DAEJEON, South Korea — Imagine a wheelchair equipped with wheels flexible enough to navigate all manner of obstacles from curbs to humps and even staircases.  

Or perhaps an unmanned delivery vehicle using the same wheels that takes the stairs to deliver food and groceries right to your door. 

This is what researchers from the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) envision for their “morphing” wheel, which can roll over obstacles up to 1.3 times the height of its radius.  

Inspired by the surface tension of water droplets, it goes from solid to fluid when it encounters impediments. 

Other possible applications include robots that spy on the enemy in the battlefield. 

The KIMM team also hopes that morphing wheels will eventually be used with two- and four-legged robots – currently limited in movement efficiency and susceptible to vibration – that can carry payloads that need stable movement in industrial settings. 

“The goal is to make this viable for speed up to 100 kph, or the speed of an average car,” said Song Sung-hyuk, principal researcher at KIMM. 

Wheels developed for a similar purpose such as nonpneumatic or airless tires have flexibility but are limited in their ability to overcome obstacles, said Song, who is a member of KIMM’s AI robotics research team.  

The morphing wheel consists of an outer hoop of a chain and a series of spoke wires running through the hub. The stiffness of the spokes – and hence the wheel – is automatically regulated by a sensor as it reacts to the terrain. 

Song’s team demonstrated to Reuters a prototype wheelchair mounted on morphing wheels as it climbed stairs with 18-cm steps with a life-size dummy sitting in it. The team has also tested a device mounted with the wheel at speeds of up to 30 kph. 

The morphing wheel was featured on the cover of the journal Science Robotics in August.
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BEIJING/HONG KONG — A 22-year-old Chinese woman’s account of how she was lured into the country’s illegal surrogacy industry before suffering a miscarriage went viral on Chinese social media this week and raised heated debates over women’s rights and social inequality. 

Surrogacy is banned in China, and authorities have vowed to severely crack down on illegal practices, including the buying and selling of sperm, egg and surrogacy services. 

The incident comes as Chinese authorities grapple with how to increase the country’s birth rate as more young couples put off having children or opt to have none. 

China’s population fell for a second consecutive year in 2023 and Beijing in October rallied local governments to direct resources towards fixing China’s population crisis to create a “birth-friendly” society.  

Zhang Jing, 22, told state-backed Phoenix TV magazine that she donated her eggs out of financial desperation and then agreed to “rent out her uterus” to be impregnated for a total of 30,000 yuan ($4,152).  

If she “successfully” delivered the baby, she would be paid a total of 240,000 yuan. At five months pregnant, she experienced severe complications and had to have an abortion.  

Zhang’s story amassed more than 86 million views and 10,000 comments on Chinese social media platform Weibo, with the hashtag “#2000s-born Surrogate Miscarriage Girl Speaks Out#.” 

The majority of comments strongly opposed surrogacy. Some warned that legalizing surrogacy in China could lead to increased competition that would lower compensation and further devalue women. 

“No woman could escape this if surrogacy were legalized,” one user wrote, while another said, “Legalizing surrogacy would drive down prices and commodify women.” 

Zhang’s story ignited calls for a more thorough crackdown on illegal surrogacy by authorities, with some commenters warning that allowing the black market to continue to operate could even normalize human organ trafficking.  

“Life should not be traded as a commodity,” one user wrote. “If this extends to the sale of organs, it will only get darker and darker, and women will have no future.” 

The incident comes a few weeks after a 28-year-old pregnant woman who acted as a surrogate in China’s southwestern city of Chengdu was allegedly abandoned by her surrogacy agency. 
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MELBOURNE, Australia — How do you remove children from the harms of social media? Politically the answer appears simple in Australia, but practically the solution could be far more difficult.

The Australian government’s plan to ban children from social media platforms including X, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram until their 16th birthdays is politically popular. The opposition party says it would have done the same after winning elections due within months if the government hadn’t moved first.

The leaders of all eight Australian states and mainland territories have unanimously backed the plan, although Tasmania, the smallest state, would have preferred the threshold was set at 14.

But a vocal assortment of experts in the fields of technology and child welfare have responded with alarm. More than 140 such experts signed an open letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemning the 16-year age limit as “too blunt an instrument to address risks effectively.”

Details of what is proposed and how it will be implemented are scant. More will be known when legislation is introduced into the Parliament next week.

The concerned teen

Leo Puglisi, a 17-year-old Melbourne student who founded online streaming service 6 News Australia at the age of 11, laments that lawmakers imposing the ban lack the perspective on social media that young people have gained by growing up in the digital age.

“With respect to the government and prime minister, they didn’t grow up in the social media age, they’re not growing up in the social media age, and what a lot of people are failing to understand here is that, like it or not, social media is a part of people’s daily lives,” Leo said.

“It’s part of their communities, it’s part of work, it’s part of entertainment, it’s where they watch content – young people aren’t listening to the radio or reading newspapers or watching free-to-air TV – and so it can’t be ignored. The reality is this ban, if implemented, is just kicking the can down the road for when a young person goes on social media,” Leo added.

Leo has been applauded for his work online. He was a finalist in his home state Victoria’s nomination for the Young Australian of the Year award, which will be announced in January. His nomination bid credits his platform with “fostering a new generation of informed, critical thinkers.”

The grieving mom-turned-activist

One of the proposal’s supporters, cyber safety campaigner Sonya Ryan, knows from personal tragedy how dangerous social media can be for children.

Her 15-year-old daughter Carly Ryan was murdered in 2007 in South Australia state by a 50-year-old pedophile who pretended to be a teenager online. In a grim milestone of the digital age, Carly was the first person in Australia to be killed by an online predator.

“Kids are being exposed to harmful pornography, they’re being fed misinformation, there are body image issues, there’s sextortion, online predators, bullying. There are so many different harms for them to try and manage and kids just don’t have the skills or the life experience to be able to manage those well,” Sonya Ryan said.

“The result of that is we’re losing our kids. Not only what happened to Carly, predatory behavior, but also we’re seeing an alarming rise in suicide of young people,” she added.

Sonya Ryan is part of a group advising the government on a national strategy to prevent and respond to child sexual abuse in Australia.

She wholeheartedly supports Australia setting the social media age limit at 16.

“We’re not going to get this perfect,” she said. “We have to make sure that there are mechanisms in place to deal with what we already have which is an anxious generation and an addicted generation of children to social media.”

A major concern for social media users of all ages is the legislation’s potential privacy implications.

Age estimation technology has proved inaccurate, so digital identification appears to be the most likely option for assuring a user is at least 16.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, an office that describes itself as the world’s first government agency dedicated to keeping people safer online, has suggested in planning documents adopting the role of authenticator. The government would hold the identity data and the platforms would discover through the commissioner whether a potential account holder was 16.

The skeptical internet expert

Tama Leaver, professor of internet studies at Curtin University, fears that the government will make the platforms hold the users’ identification data instead.

The government has already said the onus will be on the platforms, rather than on children or their parents, to ensure everyone meets the age limit.

“The worst possible outcome seems to be the one that the government may be inadvertently pushing towards, which would be that the social media platforms themselves would end up being the identity arbiter,” Leaver said.

“They would be the holder of identity documents which would be absolutely terrible because they have a fairly poor track record so far of holding on to personal data well,” he added.

The platforms will have a year once the legislation has become law to work out how the ban can be implemented.

Ryan, who divides her time between Adelaide in South Australia and Fort Worth, Texas, said privacy concerns should not stand in the way of removing children from social media.

“What is the cost if we don’t? If we don’t put the safety of our children ahead of profit and privacy?” she asked. 
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Brussels — The European Commission on Thursday fined Meta Platforms $840.24 million over abusive practices benefiting Facebook Marketplace, it said in a statement, confirming an earlier report by Reuters.

“The European Commission has fined Meta … for breaching EU antitrust rules by tying its online classified ads service Facebook Marketplace to its personal social network Facebook and by imposing unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers,” the European Commission said.

Meta said it will appeal the decision, but in the meantime, it will comply and will work quickly and constructively to launch a solution which addresses the points raised.

The move by the European Commission comes two years after it accused the U.S. tech giant of giving its classified ads service Facebook Marketplace an unfair advantage by bundling the two services together.

The European Union opened formal proceedings into possible anticompetitive conduct of Facebook in June, 2021, and in December, 2022, raised concerns that Meta ties its dominant social network Facebook to its online classified ad services.

Facebook launched Marketplace in 2016 and expanded into several European countries a year later.

The EU decision argues that Meta imposes Facebook Marketplace on people who use Facebook in an illegal “tie” but Meta said that argument ignores the fact that Facebook users can choose whether to engage with Marketplace, and many do not.

Meta said the Commission claimed that Marketplace had the potential to hinder the growth of large incumbent online marketplaces in the EU but could not find any evidence of harm to competitors.

Companies risk fines of as much as 10% of their global turnover for EU antitrust violations.
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