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Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings has posted a record quarterly profit for the three months to March, sending its shares up more than 5% on Thursday. The firm, which owns the popular messaging app WeChat, posted a 61% year-on-year jump in profit, to 23.29bn yuan ($3.7bn; £2.73bn). Tencent's online games, like the hugely popular Honour of Kings, boosted revenues by 26%. WeChat, which is a bit like WhatsApp, is now China's biggest social network. It is also an important source of revenue for Tencent - though the firm continues to remain reasonably vague on those details in its earnings reports. Where does the money come from? Analysts have said that most of Tencent's revenue growth comes from the gaming apps it owns and the purchases that users make within those games. WeChat is integral to that revenue as Tencent uses the platform as a way of getting those games out to users. Together with its Chinese-only version Weixin, WeChat hit one billion monthl...

Main image: The Moon, photographed with an iPhone. Credit: Jamie Carter We all know about the amazing quality of today’s smartphone cameras, but how often have you pointed one at the night sky? Smartphone astrophotography is not going to match those images from the Hubble Space Telescope, or from a DSLR camera attached to a telescope on an equatorial mount, which follows stars as they appear to move. However, what you can capture with your phone – from close-ups of planets and the craters and mountain range of the Moon to timelapses and star-trails – will astound you. Get ready, Instagram, for some astronomically good phone images. Manual control apps The sensitivity of the sensor in your smartphone's camera may be set, but how you control it is not. While the native camera app on your phone is pretty restrictive, there are a raft of apps that give you manual control of ISO, exposure, shutter speed, and even allow you to capture in raw rather than JPEG. That...

Google recalls this Monday to the Japanese Seiichi Miyake: He originally wanted to help a friend whose eyesight was limited. Meanwhile, his invention is used worldwide. Anyone calling Google's home page in numerous countries this Monday , including Germany, sees the drawn-up close-up of a street instead of the usual logo, some paving stones are grooved, others with pimples - on it stand a person with a cane. Google is reminiscent of the Japanese inventor Seiichi Miyake (1926-1982). The so-called blind guidance system goes back to him; also called guideline system or tactile floor guidance system. These are systems that allow visually impaired or blind people, for example, using a stick safely move in public space: For this purpose in the soil certain indicators are embedded, grooves or pimples. You can see them in everyday life, for example on platforms, at pedestrian lights or in public places. In 1965, Seiichi Miyake invested his own money to develop the tactile plates, ac...