Here is a news article: Iranian hackers infiltrated a small New York dam in 2013 in a previously undisclosed incident, according to The Wall Street Journal.

 ADVERTISEMENT

 Investigators said that the hackers didn’t take control of the system, but were probing its defenses. The White House was alerted when officials initially believed the intrusion occurred at a much larger facility in Oregon.

 The still-classified breach occurred amid a wave of Iranian hacks on U.S. banks and just three years after a computer worm believed to be built by the U.S. and Israel damaged nuclear infrastructure in Iran.

 The incident fits a pattern openly described by U.S. officials who warn that hackers from Russia, Iran and China are testing U.S. critical infrastructure networks for vulnerabilities.

 National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers told lawmakers last fall that China and “one or two” other countries would be able to shut down portions of critical U.S. infrastructure with a cyberattack. Researchers suspect Iran to be on that list.

 In fiscal 2015, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) responded to 295 hacking incidents related to industrial controls, up from 245 the year previous, the Journal reports.

 If hackers moved from grid-mapping to a deliberate attack, the consequences could be devastating. A blackout across 15 states and Washington, D.C., could cost the economy hundreds of billions, raise mortality rates at hospitals and cut the nation’s water supply, according to a recent study.

 Experts say utilities are unprepared to cope with the threat of such an attack. Much of the technology governing industrial systems is outdated and in many cases connected directly to at-risk office networks.

 The U.S. has more than 57,000 industrial-control systems connected to the Internet. The DHS has issued repeated public warnings to utilities that their networks are at risk.

 A top DHS official recently told energy firm executives at a conference that ISIS “is beginning to perpetrate cyberattacks.”

 The incident in New York also raises questions about the murky set of guidelines surrounding cyberwarfare.

 Experts say there are three distinct kinds of cyber intrusions: corporate espionage intended to financially benefit foreign companies, hacks intended to do damage to infrastructure and traditional intelligence-gathering efforts performed by nation states.

 Lawmakers have called for clear standards governing the U.S. response to different incidents, in some cases pressing the intelligence community to create such guidelines.

 “We don’t know what constitutes an act of war, what the appropriate response is, what the line is between crime and warfare,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) said in a House Intelligence Committee hearing in September. ||||| ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Security researcher Brian Wallace was on the trail of hackers who had snatched a California university's housing files when he stumbled into a larger nightmare: Cyberattackers had opened a pathway into the networks running the United States power grid.

 Digital clues pointed to Iranian hackers. And Wallace found that they had already taken passwords, as well as engineering drawings of dozens of power plants, at least one with the title "Mission Critical." The drawings were so detailed that experts say skilled attackers could have used them, along with other tools and malicious code, to knock out electricity flowing to millions of homes.

 Wallace was astonished. But this breach, The Associated Press has found, was not unique.

 About a dozen times in the last decade, sophisticated foreign hackers have gained enough remote access to control the operations networks that keep the lights on, according to top experts who spoke only on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter.

 The public almost never learns the details about these types of attacks — they're rarer but also more intricate and potentially dangerous than data theft. Information about the government's response to these hacks is often protected and sometimes classified; many are never even reported to the government.

 These intrusions have not caused the kind of cascading blackouts that are feared by the intelligence community. But so many attackers have stowed away in the systems that run the U.S. electric grid that experts say they likely have the capability to strike at will.

 And that's what worries Wallace and other cybersecurity experts most.

 "If the geopolitical situation changes and Iran wants to target these facilities, if they have this kind of information it will make it a lot easier," said Robert M. Lee, a former U.S. Air Force cyberwarfare operations officer. "It will also help them stay quiet and stealthy inside."

 In 2012 and 2013, in well-publicized attacks, Russian hackers successfully sent and received encrypted commands to U.S. public utilities and power generators; some private firms concluded this was an effort to position interlopers to act in the event of a political crisis. And the Department of Homeland Security announced about a year ago that a separate hacking campaign, believed by some private firms to have Russian origins, had injected software with malware that allowed the attackers to spy on U.S. energy companies.

 "You want to be stealth," said Lillian Ablon, a cybersecurity expert at the RAND Corporation. "That's the ultimate power, because when you need to do something you are already in place."

 The hackers have gained access to an aging, outdated power system. Many of the substations and equipment that move power across the U.S. are decrepit and were never built with network security in mind; hooking the plants up to the Internet over the last decade has given hackers new backdoors in. Distant wind farms, home solar panels, smart meters and other networked devices must be remotely monitored and controlled, which opens up the broader system to fresh points of attack.

 Hundreds of contractors sell software and equipment to energy companies, and attackers have successfully used those outside companies as a way to get inside networks tied to the grid.

 Attributing attacks is notoriously tricky. Neither U.S. officials nor cybersecurity experts would or could say if the Islamic Republic of Iran was involved in the attack Wallace discovered involving Calpine Corp., a power producer with 82 plants operating in 18 states and Canada.

 Private firms have alleged other recent hacks of networks and machinery tied to the U.S. power grid were carried out by teams from within Russia and China, some with governmental support.

 Even the Islamic State group is trying to hack American power companies, a top Homeland Security official told industry executives in October.

 Homeland Security spokesman SY Lee said that his agency is coordinating efforts to strengthen grid cybersecurity nationwide and to raise awareness about evolving threats to the electric sector through industry trainings and risk assessments. As Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged in an interview, however, "we are not where we need to be" on cybersecurity.

 That's partly because the grid is largely privately owned and has entire sections that fall outside federal regulation, which experts argue leaves the industry poorly defended against a growing universe of hackers seeking to access its networks.

 As Deputy Energy Secretary Elizabeth Sherwood Randall said in a speech earlier this year, "If we don't protect the energy sector, we are putting every other sector of the economy in peril."

 ___

 THE CALPINE BREACH

 The AP looked at the vulnerability of the energy grid as part of a yearlong, AP-Associated Press Media Editors examination of the state of the nation's infrastructure. AP conducted more than 120 interviews and examined dozens of sets of data, government reports and private analyses to gauge whether the industry is prepared to defend against cyberattacks.

 The attack involving Calpine is particularly disturbing because the cyberspies grabbed so much, according to interviews and previously unreported documents.

 Cybersecurity experts say the breach began at least as far back as August 2013, and could still be going on today.

 Calpine spokesman Brett Kerr said the company's information was stolen from a contractor that does business with Calpine. He said the stolen diagrams and passwords were old — some diagrams dated to 2002 — and presented no threat, though some outside experts disagree.

 Kerr would not say whether the configuration of the power plants' operations networks — also valuable information — remained the same as when the intrusion occurred, or whether it was possible the attackers still had a foothold.

 According to the AP investigation, the hackers got:

 —User names and passwords that could be used to connect remotely to Calpine's networks, which were being maintained by a data security company. Even if some of the information was outdated, experts say skilled hackers could have found a way to update the passwords and slip past firewalls to get into the operations network. Eventually, they say, the intruders could shut down generating stations, foul communications networks and possibly cause a blackout near the plants.

 —Detailed engineering drawings of networks and power stations from New York to California — 71 in all — showing the precise location of devices that communicate with gas turbines, boilers and other crucial equipment attackers would need to hack specific plants.

 —Additional diagrams showing how those local plants transmit information back to the company's virtual cloud, knowledge attackers could use to mask their activity. For example, one map shows how information flows from the Agnews power plant in San Jose, California, near the San Francisco 49ers football stadium, to the company headquarters in Houston.

 Wallace first came across the breach while tracking a new strain of noxious software that had been used to steal student housing files at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

 "I saw a mention in our logs that the attackers stored their malware in some FTP servers online," said Wallace, who had recently joined the Irvine, Calif.-based cybersecurity firm Cylance, Inc., fresh out of college. "It wasn't even my job to look into it, but I just thought there had to be something more there."

 Wallace started digging. Soon, he found the FTP servers, typically used to transfer large numbers of files back and forth across the Internet, and the hackers' ill-gotten data — a tranche of more than 19,000 stolen files from thousands of computers across the world, including key documents from Calpine.

 Before Wallace could dive into the files, his first priority was to track where the hackers would strike next — and try to stop them.

 He started staying up nights, often jittery on Red Bull, to reverse-engineer malware. He waited to get pinged that the intruders were at it again.

 Months later, Wallace got the alert: From Internet Protocol addresses in Tehran, the hackers had deployed TinyZbot, a Trojan horse-style of software that the attackers used to gain backdoor access to their targets, log their keystrokes and take screen shots of their information. The hacking group, he would find, included members in the Netherlands, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

 The more he followed their trail, the more nervous Wallace got. According to Cylance, the intruders had launched digital offensives that netted information about Pakistan International Airlines, the Mexican oil giant Pemex, the Israel Institute of Technology and Navy Marine Corps Intranet, a legacy network of the U.S. military. None of the four responded to AP's request for comment.

 Then he discovered evidence of the attackers' most terrifying heist — a folder containing dozens of engineers' diagrams of the Calpine power plants.

 According to multiple sources, the drawings contained user names and passwords that an intruder would need to break through a firewall separating Calpine's communications and operations networks, then move around in the network where the turbines are controlled. The schematics also displayed the locations of devices inside the plants' process control networks that receive information from power-generating equipment. With those details, experts say skilled hackers could have penetrated the operations network and eventually shut down generating stations, possibly causing a blackout.

 Cylance researchers said the intruders stored their stolen goods on seven unencrypted FTP servers requiring no authentication to access details about Calpine's plants. Jumbled in the folders was code that could be used to spread malware to other companies without being traced back to the attackers' computers, as well as handcrafted software designed to mask that the Internet Protocol addresses they were using were in Iran.

 Circumstantial evidence such as snippets of Persian comments in the code helped investigators conclude that Iran was the source of the attacks.

 Calpine didn't know its information had been compromised until it was informed by Cylance, Kerr said.

 Iranian U.N. Mission spokesman Hamid Babaei did not return calls or address questions emailed by AP.

 Cylance notified the FBI, which warned the U.S. energy sector in an unclassified bulletin last December that a group using Iran-based IP addresses had targeted the industry.

 Whether there was any connection between the Iranian government and the individual hackers who Wallace traced — with the usernames parviz, Alireza, Kaj, Salman Ghazikhani and Bahman Mohebbi — is unclear.

 ___

 A 'LUCRATIVE' TARGET

 Cyberattacks designed to steal information are steadily growing in scope and frequency; there have been high-profile hacks of Target, eBay and federal targets such as the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. But assaults on the power grid and other critical infrastructure aim to go a step further.

 Trained, well-funded adversaries can gain control of physical assets — power plants, substations and transmission equipment. With extensive control, they could knock out the electricity vital to daily life and the economy, and endanger the flow of power to mass transportation, military installations and home refrigerators.

 In the summer of 2014, a hacker of unknown origin, using masking software called Tor, took over the controls of a large utility's wind farm, according to a former industry compliance official who reviewed a report that was scrubbed of the utility's name. The hacker then changed an important setting, called the automatic voltage regulator, from "automatic" to "manual," he said.

 That seemingly simple change to any power plant can damage the generator and destabilize parts of the nearby grid if the plant's output is high enough.

 Last year, Homeland Security released several maps that showed a virtual hit list of critical infrastructure, including two substations in the San Francisco Bay area, water and gas pipelines and a refinery. And according to a previously reported study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a coordinated attack on just nine critical power stations could cause a coast-to-coast blackout that could last months, far longer than the one that plunged the Northeast into darkness in 2003.

 "The grid is a tough target, but a lucrative target," said Keith Alexander, the former director of the National Security Agency who now runs a cybersecurity firm. The number of sophisticated attacks is growing, he said. "There is a constant, steady upbeat. I see a rising tide."

 No one claims that it would be easy to bring down the grid. To circumvent companies' security, adversaries must understand the networks well enough to write code that can communicate with tiny computers that control generators and other major equipment. Even then, it's difficult to cause a widespread blackout because the grid is designed to keep electricity flowing when equipment or lines go down, an almost daily occurrence that customers never see.

 Because it would take such expertise to plunge a city or region into darkness, some say threats to the grid are overstated — in particular, by those who get paid to help companies protect their networks. Still, even those who said the risks of cyber threats can be exaggerated agree it is possible for cyberattackers to cause a large-scale blackout.

 And nearly everyone agrees that there are weaknesses that open the door to malefactors.

 Traditional central power stations and transmission systems include equipment that is decades old and physically unable to handle electronic threats. Some run on machines that use software that is so old that malware protections don't exist, such as Windows '95 and FORTRAN, a programming language developed in the 1950s.

 At the Tennessee Valley Authority, a corporation owned by the federal government that powers 9 million households in the southeastern U.S., a former operations security expert said in recent years he saw passwords for some key operating systems stored on sticky notes.

 "Some of the control systems boot off of floppy disks," said Patrick Miller, who has evaluated hydroelectric dam cybersecurity for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers. "Some dams have modeling systems that run on something that looks like a washing machine hooked up to tape spools. It looks like the early NASA stuff that went to the moon."

 The rush to tie smart meters, home programmable thermostats and other smart appliances to the grid also is causing fresh vulnerabilities.

 About 45 percent of homes in the U.S. are hooked up to a smart meter, which measures electricity usage and shares information with the grid. The grid uses that information to adjust output or limit power deliveries to customers during peak hours.

 Those meters are relatively simple by design, mostly to keep their cost low, but their security is flimsy. Some can be hacked by plugging in an adapter that costs $30 on eBay, researchers say.

 FERC recently raised concerns about another area that is not covered by federal cybersecurity rules: contractors that sell energy companies software and equipment. As is evident from the Calpine incident, attackers have used outside companies to pull off hacks against energy companies.

 "We've got these vulnerable systems out there that are old and never had security built into them, and now we're exposing them to a wider audience," said Justin Lowe, a utility cybersecurity expert at PA Consulting Group.

 "That wider audience is getting much more hostile."

 ___

 DEFENDING THE GRID

 The full extent of the attacks on the grid is not public knowledge. A Freedom of Information Act request by the AP for information regarding any FBI investigations of such hacks was not fulfilled. The Department of Justice said that agency kept no record of how often any such cases had been prosecuted.

 The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which oversees the reliability of the electrical sector, collects information about cyber incidents involving utilities and other users, owners, and operators of the bulk power system — but it is scrubbed of identifying information and details are confidential and exempt from disclosure under FOIA.

 Authorities say they take the threat seriously. In response to a FOIA request, Homeland Security said it had helped more than 100 energy and chemical companies improve their cyber defenses, and held both classified and unclassified briefings in June 2013 and late 2014 on threats to companies associated with power grid operations.

 A small DHS team compiles statistics about hacks and vulnerabilities on control systems powering the grid and other public infrastructure, and responds to some attacks. But former federal employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information was sensitive said government red tape kept the team from thoroughly responding to the smaller municipal and rural utilities that most needed their help, and that the statistics overstated the agency's grasp of the problem.

 The companies themselves say they are vigilant — though they caution no fortifications are foolproof.

 Early this year, an operations supervisor in Virginia for a subsidiary of American Electric Power — the nation's largest power grid operator, with operations in 38 states — opened a personal email on a company laptop and unwittingly downloaded a piece of malware called CryptoLocker.

 Known as "ransomware," CryptoLocker is a relatively common type of malware that reaches to outside servers, usually overseas, and downloads encryption instructions that scramble a computer's contents, making them inaccessible to anyone without a specific "key." The malware then moves through a computer — and computer network — and encrypts all the files it can, keeping users from accessing anything.

 In exchange for a fee, the hackers provide the victim a key that allows the files to be unlocked.

 Members of AEP's cyber-security team — housed in the company's Columbus, Ohio, headquarters behind an unmarked door that unlocks with a fingerprint scanner — saw the strange network behavior as soon as it started.

 "When you see this (code) attempting to hit thousands of systems outside of the AEP network, that's a 'holy crap' moment," said Sean Parcel, AEP's lead cyberinvestigator.

 Had CryptoLocker wormed its way into AEP's system, the business and operations networks could have locked up, experts say.

 But Parcel said AEP's cyberteam already had blocked the foreign addresses that the malware needed to reach to start encrypting files, part of a policy of systematically blocking hundreds of Internet Protocol addresses each week to keep employees from inadvertently downloading malicious code.

 AEP said the team remotely isolated and erased the supervisor's computer before its systems were affected.

 Like most big utilities, AEP's power plants, substations and other vital equipment are managed by a network that is separated from the company's business software with layers of authentication, and is not accessible via the Internet. Creating that separation, and making sure that separation is maintained, is among the most important things utilities can do to protect the grid's physical assets.

 But cybersecurity experts say the protective gaps between computer systems that manage utilities' business operations and machines that manage their grids are not always as wide or as unbridgeable as utilities say they are. And even the utilities' own experts, who maintain it would be extraordinarily difficult for a hacker to knock out power to customers, admit there is always a way in.

 "If the motivation is high enough on the attacker side, and they have funding to accomplish their mission," Parcel said, "they will find a way."

 ___

 Jonathan Fahey reported from New York and Columbus, Ohio.

 ___

 The AP National Investigative Team can be reached at investigate@ap.org ||||| Iranian hackers infiltrated the control system of a small dam less than 20 miles from New York City two years ago, sparking concerns that reached to the White House, according to former and current U.S. officials and experts familiar with the previously undisclosed incident.

 The breach came amid attacks by hackers linked to Iran’s government against the websites of U.S. banks, and just a few years after American spies had damaged an Iranian nuclear facility with a sophisticated computer worm called Stuxnet. In October 2012,... ||||| SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Security researcher Brian Wallace was on the trail of hackers who had snatched a California university's housing files when he stumbled into a larger nightmare: Cyberattackers had opened a pathway into the networks running the United States power grid.

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) AND THEREAFTER; THIS STORY MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST OR POSTED ONLINE BEFORE MONDAY, DEC. 21, 2015 AT 3:01 A.M. EST (2201 GMT) -... (Associated Press)

 Digital clues pointed to Iranian hackers. And Wallace found that they had already taken passwords, as well as engineering drawings of dozens of power plants, at least one with the title "Mission Critical." The drawings were so detailed that experts say skilled attackers could have used them, along with other tools and malicious code, to knock out electricity flowing to millions of homes.

 Wallace was astonished. But this breach, The Associated Press has found, was not unique.

 About a dozen times in the last decade, sophisticated foreign hackers have gained enough remote access to control the operations networks that keep the lights on, according to top experts who spoke only on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter.

 The public almost never learns the details about these types of attacks — they're rarer but also more intricate and potentially dangerous than data theft. Information about the government's response to these hacks is often protected and sometimes classified; many are never even reported to the government.

 These intrusions have not caused the kind of cascading blackouts that are feared by the intelligence community. But so many attackers have stowed away in the systems that run the U.S. electric grid that experts say they likely have the capability to strike at will.

 And that's what worries Wallace and other cybersecurity experts most.

 "If the geopolitical situation changes and Iran wants to target these facilities, if they have this kind of information it will make it a lot easier," said Robert M. Lee, a former U.S. Air Force cyberwarfare operations officer. "It will also help them stay quiet and stealthy inside."

 In 2012 and 2013, in well-publicized attacks, Russian hackers successfully sent and received encrypted commands to U.S. public utilities and power generators; some private firms concluded this was an effort to position interlopers to act in the event of a political crisis. And the Department of Homeland Security announced about a year ago that a separate hacking campaign, believed by some private firms to have Russian origins, had injected software with malware that allowed the attackers to spy on U.S. energy companies.

 "You want to be stealth," said Lillian Ablon, a cybersecurity expert at the RAND Corporation. "That's the ultimate power, because when you need to do something you are already in place."

 The hackers have gained access to an aging, outdated power system. Many of the substations and equipment that move power across the U.S. are decrepit and were never built with network security in mind; hooking the plants up to the Internet over the last decade has given hackers new backdoors in. Distant wind farms, home solar panels, smart meters and other networked devices must be remotely monitored and controlled, which opens up the broader system to fresh points of attack.

 Hundreds of contractors sell software and equipment to energy companies, and attackers have successfully used those outside companies as a way to get inside networks tied to the grid.

 Attributing attacks is notoriously tricky. Neither U.S. officials nor cybersecurity experts would or could say if the Islamic Republic of Iran was involved in the attack Wallace discovered involving Calpine Corp., a power producer with 82 plants operating in 18 states and Canada.

 Private firms have alleged other recent hacks of networks and machinery tied to the U.S. power grid were carried out by teams from within Russia and China, some with governmental support.

 Even the Islamic State group is trying to hack American power companies, a top Homeland Security official told industry executives in October.

 Homeland Security spokesman SY Lee said that his agency is coordinating efforts to strengthen grid cybersecurity nationwide and to raise awareness about evolving threats to the electric sector through industry trainings and risk assessments. As Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged in an interview, however, "we are not where we need to be" on cybersecurity.

 That's partly because the grid is largely privately owned and has entire sections that fall outside federal regulation, which experts argue leaves the industry poorly defended against a growing universe of hackers seeking to access its networks.

 As Deputy Energy Secretary Elizabeth Sherwood Randall said in a speech earlier this year, "If we don't protect the energy sector, we are putting every other sector of the economy in peril."

 ___

 THE CALPINE BREACH

 The AP looked at the vulnerability of the energy grid as part of a yearlong, AP-Associated Press Media Editors examination of the state of the nation's infrastructure. AP conducted more than 120 interviews and examined dozens of sets of data, government reports and private analyses to gauge whether the industry is prepared to defend against cyberattacks.

 The attack involving Calpine is particularly disturbing because the cyberspies grabbed so much, according to interviews and previously unreported documents.

 Cybersecurity experts say the breach began at least as far back as August 2013, and could still be going on today.

 Calpine spokesman Brett Kerr said the company's information was stolen from a contractor that does business with Calpine. He said the stolen diagrams and passwords were old — some diagrams dated to 2002 — and presented no threat, though some outside experts disagree.

 Kerr would not say whether the configuration of the power plants' operations networks — also valuable information — remained the same as when the intrusion occurred, or whether it was possible the attackers still had a foothold.

 According to the AP investigation, the hackers got:

 —User names and passwords that could be used to connect remotely to Calpine's networks, which were being maintained by a data security company. Even if some of the information was outdated, experts say skilled hackers could have found a way to update the passwords and slip past firewalls to get into the operations network. Eventually, they say, the intruders could shut down generating stations, foul communications networks and possibly cause a blackout near the plants.

 —Detailed engineering drawings of networks and power stations from New York to California — 71 in all — showing the precise location of devices that communicate with gas turbines, boilers and other crucial equipment attackers would need to hack specific plants.

 —Additional diagrams showing how those local plants transmit information back to the company's virtual cloud, knowledge attackers could use to mask their activity. For example, one map shows how information flows from the Agnews power plant in San Jose, California, near the San Francisco 49ers football stadium, to the company headquarters in Houston.

 Wallace first came across the breach while tracking a new strain of noxious software that had been used to steal student housing files at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

 "I saw a mention in our logs that the attackers stored their malware in some FTP servers online," said Wallace, who had recently joined the Irvine, Calif.-based cybersecurity firm Cylance, Inc., fresh out of college. "It wasn't even my job to look into it, but I just thought there had to be something more there."

 Wallace started digging. Soon, he found the FTP servers, typically used to transfer large numbers of files back and forth across the Internet, and the hackers' ill-gotten data — a tranche of more than 19,000 stolen files from thousands of computers across the world, including key documents from Calpine.

 Before Wallace could dive into the files, his first priority was to track where the hackers would strike next — and try to stop them.

 He started staying up nights, often jittery on Red Bull, to reverse-engineer malware. He waited to get pinged that the intruders were at it again.

 Months later, Wallace got the alert: From Internet Protocol addresses in Tehran, the hackers had deployed TinyZbot, a Trojan horse-style of software that the attackers used to gain backdoor access to their targets, log their keystrokes and take screen shots of their information. The hacking group, he would find, included members in the Netherlands, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

 The more he followed their trail, the more nervous Wallace got. According to Cylance, the intruders had launched digital offensives that netted information about Pakistan International Airlines, the Mexican oil giant Pemex, the Israel Institute of Technology and Navy Marine Corps Intranet, a legacy network of the U.S. military. None of the four responded to AP's request for comment.

 Then he discovered evidence of the attackers' most terrifying heist — a folder containing dozens of engineers' diagrams of the Calpine power plants.

 According to multiple sources, the drawings contained user names and passwords that an intruder would need to break through a firewall separating Calpine's communications and operations networks, then move around in the network where the turbines are controlled. The schematics also displayed the locations of devices inside the plants' process control networks that receive information from power-generating equipment. With those details, experts say skilled hackers could have penetrated the operations network and eventually shut down generating stations, possibly causing a blackout.

 Cylance researchers said the intruders stored their stolen goods on seven unencrypted FTP servers requiring no authentication to access details about Calpine's plants. Jumbled in the folders was code that could be used to spread malware to other companies without being traced back to the attackers' computers, as well as handcrafted software designed to mask that the Internet Protocol addresses they were using were in Iran.

 Circumstantial evidence such as snippets of Persian comments in the code helped investigators conclude that Iran was the source of the attacks.

 Calpine didn't know its information had been compromised until it was informed by Cylance, Kerr said.

 Iranian U.N. Mission spokesman Hamid Babaei did not return calls or address questions emailed by AP.

 Cylance notified the FBI, which warned the U.S. energy sector in an unclassified bulletin last December that a group using Iran-based IP addresses had targeted the industry.

 Whether there was any connection between the Iranian government and the individual hackers who Wallace traced — with the usernames parviz, Alireza, Kaj, Salman Ghazikhani and Bahman Mohebbi — is unclear.

 ___

 A 'LUCRATIVE' TARGET

 Cyberattacks designed to steal information are steadily growing in scope and frequency; there have been high-profile hacks of Target, eBay and federal targets such as the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. But assaults on the power grid and other critical infrastructure aim to go a step further.

 Trained, well-funded adversaries can gain control of physical assets — power plants, substations and transmission equipment. With extensive control, they could knock out the electricity vital to daily life and the economy, and endanger the flow of power to mass transportation, military installations and home refrigerators.

 In the summer of 2014, a hacker of unknown origin, using masking software called Tor, took over the controls of a large utility's wind farm, according to a former industry compliance official who reviewed a report that was scrubbed of the utility's name. The hacker then changed an important setting, called the automatic voltage regulator, from "automatic" to "manual," he said.

 That seemingly simple change to any power plant can damage the generator and destabilize parts of the nearby grid if the plant's output is high enough.

 Last year, Homeland Security released several maps that showed a virtual hit list of critical infrastructure, including two substations in the San Francisco Bay area, water and gas pipelines and a refinery. And according to a previously reported study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a coordinated attack on just nine critical power stations could cause a coast-to-coast blackout that could last months, far longer than the one that plunged the Northeast into darkness in 2003.

 "The grid is a tough target, but a lucrative target," said Keith Alexander, the former director of the National Security Agency who now runs a cybersecurity firm. The number of sophisticated attacks is growing, he said. "There is a constant, steady upbeat. I see a rising tide."

 No one claims that it would be easy to bring down the grid. To circumvent companies' security, adversaries must understand the networks well enough to write code that can communicate with tiny computers that control generators and other major equipment. Even then, it's difficult to cause a widespread blackout because the grid is designed to keep electricity flowing when equipment or lines go down, an almost daily occurrence that customers never see.

 Because it would take such expertise to plunge a city or region into darkness, some say threats to the grid are overstated — in particular, by those who get paid to help companies protect their networks. Still, even those who said the risks of cyber threats can be exaggerated agree it is possible for cyberattackers to cause a large-scale blackout.

 And nearly everyone agrees that there are weaknesses that open the door to malefactors.

 Traditional central power stations and transmission systems include equipment that is decades old and physically unable to handle electronic threats. Some run on machines that use software that is so old that malware protections don't exist, such as Windows '95 and FORTRAN, a programming language developed in the 1950s.

 At the Tennessee Valley Authority, a corporation owned by the federal government that powers 9 million households in the southeastern U.S., a former operations security expert said in recent years he saw passwords for some key operating systems stored on sticky notes.

 "Some of the control systems boot off of floppy disks," said Patrick Miller, who has evaluated hydroelectric dam cybersecurity for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers. "Some dams have modeling systems that run on something that looks like a washing machine hooked up to tape spools. It looks like the early NASA stuff that went to the moon."

 The rush to tie smart meters, home programmable thermostats and other smart appliances to the grid also is causing fresh vulnerabilities.

 About 45 percent of homes in the U.S. are hooked up to a smart meter, which measures electricity usage and shares information with the grid. The grid uses that information to adjust output or limit power deliveries to customers during peak hours.

 Those meters are relatively simple by design, mostly to keep their cost low, but their security is flimsy. Some can be hacked by plugging in an adapter that costs $30 on eBay, researchers say.

 FERC recently raised concerns about another area that is not covered by federal cybersecurity rules: contractors that sell energy companies software and equipment. As is evident from the Calpine incident, attackers have used outside companies to pull off hacks against energy companies.

 "We've got these vulnerable systems out there that are old and never had security built into them, and now we're exposing them to a wider audience," said Justin Lowe, a utility cybersecurity expert at PA Consulting Group.

 "That wider audience is getting much more hostile."

 ___

 DEFENDING THE GRID

 The full extent of the attacks on the grid is not public knowledge. A Freedom of Information Act request by the AP for information regarding any FBI investigations of such hacks was not fulfilled. The Department of Justice said that agency kept no record of how often any such cases had been prosecuted.

 The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which oversees the reliability of the electrical sector, collects information about cyber incidents involving utilities and other users, owners, and operators of the bulk power system — but it is scrubbed of identifying information and details are confidential and exempt from disclosure under FOIA.

 Authorities say they take the threat seriously. In response to a FOIA request, Homeland Security said it had helped more than 100 energy and chemical companies improve their cyber defenses, and held both classified and unclassified briefings in June 2013 and late 2014 on threats to companies associated with power grid operations.

 A small DHS team compiles statistics about hacks and vulnerabilities on control systems powering the grid and other public infrastructure, and responds to some attacks. But former federal employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information was sensitive said government red tape kept the team from thoroughly responding to the smaller municipal and rural utilities that most needed their help, and that the statistics overstated the agency's grasp of the problem.

 The companies themselves say they are vigilant — though they caution no fortifications are foolproof.

 Early this year, an operations supervisor in Virginia for a subsidiary of American Electric Power — the nation's largest power grid operator, with operations in 38 states — opened a personal email on a company laptop and unwittingly downloaded a piece of malware called CryptoLocker.

 Known as "ransomware," CryptoLocker is a relatively common type of malware that reaches to outside servers, usually overseas, and downloads encryption instructions that scramble a computer's contents, making them inaccessible to anyone without a specific "key." The malware then moves through a computer — and computer network — and encrypts all the files it can, keeping users from accessing anything.

 In exchange for a fee, the hackers provide the victim a key that allows the files to be unlocked.

 Members of AEP's cyber-security team — housed in the company's Columbus, Ohio, headquarters behind an unmarked door that unlocks with a fingerprint scanner — saw the strange network behavior as soon as it started.

 "When you see this (code) attempting to hit thousands of systems outside of the AEP network, that's a 'holy crap' moment," said Sean Parcel, AEP's lead cyberinvestigator.

 Had CryptoLocker wormed its way into AEP's system, the business and operations networks could have locked up, experts say.

 But Parcel said AEP's cyberteam already had blocked the foreign addresses that the malware needed to reach to start encrypting files, part of a policy of systematically blocking hundreds of Internet Protocol addresses each week to keep employees from inadvertently downloading malicious code.

 AEP said the team remotely isolated and erased the supervisor's computer before its systems were affected.

 Like most big utilities, AEP's power plants, substations and other vital equipment are managed by a network that is separated from the company's business software with layers of authentication, and is not accessible via the Internet. Creating that separation, and making sure that separation is maintained, is among the most important things utilities can do to protect the grid's physical assets.

 But cybersecurity experts say the protective gaps between computer systems that manage utilities' business operations and machines that manage their grids are not always as wide or as unbridgeable as utilities say they are. And even the utilities' own experts, who maintain it would be extraordinarily difficult for a hacker to knock out power to customers, admit there is always a way in.

 "If the motivation is high enough on the attacker side, and they have funding to accomplish their mission," Parcel said, "they will find a way."

 ___

 Jonathan Fahey reported from New York and Columbus, Ohio.

 ___

 The AP National Investigative Team can be reached at investigate@ap.org |||||
A summary of this is?

– Iranian hackers who targeted American financial institutions two years ago were also apparently curious about a small dam in upstate New York—and officials are worried what this means for the security of US industrial infrastructure overall, the Wall Street Journal reports. The hackers reportedly infiltrated the controls for the facility—IDed by Journal sources as the Bowman Avenue Dam near Rye—in 2013 through a cellular modem, per an unclassified Homeland Security document. And while the interlopers didn't wrest control of the dam, it appears they poked around quite a bit—underscoring how easy it is to break into the more than 57,000 systems for US power grids, pipelines, bridges, and dams, many of which are antiquated and virtually unprotected, the Journal notes. In fact, per a separate AP investigation, "sophisticated foreign hackers" have accessed about a dozen power networks here, attacks that the AP says the US public is rarely informed about. US infrastructure is often run by creaky systems that were previously offline, which kept them relatively safe. But, "against the advice of hacking gurus," as the Journal notes, many companies started connecting their systems to the Internet without adequately securing them. And the number of such hacks has been creeping up since. Per Homeland Security data, over the 12 months ending Sept. 30, it took in and responded to 295 incidents, up from 245 the year before, per the Journal. Possible consequences: hackers causing a flood, explosion, or even bumper-to-bumper traffic, either by accident or intentionally. A Homeland Security official recently told energy execs at a conference that even ISIS "is beginning to perpetrate cyberattacks," per the Hill. In the Bowman Dam incident, the White House was informed because officials initially thought the hack was against Oregon's larger Arthur R. Bowman Dam, per the Journal. (The AP investigation chillingly reveals how hot a target the US power grid has been.)


Article:
The USA leads the world in obesity, but it's far from the only country with a weight problem. (Photo: Mark Lennihan, AP)

 By sheer numbers, the USA handily leads the world in obesity, with 87 million of the world's 671 million obese people — 13% of the total for a country with 5% of the population, a new report says.

 But we are hardly alone in our battle with bulges: Obesity is a growing problem worldwide and, by proportion, is even worse in some other countries, says the study to be published Thursday in the medical journal Lancet. Rates are rising among men, women and children, in rich countries and in poor countries, the report says.

 "It's going up everywhere," says study co-author Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington-Seattle.

 The new 188-country study is the most comprehensive look at obesity worldwide over the past several decades, and it paints a discouraging picture, Murray says: "The most concerning thing is that there's not a single country that has seen a decline in obesity in the past thirty years. … We hoped there would be some examples of success that you could latch onto. But there's a complete lack of success stories in bringing down obesity."

 Obesity is more common in developed countries than in poorer nations, but it is rising in both, the report says. Throughout the world – including in the USA – obesity co-exists with pockets of hunger, Murray says.

 Among the details:

 •The number of overweight or obese individuals worldwide increased from 857 million in 1980 to 2.1 billion in 2013. That's nearly 30% of the world's population, up from about 20%.

 •About one-third of adults in the USA are overweight (with a body mass index of 25 or above), and another third are obese (with a body mass index of 30 or above), as has been reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 •Obesity rates are even higher in some countries, exceeding 50% among men in Tonga and among women in Kuwait, Kiribati, Micronesia, Libya, Qatar, Samoa and Tonga. "Those are extraordinary levels," Murray says.

 •About 22% of girls and 24% of boys in developed countries are overweight or obese. So are 13% of boys and girls in developing countries.

 •In the USA and other developed countries, increases in obesity have slowed; in developing countries, rates are accelerating.

 The new study does not examine causes but lists possibilities, including increased calorie intake, changes in diet composition, decreased physical activity and even changes in the mix of bacteria that live in human guts in the modern world.

 The report notes that population-wide weight gains and income gains generally go hand in hand around the world.

 That seems to support a theory, advanced by another recent study, that a major cause of obesity is that food has become cheap relative to income.

 "It's not just cheaper in terms of money. It's also more accessible and more available all the time in the form of prepackaged junky food that is not necessarily conducive to health," says Roland Sturm, a senior economist at RAND and co-author of that study, published last week in CA: Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

 "It's a good thing that hunger has decreased," Sturm says, "but now we have to deal with another health issue."

 This month, the World Health Organization launched a commission to study rising obesity among children worldwide and suggest solutions. A report is due in early 2015.

 Read or Share this story: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/28/world-obesity-report/9675267/ ||||| Surgeon Dr. Alexandre Lesage examines an obese patient in his office prior to surgery at the Saint Jean d'Angely Hospital, in Saint Jean d'Angley, France in this file photo taken January 24, 2013.

 WASHINGTON Obesity is imposing an increasingly heavy burden on the world's population in rich and poor nations alike, with almost 30 percent of people globally now either obese or overweight - a staggering 2.1 billion in all, researchers said on Wednesday.

 The researchers conducted what they called the most comprehensive assessment to date of one of the pressing public health dilemmas of our time, using data covering 188 nations from 1980 to 2013.

 Nations in the Middle East and North Africa, Central America and the Pacific and Caribbean islands reached staggeringly high obesity rates, the team at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle reported in the Lancet medical journal.

 The biggest obesity rises among women came in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Honduras and Bahrain. Among men, it was in New Zealand, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

 The richest country, the United States, was home to the biggest chunk of the planet's obese population - 13 percent - even though it claims less than 5 percent of its people.

 Obesity is a complex problem fueled by the availability of cheap, fatty, sugary, salty, high-calorie "junk food" and the rise of sedentary lifestyles. It is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke, diabetes, arthritis and certain cancers. Chronic complications of weight kill about 3.4 million adults annually, the U.N. World Health Organization says.

 During the 33 years studied, rates of being obese or overweight soared 28 percent in adults and 47 percent in children. During that span, the number of overweight and obese people rose from 857 million in 1980 to 2.1 billion in 2013.

 That number exceeds the total world population of 1927, when it first hit 2 billion. Earth's population now tops 7 billion.

 The researchers said obesity - once a malady of rich nations - now grips people of all ages, incomes and regions, with not one country succeeding in cutting its obesity rate.

 "Two-thirds of the obese population actually resides in developing countries," said Marie Ng, a global health professor who was one of the researchers.

 The problem was most acute in the Middle East and North Africa, with more than 58 percent of adult men and 65 percent of adult women overweight or obese. Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Kuwait saw big increases.

 "We have to remind ourselves that obesity is really not a cosmetic issue. It's a main risk factor for morbidity and mortality," added global health professor Ali Mokdad, another of the researchers.

 Obesity is appearing at increasing young ages, rising nearly 50 percent in children and adolescents worldwide.

 Men tallied higher rates in developed countries. Women did so in developing countries. There was a possible ray of hope in rich countries, with the rate of increase in adult obesity slowing in the past eight years.

 More than half of the world's obese live in just 10 countries: the United States, China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Germany, Pakistan and Indonesia.

 (Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Lisa Shumaker) |||||Summary:

– There are more obese or overweight people in the world today than there were people of any weight in 1935, the most comprehensive look at worldwide obesity in decades warns. The 188-country study found that there are 2.1 billion overweight or obese people in the world, making up around 30% of the world's population, up from 20% in 1980, USA Today reports. Not a single country has recorded a decline in obesity over the last 30 years. "We hoped there would be some examples of success that you could latch onto," a study co-author says. "But there's a complete lack of success stories in bringing down obesity." The study published in British medical journal the Lancet found that the Middle East and north Africa had seen the biggest weight gains, though the US still has the largest number of obese people, with 87 million of the world's 671 million obese people, reports Reuters. Other countries, however, have even higher obesity rates, including Tonga, where more than 50% of all adults are obese. "Two-thirds of the obese population actually resides in developing countries," says one of the researchers; they warn that obesity rates are rising among rich and poor countries, men and women, and adults and children alike.


News article:

George Zimmerman still believes that he was a victim the night he shot and killed unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin. “I certainly was a victim when I was having my head bashed into the concrete and my nose broken and beaten,” Zimmerman told CNN on Monday. ” So I wouldn’t say I was not a victim.”

 A jury in Florida acquitted Zimmerman of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in the death of Trayvon Martin seven months ago. Zimmerman admits that he killed the 17-year-old while he was working as a neighborhood watchman, but he says it was in self-defense. Perhaps that’s why he claimed memories of the night don’t haunt him. When asked why, he said, “I don’t know.” But he did say that if he could go back, he would have “stayed home” that night.

 Despite all the controversy over the verdict, Zimmerman never doubted himself because of his faith in God. “I know He’s the only judge I have to answer to. He knows what happened and I know what happened.”

 Though Zimmerman once aspired to be a police officer, he now says that he hopes to be a lawyer. “I’d like to professionally…continue my education and hopefully becoming an attorney,” he said. “I think that’s the best way to stop the miscarriage of justice that happened to me.”

 Zimmerman has run into legal trouble since his acquittal. He was pulled over for speeding; his wife called the police saying that Zimmerman was threatening her with a gun; and his new girlfriend has also claimed that he threatened her with a shotgun. (They have since reconciled.)

 He’s also had a number of PR problems. He has used his notoriety to sell paintings for hundreds of thousands of dollars and even agreed to become a prize fighter for charity — even though in trial he claimed he could not hold off a teenager.

 “I saw it as an opportunity,” Zimmerman said of the boxing match with rapper DMX, which was canceled by its promoter. “I never expected it to turn out the way it did.”

 Zimmerman continues to get death threats nearly two years after the night he killed Martin. “I have a lot of people saying that, you know, they guarantee that they’re going to kill me and I’ll never be a free man,” he said. “I realize that they don’t know me. They know who I was portrayed to be.” Zimmerman said that those who say he is a racist don’t know that some of his family members are black.

 “Before the trial, during and after, I’ve learned that the majority of people, when they sit down with me one-on-one or with my family, they get a completely different perspective on me,” he said.

 When asked about Michael Dunn—a Florida man convicted of second degree murder for shooting an African-American teenager during a fight over loud music—Zimmerman said, “I don’t watch the news anymore. I watch comedy shows, home improvement shows. So I’m not well enough informed to give you exacts [sic].”

 [CNN] ||||| The seed for this crawl was a list of every host in the Wayback Machine

 This crawl was run at a level 1 (URLs including their embeds, plus the URLs of all outbound links including their embeds)

 The WARC files associated with this crawl are not currently available to the general public. |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– George Zimmerman is on the run: Trayvon Martin's killer attracted an angry crowd while hanging out at a beach in Miami last week and ended up fleeing the city with a bounty on his head, TMZ reports. As the story goes, Zimmerman gave an interview on Tuesday with Univision and Fusion (saying he's homeless and has PTSD) before catching rays with his brother, girlfriend, and her child. Then an angry crowd forced them back to the hotel with someone yelling about a $10,000 bounty on his head. The next day Zimmerman gave an interview with CNN and fled the city. Is there a real threat? In this Black Panthers video, one leader claims the bounty runs to $1 million. And Time reports that in his CNN interview, Zimmerman said he has "a lot of people saying that, you know, they guarantee that they’re going to kill me and I’ll never be a free man. I realize that they don’t know me. They know who I was portrayed to be." (See more on the CNN interview, in which Zimmerman says he was afraid he had missed Martin and shot a neighbor.)


Article:

Tweet with a location

 You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more ||||| Tweet with a location

 You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more ||||| Add a location to your Tweets

 When you tweet with a location, Twitter stores that location. You can switch location on/off before each Tweet and always have the option to delete your location history. Learn more ||||| Image copyright AFP Image caption Osama Bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, was killed by US forces in 2011

 The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been criticised for live-tweeting the killing of Osama Bin Laden as if it were happening today.

 It has shared details of the mission that led to America's most-wanted man being found five years ago in Pakistan.

 But reaction has been largely negative, with one Twitter user calling the move "grotesque and embarrassing".

 Others posted memes and gifs of people rolling their eyes and putting their heads in their hands.

 The CIA's usual tweets mostly concern historical trivia and artefacts.

 How the lives of Osama Bin Laden's neighbours changed forever

 Legacy of Bin Laden's death

 Who was Osama Bin Laden?

 Bin Laden's death: How it happened

 Have we been told the truth about Bin Laden's death?

 Image copyright @CIA

 The CIA's first 'live tweet', hashtagged #UBLRaid, begins: "1:25 pm EDT-@POTUS, DCIA Panetta, & JSOC commander Admiral McRaven approve execution of op in Abbottabad."

 At 1:15pm "Helicopters depart from Afghanistan for compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan". Just under 90 minutes later, "2 helicopters descend on compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. 1 crashes, but assault continues without delay or injury".

 Osama Bin Laden is "found on third floor and killed" at 3:39pm.

 The last tweet, at 7:01pm, reads: "@POTUS [President Obama] receives confirmation of high probability of positive identification of Usama Bin Ladin".

 The tweets prompted an outpouring of criticism among Twitter users:

 Image copyright @zippyman818

 Image copyright @Jef_Konijn

 Image copyright @TheDailyShow

 But some were more supportive:

 Image copyright @Fran_Neena20409

 Image copyright @BegheldoM

 The leader of al-Qaeda, who was thought to have ordered the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, was shot dead at a compound in Abbottabad, in May 2011 after evading capture by the US and its allies for nearly a decade.

 Speaking on the fifth anniversary of his death, CIA director John Brennan said the United States had destroyed a large part of al-Qaeda but "it's not completely eliminated, so we have to stay focused on what it can do".

 He said removing Bin Laden had a great symbolic and strategic effect on al-Qaeda and it was important to do the same thing with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, head of the so-called Islamic State (IS).

 But, talking to NBC's Meet the Press show, he described IS as a "phenomenon" that had influence in many countries around the world "so we are going to have to remain very focused on destroying all the elements of that organisation". ||||| The Central Intelligence Agency's media wing is facing a social media backlash after tweeting a "real time" account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden - five years after the event.

 In an unusual decision taken to mark the five year anniversary of the 2011 raid, the agency's Twitter account is publishing an hour by hour description of the top secret mission against the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.

 The decision to tell the story using the same timings as the day of the raid, "as if it were happening today" was designed to mark what will be a key part of President Barack Obama's legacy - and remind the public of the agencies role in the historic operation. |||||
What is a summary?

– The CIA decided to relive one of its greatest hits on Sunday by "live-tweeting" the raid that killed Osama bin Laden to mark its fifth anniversary—but social media users turned out to be a tough crowd. "Stop trying to be cool on twitter and get.on with your job," tweeted "Lame Monk" as the CIA tweets began, the Telegraph reports. "2 helicopters descend on compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. 1 crashes, but assault continues without delay or injury," read a typical entry as the CIA recounted the 2011 raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, starting with its approval by "POTUS, DCIA Panetta, & JSOC commander Admiral McRaven" and continuing until the body was identified. The agency, which calls the al-Qaeda leader "Usama bin Ladin," used the hashtag #UBLRaid. "This is grotesque and embarrassing. You should fire your web team," tweeted another user, per the BBC. Others described the effort as "unprofessional" and "totally unnecessary." The CIA rejected suggestions that the "victory lap" was inappropriate. "The takedown of bin Laden stands as one of the great intelligence successes of all time. History has been a key element of [the] CIA's social media efforts," a CIA spokesman tells ABC News. "On the fifth anniversary, it is appropriate to remember the day and honor all those who had a hand in this achievement." (Recently released documents include bin Laden's will and letters about his fear of drones.)


Write a summary based on this article:

stars Sally Field as a beleaguered factory worker who risks her job and everything she’s worked for in order to correct injustices in the workplace. She is everywoman, standing up to The Man to do what’s right. Not just for her, but for the millions just like her all over the country. Those oppressed masses just trying to put food on the table, the ones without health care, the ones struggling to make ends meet. The ones who just want a fair shake. Somebody had to have the courage to take on the Big Baddies running the show. In 1978, that somebody was Norma Rae. In 2010, it’s Conan O’Brien?

 When did Conan O’Brien become Norma Rae? For those of you who don’t remember this 1978 film, Norma Rae

 How did a Harvard-educated, multi-millionaire late night talk show host magically transmogrify into a guy who got laid off at the local car plant? The overreaction to Conan’s departure has been kind of astounding; as a nation, are we really that concerned about who hosts “The Tonight Show,” a television program that stopped being culturally relevant around 1986?

 And let’s not forget, it’s not as if Conan was cancelled. He quit. He walked away from “The Tonight Show” because he rightly or wrongly felt that moving the show half an hour later would destroy the show’s integrity. Okay, fine. But let’s not act as if he’s leading a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter. It’s not that big a deal.

 Yes Americans believe in fair play. Fair play means making a deal and sticking to it. Conan got “The Tonight Show,” and therefore he should keep it. I agree with that. But Americans also believe in capitalism, and when fair play bumps up against capitalism, capitalism usually wins. It did this time.

 To my mind, there are two reasons why Leno has come across looking as bad as he has throughout the last few weeks. The first is that he seems like an opportunistic pig for agreeing to move back to 11:30. He should have packed up his funny headlines and gone home. The other reason is that Conan has been much funnier about the whole thing. His letter to the Times was funny, his monologue jokes have been funnier, and whereas Leno has come across as needy and desperate, O’Brien’s departure seems, if not exactly classy, then at least in classy’s neighborhood. Of course it’s easy to be classy-ish when you and your staff are walking away with forty million dollars.

 I think the deeper reason people are so inflamed by this petty war is that Conan in his own way has come to represent the aggrieved, the injured, the wrongly terminated. I think there is a sense in this country that giant corporations are ruining everything, even late night talk shows. Something so insignificant takes on greater importance because I think on some level, “The Tonight Show” actually has become a very flawed stand-in for all the jobs lost to corporate greed, arrogance, and stupidity. We see Conan as a victim because we feel as though, like us, he wasn’t given a fair shot. If a guy like that, a guy who has everything, can be downsized and demoted, what hope do the rest of us have?

 Moreover Leno is installed back in his abdicated throne. It feels like a coup, a particularly unfunny coup. And above him, all the top brass still have their jobs. Just like all the top brass in every other failed or bailed-out corporation. It feels unfair. And it makes people mad.

 Sure it’s a shame it didn’t work out for Conan, the most creative talk show host since David Letterman, and I think it’s great he took a principled stand against NBC, but is this really the stuff of rallies? Is this really where we want to spend our political capital? If you have the energy to protest Conan O’Brien’s departure in Burbank, shouldn’t you maybe think about spending some time chanting outside General Motors or Goldman Sachs? Or Congress? This is the cause you want to get involved with? Instead of holding up placards with the Masturbating Bear on them, maybe donate a pint of blood. It’ll be a lot more helpful to somebody.

 Conan is an unlikely hero of the working man but at this point, when heroes are far more likely to be squashed than celebrated like Norma Rae, as sad as it sounds, he might actually be the closest thing we’ve got. ||||| Conan O’Brien made a triumphant exit from NBC Friday night, accompanied by one of the most impressive outpourings of support by younger viewers that any late-night host had ever seen  and Mr. O’Brien was effusive in his thanks for their backing.

 But he might have said: Where were you when I needed you?

 In the tumult that surrounded NBC’s late-night shake-up last week, one thing was certain: If even a small fraction of the additional younger viewers who flocked to Mr. O’Brien’s show last week had turned up regularly in his earlier ratings results, he would almost surely still be hosting “The Tonight Show.”

 Instead, for most of this past fall, Mr. O’Brien struggled to command the young viewers he needed to counter a falloff in overall audience numbers.

 While he began to drop behind his chief late-night competitor, David Letterman on CBS, among total viewers, it was more alarming to NBC that Mr. O’Brien was not consistently beating Mr. Letterman in several important advertising-sales demographic groups  viewers 18 to 49 and 25 to 54. (He did beat Mr. Letterman virtually all the time in the 18-to-34 group.)

 But to NBC’s surprise and disappointment, Mr. O’Brien fell behind his predecessor, Jay Leno, even among those 18-to-34 viewers, the group expected to be his core constituency. (From his start in June through the end of 2009, Mr. O’Brien averaged 716,000 viewers in that age group, down from the 759,000 Mr. Leno averaged the previous six months.)

 Several television researchers said in interviews that this outcome might have been easily predicted, not because Mr. O’Brien does not appeal to younger viewers  he clearly does, as evidenced by the large numbers he attracted for his closing shows  but because regularly assembling those young adult viewers in significant numbers in the late-night hours has become a daunting, if not impossible, task.

 “The 18-to-34 group is so difficult to attract and the lower half, 18 to 25, is the hardest of all,” said Jack MacKenzie, the president of the millennial strategy program for the research firm Frank N. Magid Associates.

 Compounding the problem, said a senior research executive for another company, was the fact that Mr. O’Brien was especially appealing to young men. “And that group doesn’t watch television very regularly,” said the executive, who asked not to be named because his business competes with NBC.

 Instead of watching Mr. O’Brien most nights, Mr. MacKenzie said, those young viewers have been watching everything from similar shows like “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, to cartoons on the “Adult Swim” franchise on the Cartoon Network, and the ever-present array of sports and sports news on ESPN and its sister channels.

 In comparison with the 719,000 viewers in the 18-to-34 group that Mr. O’Brien had been averaging, Stephen Colbert on his “Colbert Report,” in the same six- month period in 2009, averaged 746,000 viewers ages 18 to 34. The cartoons on “Adult Swim”  mostly “Family Guy” and “Robot Chicken”  averaged 619,000 of those viewers. ESPN from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., with varied programs that included both live sports events and editions of the highlights show “Sports Center,” averaged 614,000 viewers in that group.

 And dozens of other cable channels took other slices of the under 35 viewers.

 “What you’ve seen in recent years is increased spending by all these cable channels for original programming,” Mr. MacKenzie said. “And besides having a double revenue stream of subscription fees and advertising, the cable channels have the luxury of targeting specific audiences. Broadcasters don’t.”

 Fans of sports, for example, were watching ESPN many nights instead of Mr. O’Brien; and cartoon lovers were hooked on “Adult Swim.”

 But even all the competition on cable did not represent the total distraction for young viewers that Mr. O’Brien had to contend with. The senior research executive pointed to outside attractions like video games that vie for the attention of young, especially male, viewers. And CBS executives have in the past identified the growing tendency of owners of digital video recorders to use the time after late local newscasts to play back programs recorded earlier that night or on previous nights.

 A spokeswoman for Nielsen Media Research pointed to a study the company released last year that cited the peak hours for DVR playback. The late-night hours showed the highest percentage of playback outside the prime-time hours, with about 7.6 percent of playback taking place from 11 p.m. to 12 a.m.

 As an executive from one of NBC’s rival networks put it: “Conan didn’t just have to worry about Letterman; he had to worry about ‘House.’ People are playing back episodes of shows like ‘House’ in late night.”

 Add to all the other issues the fact that Mr. O’Brien’s young fans did not really have to watch television to see him. His shows were made available later on Web sites like Hulu. And his best comedy bits would frequently be posted on other sites  and passed around by fans  shortly after they appeared.

 Mr. MacKenzie added that NBC did Mr. O’Brien no favor by moving Mr. Leno to the 10 p.m. hour this fall. “That meant there was a show very similar in style to his on the air before him,” he said.

 In his run on “The Tonight Show,” Mr. Leno managed to attract the largest audiences in virtually every age group, though his ratings too showed signs of falling off in his later years on the show. But his was always the first show of the late-night talk variety on NBC each night, Mr. MacKenzie.

 That will happen again when Mr. Leno returns to “The Tonight Show” on March 1. But Mr. MacKenzie had some words of caution for NBC.

 “A generational switch is coming,” he said. “The baby boomer audience that has mostly been the Leno audience is going out. The Conan audience is becoming more influential  even if they aren’t watching television the same way the previous generation did.” |||||

– Conan O’Brien joins the ranks of the unemployed today, so the ousted Tonight Show host now has plenty of time to track the backlash and second-guessing about the TV shell game. Jay Leno remains the villain of the piece, but the hard truth is that O’Brien never drew the numbers of young viewers to his time slot that NBC had hoped for. “The 18-to-34 group is so difficult to attract and the lower half, 18 to 25, is the hardest of all,” a strategist told the New York Times. The increasingly fractured TV landscape didn’t help. Competition is now fierce for the audience Tonight Show producers once took for granted. O'Brien has been buffetted by the same economic realities most American are grappling with, making him a "Harvard-educated, multi-millionaire late night talk show host" who was "magically transmogrified into a guy who got laid off at the local car plant," blogs Michael Ian Black.


Article:
Comcast probably doesn't relish being one of those companies that many Americans love to hate. But sometimes, the cable giant makes this way too easy.

 Consider the case of Ricardo Brown. After Brown's wife had a disagreement with the cable company recently, Comcast started sending him monthly statements under the name "Asshole Brown."

 The disagreement happened when Brown's wife Lisa tried to cancel her cable. She got referred to one of the company's dreaded "retention specialists," who apparently didn't like being told "no," as Lisa Brown told the blogger Christopher Elliott, who first reported the story.

 "I was never rude," she told Elliott. "It could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer."

 Like many phone companies and ISPs, Comcast makes it frighteningly difficult to cancel an account. The company retains an army of retention specialists whose sole job is to keep you from signing off. Last year, the journalist Ryan Block recorded a Kafkaesque conversation he had with a Comcast retention specialist from hell. That call has been listened to nearly 6 million times.

 Comcast spokesman Steve Kipp confirmed the Browns' story to WIRED. "We have spoken with our customer and apologized for this completely unacceptable and inappropriate name change," he told us via email. "We have zero tolerance for this type of disrespectful behavior and are conducting a thorough investigation to determine what happened. We are working with our customer to make this right and will take appropriate steps to prevent this from happening again."

 According to Elliott, Comcast is also offering the Browns a full refund for the past two years of service. ||||| Warning: This post contains language that may not be appropriate for a family audience.

 It’s no secret that employees sometimes feel their customers are jerks. But I’ve never seen one put it in writing — until now.

 Lisa Brown, a volunteer for a missions organization in Spokane, Wash., contacted me about a billing problem with Comcast, her local cable provider. The issue? Someone at Comcast changed the name on their bill from her husband’s name, Ricardo, to “Asshole” Brown.

 Seriously.

 Brown has tried to fix the name herself. She’s visited her local Comcast office and phoned higher-ups in the Washington region. But she wasn’t getting anywhere and needed help.

 Comcast changed the billing name

 My first thought was that someone was trying to pull a practical joke on a consumer advocate. So I asked for a copy of the billing statement and the correspondence between her and Comcast.

 And no kidding, it looked like someone had changed the name. How impolite!

 Next, I contacted Comcast to find out what its records said. It’s fairly easy for any customer to doctor a photo of a bill to shame a large company, so I wanted to make sure the company was seeing the same thing.

 It was.

 A few minutes later, I received a call from Steve Kipp, Comcast’s vice president of communications for the Washington region.

 “We have spoken with our customer and apologized for this completely unacceptable and inappropriate name change,” he said. “Comcast has zero tolerance for this type of disrespectful behavior and are conducting a thorough investigation to determine what happened. We are working with our customer to make this right and will take appropriate steps to prevent this from happening again.”

 I asked Brown why an employee might want to change Ricardo’s name to Asshole.

 “I am shocked,” she told me. She explained that her family was having financial difficulties and needed to reduce their cable bill. She’d called Comcast to cancel the cable portion of her account, for which she had to pay a $60 fee. Instead of complying immediately, a representative escalated her call to a retention specialist, who tried to persuade her to keep the cable service and sign a new two-year contract.

 “I was never rude,” she says. “It could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer.”

 What is a fair resolution from Comcast?

 Brown, who has been a Comcast customer for the last two years, believes the company should offer a more generous refund. Also, she wants to send a letter to Comcast’s vice president in charge of customer service.

 Comcast quickly made steps toward fulfilling her wishes. First, there was a call from Rhonda Weaver, a Comcast senior director of government affairs, promising to waive the $60 cancellation fee. Weaver also said Comcast was investigating the name change and would terminate the employee who was responsible.

 Then there was a call from Ken Watts, a Comcast general manager for Spokane. He assured her they’d corrected the name on her account. He also promised a swift investigation and that he would find the vice president’s address.

 (Well, I can probably help with that: here are the Comcast executive emails.)

 Comcast seems genuinely sorry for what happened, but Brown wonders if it’s sorry enough.

 “This is unacceptable,” she says. “I am requesting everything back I paid Comcast for doing this to me.”

 But what is enough?

 Should Comcast refund two years’ worth of cable bills? Or is an apology, a refund of the cancellation fee, and firing the employee, enough?

 Here’s hoping Comcast’s other reps will keep their opinions of their customers to themselves. Based on their customer service scores, we kinda know what they’re thinking.

 Do we really need to have it in writing?

 Update (4:20 p.m., 1/28/2015): Brown says Comcast contacted her this afternoon, offering “the full two years refunded and another two years free.”

 Update (3:30 a.m., 1/29): Brown contacted me with a clarification: “Comcast did not give me two years free. Just the refund of two years.”

 Update (noon, 1/29): Comcast has issued a more detailed response to this incident.

 What should Comcast do? Refund Brown's entire cable bill.

 It's already done enough. View Results

 Loading ... Loading ...

 Note: Since this story first appeared in 2015, I’ve received numerous other complaints from consumers who had been dissed by the customer service department. Among them: Home Depot allegedly used an “extremely offensive” epithet to describe this customer. And Comcast seemed to go for a repeat (it didn’t) one other. |||||Summary:

– This story likely won't do much to raise Comcast's popularity—or lack thereof. A Washington state woman on Tuesday reached out to consumer advocate Christopher Elliott with a problem. She needed to change the name on her Comcast bill, and after phone calls and an in-person visit to a Comcast location, remained unsuccessful. The bill continued to read: "A--hole Brown." Yes, you read that right. The bill had previously been addressed to "Ricardo Brown" (her husband's name) but was apparently changed by a Comcast employee. Brown suspects the alteration occurred after she called to cancel her cable services. Wired points out that Comcast makes it "frighteningly difficult" to ax services, and Brown was indeed redirected to a retention specialist during her call. She says she was "never rude," but was firm: She wanted to pay the $60 termination fee and pare down her services. Elliott dove in, first verifying with Comcast that the bill hadn't been altered by Brown and did indeed contain the unfortunate first name. Verification made. (Wired verified the story as well.) A regional VP of communications then called Elliott to express that the company has "zero tolerance for this type of disrespectful behavior"; a Comcast director vowed to fire the offending employee. The company's initial offer to Brown: waiving that $60 fee. Brown expressed to Elliott that she thought she deserved more, saying, "I am requesting everything back I paid Comcast for doing this to me"—everything meaning two years' worth of bills. Yesterday afternoon, Comcast agreed to that. (This remains perhaps the most memorable Comcast customer horror story.)


Image copyright I Khalil, S Misra Image caption Sperm-inspired robots "swim" when they are made to wiggle by a moving magnetic field

 Engineers have built a sperm-like robot that they can control with magnets.

 The simple design has a metal-coated head and a flexible body about six times longer than a human sperm.

 Using a magnetic field no stronger than a fridge magnet, the team made the robot "swim" forward and steered it towards a fixed point.

 They hope the findings, published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, will be useful in medical and manufacturing applications.

 "We have built a biologically inspired micro-robot that looks like a sperm cell but is completely fabricated in the lab," said Dr Sarthak Misra, a robotics engineer at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

 Sperm, like some bacteria, use a whip-like "flagellum" to propel themselves through fluid.

 Other studies of this process have included coupling a magnetic tail to a red blood cell, or controlling real sperm by steering them in metal microtubes.

 The new gadget is made from a strong but flexible polymer, with a metal layer painted onto its head using a technique called electron beam evaporation.

 That metal element is forced in different directions when the device is placed into a moving field, produced by the coils of an electromagnet.

 Precise navigation

 "The magnetic head is used to orient it in a certain direction and then, just by flapping its tail, it starts to move forward," Dr Misra told the BBC. "The flapping happens because we change the current in the coils."

 Image copyright I Khalil, S Misra Image caption The simple robots consist of a flexible tail and a head with an added metallic layer

 For its size, the robot can hardly compete with its biological inspiration for pace: it wiggles along at up to 0.5 body lengths per second, whereas a human sperm can cover several times its body length in that time.

 Importantly, however, Dr Misra and his colleagues also showed that they could steer the robot with some precision. By adjusting the magnetic field changes with a computer, they navigated their creation towards a fixed point.

 This means the little robots could be useful for positioning materials in nanomanufacturing, or for medical purposes. "It opens up a lot of applications, from targeted drug delivery to in vitro fertilisation - where you want to reach precise locations," Dr Misra said.

 For these ideas to work, the researchers need to test the technique in more complicated environments. They are moving on to those experiments, as well as working on making their "MagnetoSperm" smaller and faster.

 Image copyright SPL Image caption Human sperm are another six times smaller than the tiny robots that were modelled on them

 Dr Matthew Baker, who studies molecular motors at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, told BBC News the work was "very cool" but commented that the tiny contraptions are not robots in the sense that most of us would imagine.

 "It's just a piece of metal and it's the field that's doing the hard work," Dr Baker explained. "The clever part is the oscillating, small, tunable magnetic field."

 This out-sourcing of power and navigation is what allows the gadget to be so small, according to the new study's first author Dr Islam Khalil. "As technology progresses and many products get smaller, it becomes difficult to assemble objects on nano- and micro-scales," he said in a press statement.

 "MagnetoSperm can be used to manipulate and assemble objects at these scales, using an external source of magnetic field to control its motion." ||||| Just when you thought you'd seen every kind of robot there is, researchers develop bots inspired by sperm.

 The tiny robots mimic the shape and movement of sperm cells and can be steered using magnetic fields. Dubbed "MagnetoSperm," the robots could be useful for administering medicine or carrying out in vitro fertilization, researchers say.

 "Nature has designed efficient tools for locomotion at micro scales," study leader Sarthak Misra, a mechanical engineer at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, said in a statement. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

 Improvements in technology are making many products smaller, but it is difficult to assemble objects on the nanoscale (a billionth of a meter) or microscale (a millionth of a meter), the researchers said.

 Misra and a team of scientists at his university and the German University in Cairo design robots inspired by nature or ones that use living microorganisms, such as magnetically propelled bacteria and sperm cells, for performing complex tasks on small scales.

 In a new study, published today (June 2) in the journal Applied Physics Letters, the researchers created 322 1-micron-long (about 10 times the width of a human hair) robots with heads thickly coated with cobalt-nickel, but uncoated tails.

 When the sperm bots were exposed to an oscillating magnetic field with a strength less than that of a refrigerator magnet, the force caused the sperm bots' heads to rotate and their tails to move back and forth, pushing the bots forward. The researchers steered the robots by aiming the magnetic field toward a reference point.

 The magnetic swimmers could be used for a number of biomedical applications, including drug administration, in vitro fertilization and the cleaning of clogged arteries, the researchers said.

 The robots were assembled by a method known as spin coating, in which a thin polymer film is deposited onto a silicon wafer. The researchers chose a polymer that was simple to fabricate and wouldn't break down easily. They then used an electron beam to deposit the cobalt-nickel layer onto the heads of the bots.

 The researchers plan to scale down their robots to an even smaller size and develop a magnetic nanofiber that could be used for the tails.

 Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. |||||

Write a summary.

– Technophobes may be alarmed to learn that new sperm-like robots could soon be performing many activities—including fertilizing human eggs. Researchers say the tiny bots, dubbed "MagnetoSperm," were inspired by the shape and movement of sperm cells and can "swim" to their target with incredible accuracy, LiveScience reports. They believe the sperm bots could be useful in nanomanufacturing as well as for medical uses including unclogging arteries, drug administration, and in vitro fertilization. The robots have a metal head and a body of flexible polymer, and are steered through a field produced by electromagnetic coils. "The magnetic head is used to orient it in a certain direction and then, just by flapping its tail, it starts to move forward," the lead researcher explains to the BBC. "The flapping happens because we change the current in the coils," he says, predicting that the tiny bots will prove useful where it is necessary to reach "precise locations." The bots are still a lot slower—and around six times bigger—than human sperm, but the MagnetoSperm team says it is working on creating smaller, faster versions. (Meanwhile, scientists have recently found the world's oldest sperm.)