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leb writes: "Eurekalert has a synopsis of an upcoming Science article that describes the creation of 'microbots' 670 micrometers tall and 170 to 240 micrometers wide that were able to manipulate small cell like beads in biological environments. Coupled with a multisensor area, the microrobots also may suggest lab-on-a-chip designs, or 'factory-on-a-desk' tools, programmed to assemble various
microstructures. Sounds a little like Neil Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age' to me ..."
I mean sipping a beer, of course. I don't think we condone bear-sipping in this country.
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seumas.com
For those of you interested there are movies and pictures of the machines at here.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
or they could do it by having a moderation option for -1 posts that says move to offtopic posts. Then the post would move to and off topic sid like for example using this story sid=00/07/04/1412229/offtopic Then all the people who want to read osm stories and look at beer spam could do so.
Nascantur in Admiratione. (Let them be born in Wonder)
Shall we consider this your triumphant return, or a courageous act of defiance? Or both?
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The geeks shall inherit the earth.
Well, ideally, the people getting unemployed should not have to work anymore. The fact that they have to just proves how strange a capitalistic world behaves. Of course, if this was Soviet Russia, they would also be assigned new jobs. Maybe unemployed people not having to work produces too much offspring =). Anyway, not _having_ to work I think is a goal for many people in this world. Let's say the workers buy (or get) shares in their factory and buy nanotech to make things go around. Suddenly you have maybe 1000 newborn capitalists that just screw all day long. Yay for the new economy =)! Hmm, I think I just got trolled. Darn.
return -ENOSIG;
These things are FAR from being nanotechnology. Cells are on the order of 1 micron; these robots are nearly 1000 times the size of a cell. In terms of volume, 10^6 times larger. The 200 micrometer glass beads are HUGE compared to the size of cell.
Nano technology implies manufacturing on the scale of the nanometer; these are performing tasks on the MILLIMETER scale, six orders of magnitude larger. Hell, if you looked closely I bet you could see these guys at work with the naked eye.
Wow, you could give each one a grit and command them to move to the stove. What would you have then? ;)
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Seems to me the major problem is a lack of moderation points floating around in this article. We all know moderators have no problem slapping a -1 on anything that remotely smells "troll". Perhaps the answer is to allocate more moderation points on weekends/holidays, or when the trolling starts to get out of hand?
These things are FAR from being nanotechnology. Cells are on the order of 1 micron...
That would certainly depend on the type of cell.
The largest cell I've seen when gazing at them through a microscope in Grade 12 biology was about 1000 microns (1 mm) across (vegetable cell of some kind).
The smallest that I've seen is a cell scraped from the inside of my own cheek with a toothpick. It was 50 microns across.
Bacteria are much smaller and are still single cells, but it's presumably animal cells that we'd mainly be dealing with.
At 650um by about 200 um, these robots are 13 cheek cells high by 4 cheek cells wide. The robots could maipulate them as easily as you could manipulate a can of food.
(Referring to osm, obviously)
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The geeks shall inherit the earth.
Because emmet is a poser?
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
The human body creates it's own kinetic energy field. That is how the Seiko kinetic watches without batteries work. Just have to figure out how to harness this without a huge increase in size. Perhaps something like a computer on a lan and the internet. It doesn't try to connect to the internet, it just sends out requests and assumes that they'll be answered. I know I'm stupid and this probablly shows it, but ohwell.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but isn't that exactly how the human body naturally prevents cancer?
Yes, deadly cancer usually happens when the immune system can't recognize the difference between the cancerous cells and the healthy ones. After all, they can only examine it at a chemical level. I mean, why doesn't your immune system destroy moles? They're not healthy, normal tissue.
Doctors (and their machines), on the other hand, can step back further than the chemical level, and recognize an unhealthy and unnatural growth from its shape and location.
You can be killed by a benign tumor, if it's in the wrong place and big enough. When a tumor goes malignant, that means that it's releasing cells that take root in other parts of the body, sprouting more tumors wherever they land; either through one growing in just the wrong place, or the cumulative weakening of all sorts of organs being interfered with, it kills you. If you can weed out tiny tumors by the hundred, as quickly as they sprout up, you remove the sources of new seed cells. Do it for long enough, and well enough, and not only will you keep the tumors from killing the patient, but sooner or later, there won't be enough sources of seed cells to keep new tumors sprouting up, and the patient is cured.
That's the theory anyway. I hope it works.
I have read both,
in fact, just finished Snow Crash by Stephenson, and am starting The Difference Engine by Gibson/Sterling.
I enjoyed Stephenson more, Gibson is fairly scatelogical (sp?) and dark, Stephenson is funny, dark, funny and very interesting. With the Gibson books I feel like I am looking down on a massive world of mega-tech/drugs, with Stephenson I felt like I was actually there.
my 2 cents..
So does this mean that we no longer have to worry about birth control? Because if they can be used for that I want mine to have a joystick and a camera (for research reasons of course) :).
I've long felt that the final cure for cancer will be a persistent weeding strategy: detect every tiny tumor as it gets started, and cut it out ASAP.
Tiny robotic implements like this, which can be built onto the tip of a needle (or better yet, a "tentacle" needle using the same technology that can flex and move around important nerves and blood vessels, so it can safely penetrate to any place in the body) and can function in conductive fluids (like in the human body), are probably the most important missing component to implement automated tumor weeding.
It could also have very important applications in cleaning out blood vessels (much finer than our current "balloon" and "burner" methods).
This kind of microtechnology could provide many of the health benefits expected from nanotechnology. This could be the key to pushing the average life expectancy past 100 years.
For the drug testing thing....you don't need microbots.
There's already a company which deals in this sort of thing using chemicals. Check out this site.
I think it's kinda revolting and saddening, but they're not doing anything illegal it seems, so more power to them.
In the slashdot tradition of insisting upon the distinction (that no one else at all ever bothers to make) between "crackers" and "hackers," may I insist, in the cause of verbal precision, that we now also distinguish between "trolls" and "spammers"?
By the commonly accepted definition, a troll is someone looking to stir up a heated discussion by posting messages which aren't quite, ah, sincere. There may be, no there is, a certain degree of dishonesty in the composition of a traditional troll; however, the fact remains, if no one gets excited enough to respond, then the troll must be held a failure. Now isn't that the essence of a web log, to stimulate readers to participate? Isn't this the very reason why it is better to prowl slashdot than to sit and soak up TV? A successful troll on a weblog like this one is typically followed by many responses and rebuttals. And indeed, often what a troller has to say is often intellectually stimulating; on other occasions the substance of a troll is garbled, absurd rubbish, but at least it gets people to laugh, and while laughter may be officially verboten and verba non grata at the otherwise excellent Kuro5hin, I hope no one reading this here has a soul so dead that he decries the value of laughter. So at the very least, a troll has a certain definite value.
Conversely, a spammer is an odious fellow who overloads communication channels with innumerable copies of a message which no rational person has the slightest interest to read. The essence of spam is that it is something which emburdens you with the task of throwing it in the garbage.
osm is a troll, a damn good one. streetlawyer is a fucken troll. 80md is a troll, and so is Jon Ericson, and so is gnarphlager, and so is spiralx, and so, logging in from Chiapas, is Estanislao Martinez (andale! andale! arribe! viva Che!). The guy who penned this swell little piece of nuttiness is a troll. I'm sure if you peruse slashdot regularly you can think of other favorites of your own. Did you ever see any of these guys flood a thread with copy after copy of their works? No, you have not. These are funny guys, and their light and wacky humor is nothing but good news here in slashdot. I don't propose that we hand slashdot over to the true troll underground entirely, much as they'd probably like it, but I do say that slashdot can and should tolerate their eccentric literary troll art, in the reasonably small doses they supply.
But now compare these artists to beer mug man, or penis bird guy, or this fellow who has posted, out of the 141 comments here, 40 (as of my last count) pointless content-free comments titled "NOBODY" to this article. The basic difference is, their posts are all empty and all the same, i.e. boring, and they repeat and repeat and repeat themselves. That, fellow readers, is nothing more nor less than pure spam.
Please refrain from insulting osm by comparing his creative stuff with repetitive boring crap such as that. Hormel Spam(tm) is actually pretty tasty pan-fried with poached eggs and wheat bread toast - try it sometime - but weblog spam is naught but slop, fit only for the garbage pail.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Well, I remember reading one of the Lem books written in the 60's
where nanobots on a foreign planet were used to build walls,
etc... And I guess that the idea was floating around in various
"futurologic congresses" etc.
Still, the Diamond Age is a "relatively" serious exploration of what
would be the social implication of the nanotechnology age. When written,
Stephenson had available another thirty years of technological advances,
so he was in a better position to theoretize about this than Lem.
I guess that when he wrote about this, he considered the Diamond Age
as being a serious possibility for the not too remote future (Neil,
are you reading this?). Lem was probably considering the
"futurological congress" as being an intellectual game - and the
adventures of Pirx the pilot a serious "anticipation". Now it might
happen that we will have nanobots, but no space travel...
Lotzi
Damn it, if bitchslapping is okay, why can't they have a kuro5hin-style policy of just tearing out all of the completely OT posts?
This thing will be useful. Lots of the molecular nanotechnology people have been saying that micromachinery will never be useful.
It looks more and more like we'll be going down one step at a time, not just suddenly building a molecular assembler with chemical processes and AFMs. Like Feynman thought: build one little set of hands, use that to build a smaller set of hands, until you've got one built out of atoms.
I remember a portion of the book "Nano" that mercilessly, and utterly without class, mocked the efforts of the micromachinery crowd, taking special effort to make fun of the "three little gears" (an electrostatic motor and two gears driven by it). I don't know if this outburst was the fact that they were building mechanisms, while the nanotech people were still only doing simulations, but I thought it was completely uncalled-for.
Nanotechnology will be an incredible revolution in technology, but advances in microtechnology are not only useful in themselves, but IMHO essential to the development of nanotechnology. I remember one thing a nanotech researcher said that convinced me of this: he said that they thought they had built a wire and some diodes, but they couldn't hook them to anything, so they just couldn't tell.
BTW, they're actually performing tasks on the micrometer scale, to be fair. Think: a human is built at the meter scale, and one can work at the millimeter scale. This thing is built at the millimeter scale, and it can move things around to micrometer accuracy. I'm sure a nanotech assembler would be at least micrometer across, but you wouldn't call it "microtechnology" because of that.
In my mind, I've conjured up this surreal image of some guy sipping a bear while an army of microbots construct a new liver for him, in a cooler on his desktop, next to his PC...
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seumas.com
It's amazing to me that these little guys can move a glass beed more than 250 microns (. They're only ~200 microns big, so that's like an ant moving another ant the length of his body. Not a big achievment for an ant, but a pretty impressive undertaking for todays nanostructures. I know a few mold makers who would like to set a few of these things loose inside of a high detail plastic mold to polish the hard to reach areas. They still have to be wired to a controler, but they can reach areas unreachable with conventional tools.
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Keep in mind, they still have to be "tethered" to some kind of controler.
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I think this is really great and I'm glad to see something that gives me hope that nanotech might start to mature during our lifetimes.
After reading the article, though, I think there's still a long way to go before crying that we have a cure for cancer or aging...
Why? Because while the article does a lot of explainning about what these nanobots can do, which is pretty impressive, a few important problems are practically neglected any mention in the article.
First, how are the nanobots controlled? If it's not by a computer program then they can't be called 'bots just yet. In fact it seems from the article that they actually have to have little wires to each of these nanobots in order to control them.
The next question is how are they powered. If there is no convinient way to power them, all this means is more wires. With all these wires I imagine it must be quite a complex setup for just one nanite.
The good thing about this, though, is that in order to make truly useful truly smart nanites, small robotic hands are an important step in the right direction.
Honestly?
So called "slave labor" is resposible for the majority of work done. A "factory on a stick" will do nothing more than leave millions of people un-employed. While the wages and safety conditions might not be something to write home about, sweatshops produce so much for us. It is a slap in the face against these workers to even suggest that the geeks could create a way to replace them.
Would you like to be faced with un-employment one day because some hacker across the ocean found a way to replace with you a new gadget?
I didn't think so.
,
faeryman
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seumas.com
This means the world is one step closer to all problems being software problems!
Robots in all sizes, for all purposes, which only we understand and control...
Our plans for world domination are coming to fruition. We will be like gods!
No! We have surpassed the gods themselves!
Muahahahaha!
[TheDullBlade is struck by lightning, leaving a smoking pair of boots and a sickening burnt meat smell]
Will this mechanical assembler technology significantly assist us in devising more affordable and more efficient space technology?
I have long been concerned that advances in nanotechnology, biotechnology, and/or artificial intelligence will result in a technological cataclysm which the human race will not survive (or at least not as recognizeably human). I have rigorously tracked trends in these technologies, and the ability to build increasingly powerful devices at low cost has been increasing at an exponential rate across the board, much faster than most people have expected. I deeply and truly fear the time when the equipment exists in every highschool lab to (for instance) custom-engineer virii or bacteria, and the entire human race is still stuck on this mudball. As the availability of this technology increases, the probability of some sick-minded biohack (et al) fashioning a doomsday virus approaches unity.
We need to get out of here and spread the genetic pool around a bit, across multiple disjoint life support systems, preferably with a big hunk of empty space between them, so that accident or malice can do only limited damage. Before that can happen, space technology needs to become much, much more affordable. Two things that would really give us a boost in the right direction would be (1) a cheaper and/or more effective power source, and (2) lighter building materials.
Light, strong building materials would go a long way to dropping the cost of pushing a payload out of the Earth's gravity well, by making the space vehicle and (potentially) the payload lighter, decreasing the amount of energy required for achieving orbital velocities. What are some ways these micro-assemblers could assist us in creating these lighter materials?
Obviously, even if we reduce the per-capita vehicle mass of boosting a human into orbit to zero, our vehicle would still need to expend enough energy to boost the human's mass into orbit. This takes a lot of energy, preferably in a lightweight form. Liquid oxygen and hydrogen is about as good as we can get, energy-density-wise, without going nuclear and building an Orion drive. How might these micro-assemblers assist us in more cheaply generating large volumes of liquid hydrogen and oxygen? Is there a better fuel (perhaps easier to store) that could be made less expensive, or even possible in the first place, to produce using these micro-assemblers?
Food for thought.
-- Guges --
How 'bout a Swedish fraggle?
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The geeks shall inherit the earth.
More info:
http:/
http://www.ifm.liu.se/~edjag/FS/edjag.ht ml
:wq
Who said that the robots would be automated? It would make a lot more sense for these machines to be controlled by the doctor. There needs to be some sort of feedback. Minimally invasive surgery is a vague term.
As to your concerns about nanotechnology, you might want to have a peek at this article by Bill Joy... http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
I've seen a lot of places saying that these are the precursors to nano-machines and thr cure for cancer and many other things. But what else could they mean to us?
From wat I have seen of them both in the article and in the movies that have been linked to in various replies, is that they would appear to make excellent artificial muscle replacements. As everyone here knows, I'm sure, muscles are controlled by electrical impulses sent from the brain. An electric jolt causes them to contract and the removal of that jolt causes them to relax. From what I can tell in the article, this is essentially what these little "fingers" do. Of course, they are nothing more ingenious than a tiny bimetallic strip responding to electricity instead of heat, but I think this technology could well be adapted to make muscle replacements. This application would be a godsend for people who have had motorbike wrecks to sports injuries.
Does anyone have an opinion on why this might not work? Or a better explaination of how it might work?
The chains are broken
Loki is free
Ragnarok is at hand...
Good post, I see you know your Lem :) Actually, if the FTL research is really true, perhaps space travel will be possible. And hey, they found water on Mars too! It's all so damn depressing :(
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
Come on, you mainstream techno boy... The microbots in this article have been predicted and described in detail long before Stephenson even started writing (a hellish day that was). Greg Bear has been writing about this shit for a decade, Stanislaw Lem for 2 decades. I am SO fucking tired of Stephenson's books used as a reference like he's some sort of big time thinker. Yeah, and he predicted virtual reality too, my ass...
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
sid=slashcode for discussion of slash related code. Thankyou.
100um is not far off the upper limit for cells in the human body, though it's true enough that you're not going to be doing a lot of cellular work with that arm. The average red blood cell is in the 7-9um range.
:v)
But bear in mind that this micro-arm is the first one ever. These things are likely to get smaller as experience is gained, and there's not a lot of point in doing research work on a device that you can't diagnose - keeping it visible is a good idea for research purposes.
Another thought: 6 months ago 500nm was the size of the best state-of-the-art gripper, and that couldn't work inside a human body anyway as it was made of silicon. That's just a pair of tweezers too, not the whole arm. What will we get in the next 6 months?
How soon until the smallest arm we can make can manipulate the largest regular molecules we can make? I say within 5 years.
Vik
Mod parent up. This is true stuff.
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I was talking about a little arm on the end of a needle, or a whole flexible needle made the same way. Nothing about free floating, robots with self-contained power and control systems. You don't have to navigate capillaries or lymph paths to cut out little tumors, you just have to avoid cutting up important nerves and large blood vessels. The body can heal the little punctures itself.
I also never referred to them as "microbots". The robots I was imagining are big floor models containing a top-of-the-line modern computer and with one or more "microscalpel syringes" mounted on robotic arms about the size of human arms.
"Tiny, submersible robots may suggest a single-cell retrieval system, desktop biofactories, or even tools for minimally invasive surgery.."
Mm. -Minimally invasive surgery.. Little bots crawling around in my gut.. Call me a ludite, but I'm not sure how much faith I would place in a scheme like this - how does the failsafe work? Imagine them programed by a certain nameless favorite from the Pacific Northwest.. "Dr! Quick.. Reboot the Nano-bots! We're getting the blue foam of death" as the little bots get stuck in a endless loop.
air and light and time and space