22 August 2020 | New Scientist | 13CybersecurityA FORM of magnetic levitation
can separate living and dead cells
without altering or damaging them
in any way. The process could be
used for everything from drug
discovery to tissue engineering.
Cells normally sink to the bottom
of the fluid they are in. Gozde
Durmus at Stanford University in
California and her colleagues have
developed a way of “levitating”
them by using magnetism.“Everything on Earth is
magnetic,” says Durmus. Her
team puts cells in a fluid containing
ions of the rare earth metal
gadolinium, which is weakly
magnetic, or paramagnetic. This
form of gadolinium is non-toxic,
and is injected into people to
improve contrast in MRI images.
The fluid is then put inside a glass
tube with cheap, simple magnets
above and below it. The end result
is an upward magnetic force on
the cells that opposes gravity,
so they float in the tube at a level
that depends on their density.
“It’s pretty simple to do,” saysDurmus, who first described the
technique in 2015 and has since
been working on applications.
“Anybody can make these devices.”
In her latest study, Durmus has
shown that this method can be
used to separate living and dead
cells, because the density of cells
increases after death. There are
various ways of doing this already,
such as spinning cells in a
centrifuge, but these existingprocesses damage fragile cells.
Levitation is much gentler, says
Durmus, and allows people to
observe the process as it happens,
because dying cells start sinking
straight away. “We can pretty
much watch cell death in real time,”
she says (bioRxiv, doi.org/d6nr).
The technique could have all
sorts of applications in medicine.
For instance, we could add drugs
and watch to see what levels are
toxic to healthy cells, or required
to kill cancerous cells. It also works
with bacteria, says Durmus, so
could help antibiotic development. ❚HUNDREDS of ambulances in
the UK are still using devices
that run on defunct Windows
operating systems, making them
more vulnerable to cyberattacks.
The WannaCry ransomware that
knocked out computers at dozens
of hospitals in 2017 took advantage
of a similar vulnerability.
According to data obtained
through Freedom of Information
(FOI) requests, North East
Ambulance Service and Yorkshire
Ambulance Service use devices in
their ambulances daily that run
on Windows XP.
About 500 vehicles run by the
Yorkshire Ambulance Service have
a mobile device terminal that
controls a vehicle’s GPS navigation
and deals with status messages,
such as where a patient lives
and the type of emergency.
Some 350 run on Windows XP,
which hasn’t been supported
by Microsoft since April 2014.
Yorkshire Ambulance Service says
it will update these by 15 October.
North East Ambulance Service
runs XP on devices in 550 vehicles.
London Ambulance Service also
said it has five XP devices, but theyaren’t connected to the internet.
New Scientist put in FOI requests
to all the ambulance trusts in
England last year asking whether
devices within each trust ran
on Windows XP, Windows 98
or Windows 95. Only those
mentioned in this article were
using obsolete versions of
Windows and all three declined
to provide additional comment.
“In each dual crewed ambulance
and rapid response vehicle there
is a mobile data terminal, whichis controlled by a third party
company, Terrafix,” said
Yorkshire Ambulance Service
in its FOI response. Terrafix
didn’t respond to New Scientist’s
request for comment.
“Terrafix provides systems to
many ambulances, so is a high-
level potential target for hackers,
cybercriminals and cyberwarfareattacks,” says Ray Walsh at advocacy
group ProPrivacy. “The company
is responsible for systems that
provide the information that first
responders and paramedics
receive while on call,” he says. “If it
were to be hacked, cybercriminals
could potentially get a hold of any
patient data that is provided by
the mobile data terminal in the
ambulance or, worse, interfere
with the vital information that
enables the ambulance to get
to the patient quickly.”
Windows XP no longer gets
security updates. Potential
consequences were seen in 2017,
when the WannaCry ransomwear
attacks took down hundreds
of thousands of computers
worldwide. More than 60 UK
National Health Service trusts
were affected, which prevented
doctors from accessing patient
records and forced the
cancellation of many procedures.
WannaCry exploited computers
that hadn’t been updated with
the latest Windows security
patches or that ran versions
of the operating system that
Microsoft no longer supported. ❚“We could use the technique
to see what levels of
a drug are required
to kill cancerous cells”Physics
Ambulances have data
terminals for getting
patient informationPhee WaterfieldJAMES^WALS
H/ALA
MYNews
Ambulances vulnerable to attack
Some devices in UK ambulances are still relying on an outdated operating system
Magnetic levitation
separates living cells
from the deadMichael Le Page