette, the ECA said that Apple and its regional distributor Arab Business Machine (ABM) have violated the country s competition laws by banning parallel imports by authorised distributors in Egypt.

Just looking at the two women, you might find it difficult to tell them apart: Lisa and Julia Ngo are identical twins. Yet there is a major difference in their health: Lisa suffers from multiple sclerosis (MS), Julia does not. That made the sisters ideal volunteers for a study at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich into how MS develops. "I want to know where MS comes from," Lisa told DW. Sometimes I ask myself, why did it hit me

China launched a rover early Saturday destined to land on the far side of the moon, a global first that would boost Beijing’s ambitions to become a space superpower, state media said. The Chang’e-4 lunar probe mission — named after the moon goddess in Chinese mythology — launched on a Long March 3B rocket from the southwestern Xichang launch center at 2:23 am (1823 GMT), according to the official Xinhua news agency.

German auto giant Volkswagen will begin rolling out its last generation of combustion engine cars in 2026, in its latest green pledge as it looks to turn the corner on the “dieselgate” emissions cheating scandal. The carmaker, which last month announced a 44 billion euro ($50 billion) electric offensive by 2023, said it would phase out its diesel and petrol cars as it looks to meet the emissions targets of the 2015 Paris climate deal by 2050.

The European Union’s executive proposed on Wednesday spending more money to counter fake news on the Internet, establishing an early warning system to alert governments and pushing tech companies do more to stop disinformation before next year’s EU elections. The European Commission’s plan, which must be agreed by EU leaders, is part of an attempt to stop what the United States, NATO and the EU say are Russian attempts to undermine Western democracies with disinformation campaigns that sow division. Russia has repeatedly denied any such actions.

Australia s two main parties struck a deal Tuesday to pass sweeping cyber laws requiring tech giants to help government agencies get around encrypted communications used by suspected criminals and terrorists. The laws are urgently needed to investigate serious crimes like terrorism and child sex offences, the conservative government said, citing a recent case involving three men accused of plotting attacks who used encrypted messaging applications.

The first manned space mission to the International Space Station since an unprecedented accident in October, which raised concerns about Moscow’s Soviet-designed spacecraft, will launch on Monday. Oleg Kononenko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Anne McClain of NASA and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency brushed aside any possible safety concerns, saying risk was just part of the job.