With a forecast 80 billion connected devices by 2025, the Internet of Things (IoT) is set to transform the way business operates. From AI to VR and the IoT, technology is already having a marked impact on the way businesses maximise profit, improve efficiency and operate. Virtual reality is set to change the way we train our workforces. It enables trainers to deliver learning in an interesting and interactive way. They can present large amounts of complex information visually, to aid learning and help students retain information.

A viral app that added Asian, Black, Caucasian and Indian filters to people's selfies has removed them after being accused of racism. The update which launched yesterday was met with backlash - with many people criticising it for propagating racial stereotypes. The filters drew comparison with'blackface' and'yellowface' - when white people wear make up to appear to be from a different ethnic group. The filters drew comparison with'blackface' and'yellowface' - when white people wear make up to appear to be from a different ethnic group. The app uses Artificial Intelligence to transform faces.

Reports of satellite navigation problems in the Black Sea suggest that Russia may be testing a new system for spoofing GPS, New Scientist has learned. This could be the first hint of a new form of electronic warfare available to everyone from rogue nation states to petty criminals. On 22 June, the US Maritime Administration filed a seemingly bland incident report. The master of a ship off the Russian port of Novorossiysk had discovered his GPS put him in the wrong spot – more than 32 kilometres inland, at Gelendzhik Airport. After checking the navigation equipment was working properly, the captain contacted other nearby ships. Their AIS traces – signals from the automatic identification system used to track vessels – placed them all at the same airport.

In science news around the world, the next target for Pluto-observing spacecraft New Horizons might be two objects rather than just one, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sends a letter warning of regulatory violations to the fertility specialist who created the first baby using controversial mitochondrial replacement therapy, Berlin scientists learn that sick squirrels in the city have a new form of poxvirus, Italy and France both make some vaccines mandatory for school-age children, and more. Also, a Chinese biologist whose team last week retracted a high-profile paper on a gene-editing technology defends his work.

A resident of the Silver Wing Social Care elderly care home in Tokyo's Chuo Ward chats happily to a staff member in the facility's communal area, while in a nearby room another senior is being helped by a rehabilitation specialist to walk again after a fall last month. These workers never take a day off, never complain and don't need to be paid, for they are robots. Silver Wing Social Care provides a glimpse into the future of Japan and indeed other industrialised nations as they follow its path to ageing societies and labour shortages. The company's flagship care facility began using robots to help care for residents four years ago after being selected by the city government as a test project. Japan is entering uncharted territory for a modern economy. A consistently low birth rate has shrunk the working-age population by around 10 million since its mid-1990s peak, with another 20 million set to disappear from workplaces in the coming decades.

Supply chain functions are moving towards automation and integration. For instance, take the use of cloud computing, robotics and artificial intelligence in improving productivity and customer service. In fact, not a single day goes by when we don't come across headlines about the shipping and logistics industry, like Clearpath or DHL, developing drones and warehouse robots or Uber's efforts to create autonomous vehicles. We could not have fantasized such technological advancements last century. But for all of the pervasiveness and advantages attached to the Internet of Things (IoT), it is observed that IoT actually makes supply chain systems more vulnerable to cyber-attacks and other exploits.

Data released by West Midlands Fire Service appears to show the city of Birmingham has too many fire stations, with 15 compared with neighbouring Solihull's two. The service's online map of attendance times shows many parts of Solihull, a suburban and rural area, have to wait much longer for firefighters to arrive. Even on the basis of relative population sizes, Solihull looks under-served. You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid.

As Amazon's gadgets seem to go from strength to strength, I sat down with David Limp, the senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon, to learn about the Alexa's next steps and the company's future plans. However, since one of the big successes of the company's devices division has been the Kindle ebook reader, I began by asking David Limp about that. "We've just got done with another Prime Day, which was a record day. On Kindle, which is coming up on its 10-year anniversary this November, a big milestone for us, it was the best-selling day in the history of Kindle. So, 10 years and you know if you were to listen to the pundits talk, they say nobody's buying readers anymore. But I can assure you lots of people are. And we're really excited that people still love dedicated readers and we're going to continue inventing there."

To an untrained AI, the world is a blur of confusing data streams. Most humans have no problem making sense of the sights and sounds around them, but algorithms tend only to acquire this skill if those sights and sounds are explicitly labelled for them. Now DeepMind has developed an AI that teaches itself to recognise a range of visual and audio concepts just by watching tiny snippets of video. This AI can grasp the concept of lawn mowing or tickling, for example, but it hasn't been taught the words to describe what it's hearing or seeing. "We want to build machines that continuously learn about their environment in an autonomous manner," says Pulkit Agrawal at the University of California, Berkeley.

When my wife and I became parents, the most important weapon in our childcare arsenal was an A5-size notebook. In this mighty tome we wrote out every single data point relating to our new baby, from the quantity of milk she drank and duration of sleep through to the volume of excreta. It was, after all, only with this information that we were able, in our sleep-deprived and confused state, to coordinate how to meet her needs. Devices like Nanit's artificially intelligent baby monitor are designed to outsource much of that brainwork. It's a $349 night-vision camera that hangs over a cot, using computer vision and deep learning to monitor your little one's sleep. The little gadget is relatively small, but it packs a microphone, speaker, camera, nightlight and temperature sensor inside its body.