Sony to come up with new toy

Toio will hit the markets on December 1, priced at around 20,000 yen ($180), and will mark the company`s re-entry in the toy industry after a gap of almost 13 years, although its subsidiary Sony Interactive Entertainment has been selling the PlayStation gaming console for a long time. The new toy is made up of two motorised cubes, smaller than a matchbox, paired with ring-shaped remotes. 

The movement sensors in the hands of the users will allow them to control the direction of the cubes at the twist of their wrist. Sony had developed popular toys throughout the 1990s, including the My First Sony Walkman and the robotic dog AIBO, but had exited the sector in 2004 after it stopped manufacturing The Talking Card, a language learning toy. 

While enterprises across the globe are still recuperating from the massive “WannaCry” malware attack, security firm Check Point has warned of a new outbreak that has already infected 250 million computers worldwide, with India among the worst-hit countries. The new threat, Fireball, hijacks browsers to change the default search engine and track their web traffic. 

The firm said it has found that the malware also has the ability to remotely run any code on the victim’s machine or download new malicious files. “A quarter-billion computers could very easily become victims of real malware. It installs a backdoor into all these computers that can be easily exploited,” said Maya Horowitz, head of Check Point research team. 

Check Point estimated that one in five corporate networks globally have at least one infection. “But only a fraction of those victims, around 5.5 million PCs, are in the US. Far worse hit are countries like India and Brazil, with close to 25 million infected machines each,” the firm said.

New AI-based programme can predict patient’s lifespan Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) programme that can predict when a patient is likely to die, simply by looking at images of their organs. 

In the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, the team used artificial intelligence to analyse the medical imaging of 48 patients’ chests. The computer-based analysis was able to predict which patients would die within five years, with 69 per cent accuracy. 

“The accurate assessment of biological age and the prediction of a patient’s longevity has so far been limited by doctors’ inability to look inside the body and measure the health of each organ. Our research has investigated the use of ‘deep learning’, a technique where computer systems can learn how to understand and analyse images,” said lead author Luke Oakden-Rayner, radiologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. 

While the researchers could not identify exactly what the computer system was seeing in the images to make its predictions, the most confident predictions were made for patients with severe chronic diseases such as emphysema and congestive heart failure.