WITH THE END of the US government shutdown in sight, disorganization still reigns at federal agencies. Workers at the Environmental Protection Agency tell WIRED that they have faced increasing chaos over the past five weeks.

In recent weeks, varied phases of furloughs have forced staff to go home in seemingly random waves. Some employees remaining at the agency are working on policies friendly to fossil fuel and industrial interests that are a priority of the administration, even as the rest of the government shuts down.

Others have had to sit on their hands, as the shutdown takes out colleagues with no notice—and remaining employees have little to no information as to what is coming next.

“We learn who is furloughed when we send an email to someone and get the out-of-office message, or we hover over names in Teams for people who are showing out of office,” one EPA worker tells WIRED. (This worker, and others in this story, were granted anonymity because they aren’t permitted to speak to the press.)

Some employees who are being kept are at work revising pollution rules, a core deregulatory goal of the administration. An employee at the Office of Air and Radiation confirmed to WIRED that their team, which is working on rule revisions in that office, is still being called in to work, while others in the office—including support staff like administrative assistants and operations workers—were sent home the week of October 20.

“Staff working in the regulatory part of the air office are still working,” the employee tells WIRED. “Lots of furloughs elsewhere. But we’re still working on deregulatory actions.” The New York Times reported in mid-October that other staffers working to repeal rules friendly to oil, gas, and coal interests were also being told to “press on.”

Around 4,400 employees, WIRED has learned, had been furloughed at the agency as of late October. According to the EPA’s shutdown plan, which was last updated in September, the agency employed more than 15,000 people as of October 1. In the plan, the agency lists just 1,734 employees expected to be retained in the event of a full shutdown. These employees would work on “significant agency activities” deemed crucial enough to be continued in a lapse, including Superfund activities, disaster assistance, criminal investigations, and the preservation of research.

Following a Sunday vote in the Senate, the government shutdown could end as early as this week.

OMB director Russell Vought, the public face of the government shutdown, has tried to use it as a way to further cut back the size of the federal workforce. But more than a month into the shutdown, workers at the EPA have mostly escaped the high-profile reductions in force and mass furloughs that have hit other agencies. Many workers are still coming in to do their jobs as the agency tries to continue business as usual. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, meanwhile, has squarely blamed Democrats.

In the history of gluteal enhancement, Mexico City stands out. It protrudes. It was here, in 1979, that a plastic surgeon, Mario González-Ulloa, first installed a pair of silicone implants designed specifically for the buttocks. The textbook Body Sculpting with Silicone Implants calls González-Ulloa the “grandfather of buttock augmentation.” The early 2000s saw a new generation of Mexico City buttock transformation luminaries, notably Ramón Cuenca-Guerra. In his 2004 paper “What Makes Buttocks Beautiful?” Cuenca-Guerra laid out four characteristics that “determine attractive buttocks” as well as the five types of “defects,” with strategies for correcting each one. I, for instance, have defect type 5, the “senile buttock.” (González-Ulloa’s depiction of this took the form of charcoal nudes contrasting “the typical ‘happy buttock’”—high, rounded, dimpled—with its counterpart, the low-slung, drooping “sad buttock.”)

While I understand the value of standardizing procedures and setting guidelines for surgical practice, I tripped over Cuenca-Guerra’s methodology. How and by whom had the determinants been determined? Like this: 1,320 photographs of “nude women ages 20 to 35 years, as seen from behind” were presented to a panel of six plastic surgeons, who “pointed out which buttocks they considered attractive and harmonious, and features on which this attractiveness depended.” Oho!

I thought it would be interesting to talk to Cuenca-Guerra about the notion of a visually ideal female figure. As something that could or should be surgically created (or, in the case of the senile buttock, re-created). As something that even exists. I sent an email using the address on a more recent journal paper. There was no reply. Ramón Cuenca-Guerra’s buttocks are in worse shape than mine. He has been dead for some time. I was able to reach a colleague of his, José Luis Daza-Flores. Here was the third generation; just as Cuenca-Guerra had studied under González-Ulloa, Daza-Flores had studied under Cuenca-Guerra, extending the lineage and making Daza-Flores, I guess, “the son of buttock augmentation.”

Daza-Flores collaborated with Cuenca-Guerra on a paper called “Calf Implants,” in which the team did for the lower leg what Cuenca-Guerra had done for the butt: laid out “the anatomical characteristics that make calves look attractive” and the “defects” to be addressed. Here again, plastic surgeons were recruited to judge images—2,600 of them, a vast photographic millipede of female legs.

The paper took an unexpected turn. Referring to a marked-up photograph of a lower leg deemed attractive, the authors tried to show that its measurements conformed to what is known in mathematics as the divine proportion (or golden ratio)—1.6 (I’m rounding it off) to 1. When you divide a line into two parts such that the whole length divided by the long part is equal to the long part divided by the short part, both those ratios will be 1.6 to 1. I found an illustration of the divine proportion on a website called Math Is Fun (and convincing no one). The golden dividing line splits the length such that one chunk is roughly two-thirds and the other is around one-third. The ancient Greeks divided the “ideal” face into similarly proportioned thirds. This was the first time I’d seen the divine proportion applied to a leg.

The paper contained sentences like this: “Seventeen women had thin legs, in the shape of a tube, and a mere 1:1.618 ratio in the A-P and L-L projections.” Though I confess to not grasping the particulars of the discussion, I believe that to be a mathematically precise description of cankles.

Portable genetic sequencers used around the world to sequence DNA have critical, previously unreported security vulnerabilities that could reveal or alter genetic information without detection, according to a new study.

Researchers from the University of Florida have, for the first time, exposed these security risks in devices from Oxford Nanopore Technologies, which produces nearly all the portable genetic sequencers in the world.

Alerted by the security researchers, Oxford Nanopore Technologies has rolled out updated software to patch the vulnerabilities. But out-of-date software, or unsecured internet systems, could still leave some DNA sequencers vulnerable to attack.

“No one in the world had looked at the security of these devices, which shocked me,” said Christina Boucher, Ph.D., a professor of computer and information science and engineering at UF, expert in bioinformatics, and co-author of the new report.

Boucher collaborated with Sara Rampazzi, Ph.D., also a professor of computer and information science and engineering, cybersecurity expert and project lead at UF, and students in the department to test Nanopore sequencers for security flaws. The study serves as a warning to the scientific community that new threats to genomic data urge a shift toward “secure-by-design” systems as portable DNA sequencers become increasingly common. The team published their findings in Nature Communications.

The researchers uncovered three vulnerabilities in the Oxford Nanopore MinION portable sequencer and its associated software. Two of these flaws allow an unauthorized user to improperly access the device and potentially copy or alter the DNA data without the authorized user’s knowledge. A third flaw opens the sequencer to a denial-of-service attack, which would halt the sequencing operation and make the device appear broken.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal government’s cyber defense coordinator, verified these vulnerabilities in a report released Oct. 21. The report also provides instructions from Oxford Nanopore Technologies on how users can update their sequencers to address the security flaws.

Versions with older software would remain open to attack. This is especially possible when the portable sequencers are connected to insecure Wi-Fi networks or remote control is activated.

Costing just a few thousand dollars and able to operate anywhere in the world, these palm-sized sequencers have transformed the previously cumbersome and expensive work of sequencing DNA. But that portability contributes to the security risks of these devices because the sequencers must be connected to a computer to work.

“You are connecting a very specialized device to a general-purpose device like a laptop, which is intrinsically assumed to be secure,” said Rampazzi. “Instead, that laptop could be connected to an unsecured network, or it could be infected with malware or ransomware, especially if used in the field outside controlled environments.”

These nanopore sequencers are marketed only for research use and not to be used for clinical diagnosis. Yet even when restricted to research, these devices can be used to sequence the DNA of people.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, which focuses on defining genomic cybersecurity and privacy guidelines, has only started to consider research use cases in distinction to clinical use in their latest draft guidelines, highlighting the increased attention on the topic and the lack of a clear standard.

Revealing these previously undiscovered vulnerabilities was only possible due to the interdisciplinary collaboration between the Rampazzi and Boucher labs. Boucher develops algorithms to better analyze DNA, while Rampazzi researches security flaws in critical systems ranging from medical devices, and self-driving cars to underwater data centers. Combining their expertise helped alert the community to a significant privacy threat.

“In bioinformatics, we haven’t been working as closely with the security community as I think we should be,” Boucher said.