One day, hospital patients might be able to ingest tiny robots that deliver drugs directly to diseased tissue, thanks to research being carried out at EPFL and ETH Zurich.
A group of scientists led by Selman Sakar at EPFL and Bradley Nelson at ETH Zurich drew inspiration from bacteria to design smart, highly flexible biocompatible micro-robots. Because these devices are able to swim through fluids and modify their shape when needed, they can pass through narrow blood vessels and intricate systems without compromising on speed or maneuverability. They are made of hydrogel nanocomposites that contain magnetic nanoparticles, allowing them to be controlled via an electromagnetic field.
In an article appearing in Science Advances, the scientists describe a method for programming the robot’s shape so that it can easily travel through fluids that are dense, viscous or moving at rapid speeds.
Embodied intelligence
Fabricating miniaturized robots presents a host of challenges, which the scientists addressed using an origami-based folding method. Their novel locomotion strategy employs embodied intelligence, which is an alternative to the classical computation paradigm that is performed by embedded electronic systems. “Our robots have a special composition and structure that allows them to adapt to the characteristics of the fluid they are moving through. For instance, if they encounter a change in viscosity or osmotic concentration, they modify their shape to maintain their speed and maneuverability without losing control of the direction of motion,” says Sakar.
WPML (or WP MultiLingual), the most popular WordPress plugin for translating and serving WordPress sites in multiple languages.
According to its website, WPML has over 600,000 paying customers and is one of the very few WordPress plugins that is so reputable that it doesn’t need to advertise itself with a free version on the official WordPress.org plugins repository.
But on Saturday, ET timezone, the plugin faced its first major security incident since its launch in 2007.
The attacker, which the WPML team claims is a former employee, sent out a mass email to all the plugin’s customers. In the email, the attacker claimed he was a security researcher who reported several vulnerabilities to the WPML team, which were ignored. The email[1, 2, 3, 4, 5] urged customers to check their sites for possible compromises.
But the WPML team vehemently disputed these claims. Both on Twitter[1, 2] and in a follow-up mass email, the WPML team said the hacker is a former employee who left a backdoor on its official website and used it to gain access to its server and its customer database.
WPML claims the hacker used the email addresses and customer names he took from the website’s database to send the mass email, but he also used the backdoor to deface its website, leaving the email’s text as a blog post on its site [archived version here].
Developers said the former employee didn’t get access to financial information, as they don’t store this kind of details, but they didn’t rule that he could now log into customers’ WPML.org accounts as a result of compromising the site’s database.
The company says it’s now rebuilding its server from scratch to remove the backdoor and resetting all customer account passwords as a precaution.
The WPML team also said the hacker didn’t gain access to the source code of its official plugin and did not push a malicious version to customers’ sites.
The company and its management weren’t available for additional questions regarding the incident. It is unclear if they reported the employee to authorities at the time of writing. If the company’s claim is true, there is little chance of the former employee escaping jail time.
One of the successful projects will see albatrosses and petrels benefit from further research using ‘bird-borne’ radar devices. Developed by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the attached radars will measure how often tracked wandering albatrosses interact with legal and illegal fishing vessels in the south Atlantic to map the areas and times when birds of different age and sex are most susceptible to bycatch – becoming caught up in fishing nets.
The project’s results will be shared with stakeholders to better target bycatch observer programmes, monitor compliance with bycatch mitigation and highlight the impact of bycatch on seabirds.
The UK is a signatory to the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP), part of the Convention on Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS). This agreement has been extremely successful in substantially reducing levels of seabird bycatch in a number of important fisheries where rates have been reduced to virtually zero from levels that were historically concerning.
Professor Richard Phillips, leader of the Higher Predators and Conservation group at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said:
The British Antarctic Survey is delighted to be awarded this funding from Darwin Plus, which is for a collaboration between BAS and BirdLife International. The project will use a range of technologies – GPS, loggers that record 3-D acceleration and novel radar-detecting tags – to quantify interactions of tracked wandering albatrosses with legal and illegal fishing vessels. The technology will provide much-needed information on the areas and periods of highest bycatch.
