Boffins build blood-swimming medical microbot A research team has developed a swimming microrobot designed to navigate through your bloodstream – all with your best interests at heart. Or at lung. Or at the far-flung islets of Langerhans. This diagnostic and therapeutic innovation was announced at this week's International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) by …
Mine will be the one with the rather battered copy of KE Drexlers Engines of Creation in the pocket.
However as Drexler proposed a more "biological" model of nanotechnology (build up by atoms rather than start with a wafer and strip chunks off) he expected them to be mfg by the *billions*.
But it's a start.
To be fair until the noggins come up with a more effecient way of building at the atomic level than with electron microscope then true nanotechnology remains pretty far away mores the pity
Not really.
On the whole the MEMS people have shown more initiative they're more used to *making* stuff that moves.
Biologists and virologists are used to *studying* things that move..
Chemists are used to studying things that move when they are warm.
The 3 other groups *have* made "devices" that are on a similar (or in fact substantially smaller) but typically by the mole (IE 6x10^23) of something.
That's sort of the point. While making big things one atom (or molecule) at a time is tought making *lots* of small (or ideally in this case *really* ) small things is quite easy *once* you've worked out the design.
You're quite right it's *very* much a proof of concept rather than a prototype. While I'm not sure there are *no* blood vessels big enough to take this thing It's likely to be a pretty short list.
Also, this device is too big to travel in many of our arteries and veins. I agree with some other fellows here: I would never let them put this inside me with this size. And I doubt this video properly illustrates how blood really flows inside your body. Looks like it is flying, not swimming against the current.
And don't get me started on the shape....
1.86 GHz is somewhat below the 2.45 GHz used in most microwave ovens. Which penetrates organic material just fine, if my morning cholesterol sandwich is anything to go by.
Wavelength has little to do with it. 1.86 GHz waves are in the 15 cm range, way bigger than the 'bot. Ideal aerial length is something you care about when signals are faint - doesn't seem to apply here.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
