Scientists have developed an artificial cell that can eat bacteria – just like the hungry video game character Pac-Man. The cells are the size of a red blood cell and can be used to'eat' bad bacteria such as E coli, deliver drugs to sites in the body and clean up pollution in water. The Pac-Man cell was created by researchers at New York and Chicago universities by piercing a microscopic hole in a sphere made from a polymer to allow matter to enter or exit. The cell can be made to pump or'eat' by shining a light on it. The research was published in Nature.

Scientists have built artificial cells that are so life-like, they've tricked natural cells into thinking they're communicating with one of their own. This twist on the classic Turing test means that not only can our robots fool humans into thinking they're one of us - scientists can now make artificial cells that act so real, living organisms can't tell the difference. "We have been interested in the divide between living and nonliving chemical systems for quite some time now, but it was never really clear where this divide fell," one of the team, Sheref S. Mansy from the University of Trento, Italy, told ResearchGate. "[I]t is absolutely possible to make artificial cells that can chemically communicate with bacteria." Proposed more than 60 years ago by British computer scientist Alan Turing, the Turing test is designed to evaluate the intelligence of a machine by asking one simple question - can it trick a human into thinking they're having a conversation with another human?

PARIS – Molecular machines, which earned their inventors the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday, are a fraction of the width of a human hair but strong enough to move things 10,000 times their size. The devices have yet to find practical use in nanoscale engineering, but scientists look forward to the day when microscopic motors or delivery vehicles will be omnipresent, whether in the human body or a microchip. Inspired by natural proteins, which act as biological "machines" within cells, synthetic nanobots can be prodded by light or changes in temperature to produce mechanical motion. Their use in localized drug delivery is "probably the most short-term achievable" application, according to Nicholas White of the Australian National University's Research School of Chemistry. The tiny machines, constructed from groups of molecules, may be used to protect the human body from exposure to the toxic effects of certain medicines, such as those used in chemotherapy.

The 2016 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded for the design and synthesis of the world's smallest machines. The work has overtones of science fiction, but holds huge promise in fields as diverse as medicine, materials and energy. This is especially true of efforts to develop nano-scale machines (1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair), which are always destined to remain tiny however big our ambitions for them grow. It's difficult to trace the development of molecular machines to one person or scientific step. But a 1959 lecture by the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman is as good a point as any.

If a computer node is infected by a virus, worm or a backdoor, then this is a security risk for the complete network structure where the node is associated. Existing Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) provide a certain amount of support for the identification of such infected nodes but suffer from the need of plenty of communication and computational power. In this article, we present a novel approach called AGNOSCO to support the identification of infected nodes through the usage of artificial ant colonies. It is shown that AGNOSCO overcomes the communication and computational power problem while identifying infected nodes properly.