Cybersecurity is full of hard problems, but perhaps none so difficult as securing the supply chain for our electronic devices. That's why the report published this week by Bloomberg about Chinese spies secretly planting microchips in American electronics in order to conduct espionage is so deeply unsettling. There is no way to address the threat of foreign governments compromising our hardware that does not require fundamentally and radically rethinking how we manufacture our devices and lead to more expensive, less ubiquitous electronics at exactly the moment when the internet of things seems to be pushing us in the opposite direction. According to Bloomberg, members of China's People's Liberation Army inserted the compromised microchips during the manufacturing process for motherboards produced by Super Micro Computer Inc., a company based in California. Those compromised motherboards, in turn, found their way to nearly 30 different companies and prompted an ongoing investigation by the U.S. government when the errant microchips were finally discovered by Amazon.

The history of smart motorcycle helmets is a mixed bag, from clip-on heads-up displays to the Skully debacle that ended with a great piece of hardware being cratered by financially irresponsible founders. But technology moves on, and next year a new smart helmet from Jarvish will be vying for the heads of nerdy motorcyclists. The Taiwanese company will be introducing two helmets in the coming year. The first is the $799 Jarvish X, with voice activation and support for Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa. Riders can ask for directions and weather reports, and they can control media playing on their smartphone.

Nintendo is planning an update to the Switch, according to new reports. The new console is likely to arrive next year, the Wall Street Journal said. But beyond that details remain murky. The Switch was first released in March of last year. The new update is being planned for the second half 2019 and could come as soon as the summer, according to the WSJ.

Tech giants including Apple and Amazon have hit back at claims by Bloomberg their servers may have been fitted with tiny microchips placed there by Chinese spies. The chips, which were'not much bigger than a grain of rice,' would have given China unprecedented backdoor access to computers and data, according to Bloomberg. Apple, Amazon and Super Micro, the Chinese motherboard manufacturer believed to have introduced the chips, have all issued statements denying the report. An Apple spokesman strongly denied the report in a statement, saying: 'On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, 'hardware manipulations' or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server. Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident.

In 2018, ice is everywhere. You can make it yourself by putting a tray of water into the freezer. Or you can find one of those special fridges with an in-unit ice machine and wait for the cold stuff to simply plop out into your cup. But ice used to be much, much harder to get your hands on--and in the era before A/C, it was desperately desired. That's why, for much of the 19th century and into the 20th, ice was the cold, hard heart of an international economy called the "frozen water trade."

RENO, Nev., Oct. 04, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via OTC PR WIRE -- China Food and Beverage Company (OTC:CHIF), announced today that its healthcare division in cooperation with Shanghai based, American Medical Care and Insurance (AMC Shanghai) has launched an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software program based on a Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinical Decision Support System (TCM CDSS). The system is an AI assisted diagnosis and treatment cloud platform. In addition, the system integrates various functions such as centralized medical research, analysis and statistics, quantitative calculation, chart analysis, intelligent auxiliary diagnosis, medical record interpretation, and prescription matching. The TCM CDSS Cloud Platform is part of the Company's continued commitment to transform healthcare in China and around the globe. Among the goals of the platform are to keep patients out of hospitals, early detection of life threatening diseases and major clinical research studies of diseases such as diabetes and cardio vascular disease, both of which have reached the epidemic stage in the world's largest country.

Carl Vondrick is a doctoral candidate and researcher at MIT, where he studies computer vision and machine learning. His research focuses include leveraging large-scale data with minimal annotation and its applications to predictive vision and scene understanding. Recently his work has received a lot of media attention, including features in Forbes, Wired, CNN and PopSci, and other media outlets worldwide. As part of his work with MIT CSAIL, Carl built a deep learning vision system for AI to learn and understand human behaviour and interactions, using popular TV shows like The Office, Desperate Housewives, and YouTube videos. The resulting algorithm analyzes videos, then uses what it learns to predict how humans will behave.

O2, the phone network, has broken across the UK. The carrier has been hit by a major outage, according to the monitoring site Down Detector. It is also affecting other companies that uses O2's network, such as Giffgaff. Problems include failure to access data, make or receive calls or send text messages, according to users on Twitter. But it does not appear to be affecting all O2 users, and it is not clear how some people are still able to use their phones.

The Indian government plans to decongest its airports by introducing facial recognition technology next year - a proposal that may once again raise privacy concerns in the South Asian country. India's ministry of civil aviation on Thursday said passengers on domestic flights will be able to choose to use their biometric authentication system and go paperless. "Security will benefit from the ability of the technology to verify the passenger at every checkpoint in a non-intrusive way," ministry secretary Rajiv Nayan Choubey said in a statement. The proposal says passengers would be verified by being photographed at every stage of the check-in process - from entering the airport to proceeding through security and boarding the plane. The India government statement said the biometric technology will be introduced first at Bengaluru and Hyderabad airports by February next year, followed by Kolkata, Varanasi, Pune and Vijayawada by April.

Researchably, a young startup incubated at UC Berkeley, is conducting a pilot with Sanofi in China, using AI to sift through thousands of research studies and surface the most relevant ones to pharma stakeholders. "With Sanofi we're working with a small medical communications team, and they're in charge of every day reviewing 100 to 200 articles on Type 2 diabetes to then inform business units who are working on competitive analysis and also external doctors who are essentially prescribing their drugs about what's going on in their field," COO Mauro Cozzi told MobiHealthNews. "This team of 10 was spending 30 hours a week reviewing all this information, and they were making a lot of mistakes because they were doing it very quickly, so sometimes they would miss a critical paper or they wouldn't send it to the right person. And they were actually not reviewing a lot of information that could have been relevant to them because they didn't have the bandwidth. So they were only looking at 200 papers even though every week there are around 2,000 papers about Type 2 diabetes."