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One of my favourite sci-fi films as a child was the 1966 Raquel Welch movie, , about a miniaturised submarine complete with crew, who zoomed through a patient’s bloodstream to destroy a life-threatening blood clot.
While human shrinking is not on the table, the development of miniature medical robots could yield such huge benefits it is being seriously pursued by research groups around the world.
This month, a team in Beijing revealed a medical micro-robot for delivering drugs to precise locations in the gut. Other groups are building devices for destroying tumours, widening arteries – and dissolving blood clots, a common cause of strokes.
How all over 16s could need ID to use social media
Ofcom has set out its recommendations for the most effective ways to identify which of the UK’s millions of social media users are aged over 16.
What you need to know
Under the UK’s social media ban – which comes into force in March next year – under 16s will be prevented from accessing 10 of the biggest platforms, including Instagram and TikTok.
Many adults are also likely to have to confirm that they are not under-age by using one of the proposed measures,
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Ofcom’s recommendation
Age verification below 18 is difficult, because 16 and 17 year olds don’t have credit cards or full driving licences, and may not have passports.
To address that challenge, Ofcom has recommended four methods that it says would be “highly effective” at gauging people’s ages, in addition to traditional forms of ID.
The four methods
- Photo ID matching, where relevant information on a photo ID is checked against a live image.
- Banking-based checks – using the information on record regarding a user’s age.
- Face age estimation technology, which Ofcom argues has recently improved.
- Digital ID services, which enable people to digitally prove who they are or provide information about themselves, such as their age.
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Why Toblerone owner is suing vegan chocolate brand
The owner of Toblerone is taking legal action against a small British vegan chocolate brand which it claims has been copying the Swiss chocolate bar’s iconic shape.
What you need to know
- Mondelēz has filed papers at the high court accusing Catherine’s Original’s of “passing off” and trademark infringement with its O’bar.
- The O’bar is a length of chocolate divided into segments each with a rounded semi-oval hump.
Catherine’s Originals, founded by Catherine Dodd in 2021, makes its chocolate in Sussex and sells them via markets and online.
- Mondelēz International said: “The iconic Toblerone shape is one of the most recognised and distinctive product designs in the UK and across the world, and has been a hallmark of the brand since 1929.
- “We have a responsibility to protect our trademarks and intellectual property, which we take seriously.”
- The legal battle comes after Poundland was forced to delay the launch of its Twin Peaks bar in 2017 after a legal warning from Mondelēz.
What O’bar founder has said
We stand firmly behind the product and identity we’ve created. We strongly disagree with the claim concerning O’bar and are working with our legal team to defend our position. Honestly, it’s fairly frightening for a small business we’ve put so much care and hard work into building.
catherine dodd
The tax rises Healey didn’t tell you about
In John Healey’s Budget he promised to make Britain “more resilient” to global shocks and pledged to give families a £100m payment to help with energy costs, and offer a tax break for low income pensioners.
But the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has warned living standards will be challenged by higher energy costs and a ballooning tax burden. Here are all the hidden tax rises in Wednesday’s Budget.
Energy bills
The Chancellor announced a series of pledges to curb rising energy costs, promising the beginning of “radical reform”.
This includes a £100 payment towards energy costs for up to 20 million households in council tax bands A to D.
However, these fixed daily charges on gas bills will be shifted onto the price consumers pay for each unit of energy.
Energy bills
The Treasury has claimed that 60 per cent of households will save an average of £45 a year.
But the savings will only come after the big projected rise to energy bills in January. While lower users will gain the most, higher users – which includes large, low-income families – are likely to pay more than they currently do.
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High tax bands for millions
- Millions face being dragged into paying more income tax after the thresholds remained frozen.
- The IFS warned it was a Budget with “very little that will move the dial on growth”.
The effect, known as fiscal drag, occurs when tax thresholds remain frozen while wages rise – meaning people pay more tax as a greater proportion of their income becomes taxable or they are pushed into higher tax bands.
Middle-income pensioners
- Pensioners with income less than the full amount of the new state pension will not have to pay income tax, Healey announced.
- However, middle and higher income pensioners face a squeeze due to related tax rules.
- Healey said that to avoid a “cliff edge” once a pension income exceeds the allowance, the Government would “gradually” reduce the allowance as income increases.
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Middle-income pensioners
- The Government said this means those earning between £13,037 and £13,319 will receive “some Pension Tax Allowance and pay less income tax than you otherwise would”.
- But Sir Steve Webb, former pensions minister, said this means around 200,000 low-income pensioners will face a marginal income tax rate of 53 per cent.
- For each extra pound above the cut-off, they pay 20p in income tax and lose 33p in the tax rebate that those on lower incomes get, he said.
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READ THE FULL STORY HERE
Higher housing costs
The Chancellor announced that the surcharge on bank profits would be temporarily doubled from 3 to 6 per cent and that landlords face a 4 per cent tax on rental profits and property income.
But critics are warning higher costs will be passed onto renters and onto people securing mortgages.
John denies postponing difficult welfare system decisions
John Healey has denied postponing difficult decisions on the welfare system, insisting the Government is making changes “now”.
The Chancellor’s Budget has faced criticism for not dealing with the ballooning cost of welfare, including from Kemi Badenoch, who said the country is “drowning in an out-of-control welfare system”.
What you need to know
- The influential Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank warned the Budget delayed tough decisions.
- Speaking to , Healey said ministers have already brought in a range of measures to cut the cost.
- The Chancellor told BBC Radio 4’s that the Government “can never remove completely the cost of living pressures that people feel”.
Two years ago we started putting back in place face-to-face assessments. We’ve changed terms of universal credit, so people don’t have to brand themselves as too sick to work. So, those are changes we’re making now. But in the long run, as I’ve argued, and the Prime Minister has said, too, we have to bring the cost of down.
healey told gb news
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How much benefit payments will rise by
Benefit claimants will see their payments boosted next year in a move that could cost the Government up to £5.5bn, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).
Some 10 million Britons claiming working-age benefits are set to see a rise of at least 3.5 per cent from next spring, with ministers expected to increase rates in line with inflation.
What to know as ‘error’ blamed for Spain train crash
At least 68 people died and dozens more were injured following a “rear-end collision” between two trains in central Spain.
What happened?
The crash occurred between the towns of Los Yébenes and Urda, in the Toledo province, shortly before 9am local time (8am UK time) on Wednesday.
- A train operated by the state-owned national rail company Renfe carrying 397 passengers, rammed into the back of a stationary train operated by private firm Iryo, carrying 147 people.
- The crash caused at least two carriages to fall down an embankment.
- Former Spanish government minister, Fátima Báñez, was among those killed in the incident, local authorities confirmed.
- Three days of national mourning have now been declared to honour the victims.
What caused the crash?
Spain’s Transport minister Óscar Puente said a computer failure led to the initial halt of six moving trains.
Puente also suggested that the accident may have been caused by human error because one of the trains had been told to resume its journey. He said it was the control centre, through its operators, that made the decision to resume traffic which he said was “inexplicable”.
The story in pictures
What has Spain’s PM said?
The whole of Spain is grieving. Lives have been shattered, families have been torn apart, the pain is immense.
Pedro Sanchez
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Why train crashes are more common in Spain
Earlier this year, a collision between two high-speed trains in southern Spain killed 39 people. But what does the data on Spain’s train crashes say, and which are the safest European railways?
us news
Hayden Panettiere’s death ruled accidental
Police have closed the investigation into Hayden Panettiere’s death after a post-mortem found .
The actress died in August after being found unresponsive in an apartment in the South Carolina city of Greenville.
No signs of foul play
Panettiere’s on-and-off boyfriend Brian Hickerson and his brother Zach were in the property at the time. Paramedics performed CPR and other resuscitation efforts for 40 minutes before declaring her dead.
Officers initially said there did not appear to be any signs of foul play – an assessment backed up by last month’s post-mortem.
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Cause of death revealed
The coroner ruled Panettiere died from the toxic effects of an accidental overdose of several drugs, including the synthetic opioid fentanyl.
The other drugs found in her system were anti-anxiety medicine alprazolam, muscle relaxer methocarbamol, and quetiapine – which can be used to treat depression.
Panettiere had been in rehab a few weeks before death.
While more advanced devices small enough to get through blood vessels are probably at least a decade away from being used on patients, NHS doctors are already deploying a more basic kind of medical micro-robot in the form of a swallowable capsule containing a tiny camera.
The micro-robots already helping to spot cancer
Used to investigate gut problems such as bleeding or pain, the capsules are an alternative to the original approach of pushing a camera on the end of a long thin tube either down the throat or up the bottom, called endoscopy.
A camera on a tube has the advantage that it can be manoeuvred to take a closer look at any suspicious areas. The first generation of camera capsules, by contrast, just move along at the gut’s natural pace, usually exiting into the toilet within a few days.
But more advanced camera capsules can now be manoeuvred, at least within the stomach, using a magnetic steering system. They are used to investigate possible symptoms of stomach ulcers, growths and cancer.
With one such system, called NaviCam, the patient fills their stomach with a large drink of water, then lies on a platform surrounded by magnetic controls. The doctor steers around the tiny device using two joysticks, while watching the camera’s view on a screen, to inspect all of the stomach’s interior.
‘We can put the drug right where we want it’
Magnets have turned out to be the best way to steer many other kinds of medical micro-robots that are at earlier stages of development.
Beijing researchers have developed a smaller device they call a “spiny milli-ball robot”, which is 6.5mm in diameter, and is designed for drug delivery.
At this smaller scale, this robot can be steered around within the more confined space within the lower bowels, not just in the stomach.
The spikey ball goes inside a small capsule for ease of swallowing, which dissolves in the stomach. Once the device reaches the right place in the gut, the spikes mean the device can be magnetically pulled into the gut tissue, when it releases its drug payload.
As a test, the device was successfully used to deliver the drug insulin to the lower intestine of pigs, the Beijing researchers reported this month, in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems.
Precision drug delivery would be useful in a wide range of diseases, says Professor Bradley Nelson, a roboticist at Swiss university ETH Zürich, who was not involved in the Beijing research.
About a third of experimental drugs fail in clinical trials because, although they work at treating the disease, they are too toxic, he says.
But releasing drugs at just the right spot in the body slashes the dose that is needed to be effective, sometimes by a factor of several hundred, thus, solving the toxicity problem. “We can put the drug right where we want it – that’s the promise of delivering drugs with micro-robots,” says Nelson.
Micro-robots have to shrink further still if they are ever to rove through the bloodstream, but that’s what Nelson’s team has achieved. Last year, they showed that their 2-mm-wide micro-robot can be magnetically guided around a pig’s bloodstream.
The surgeon could see the blood vessels, as an X-ray of the “patient” was being carried out at the same time, with the metallic robot standing out clearly on the screen. A PlayStation controller is used for steering. “It’s like playing a video game,” says Nelson.
In a separate test using a silicone model of the brain’s circulatory system, the robot delivered a powerful drug that dissolved a blood clot. It could also potentially be used to treat cancerous tumours or localised infections.
Nelson says the more he talks to surgeons, the more he discovers new potential applications of the micro-robots – the latest being to act as a physical block of the blood supply to aneurysms, weak spots in blood vessels that can burst.
The potential cancer game-changer
When micro-robots get smaller still, they can be used in swarms so they can deliver enough of any medication, says Dr Ali Kafash Hoshiar, a roboticist at the University of Essex.
His group has developed drug-containing devices as small as one-tenth of a millimetre, and even smaller magnetic specks, which are so simple in structure they are more like metallic particles than micro-robots.
These swarms of particles can still do something medically useful, though. If they are steered to surround a cancer, they can be made to heat up, by changing the magnetic field, and destroy the tumour. He has shown this works in mice.
While the swarm approach is quite different to Raquel Welch’s miniature submarine, Hoshia says he was inspired by watching that film as a child. When micro-robots arrive they will make current forms of medicine and surgery look crude by comparison, he says. “ is the dream.”
Alzheimer’s disease gets so much attention it can overshadow vascular dementia, the second most common cause of memory loss in later life. A new view says that vascular dementia is more common than we think, but there are ways to stop it.
Shrines of Gaiety is a change of scene for the celebrated novelist Kate Atkinson. Set in seedy 1920s London, it follows the fortunes of a hardened criminal matriarch, a police detective on the case and a provincial librarian who stumbles into their crossfire.
The characters are portrayed with engaging detail and pacey dialogue. It is also a masterful depiction of London society leaning into hedonism as it recovers from the First World War. Atkinson has triumphed again.