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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 ..."
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.
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.
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'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
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.
___
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]
But this technology is eons away from being deployed for anything useful. And by then, they'll likely no longer require tethering.
At least, that's my take.
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seumas.com
More info:
http:/
http://www.ifm.liu.se/~edjag/FS/edjag.ht ml
:wq
it'll put someone out of work?
Good!
the best thing about nanotech is not that it'll allow everyone to purchase super detailed mega-spiffy goods. The best thing about Nanotech is it will take every labor/ service related worker and throw them in the gutter. Where they belong!
Guess what waits for them in the gutter?
the general assembler. A nano-sized robot that can build a copy of itself from nearby available materials. "what does this mean for me as I am an idiot?" you might say. Imagine living without want. Imagine a future where materialism is long dead, anyone can build anything if they have the right plans for their general assembler(s). A future where information and ideas are the new currency. Sainthood to the first one to bring a single assembler to the poor slave laborers. Forever loved for freeing them from the slavery of trying to be a "productive" country, where labor is exchanged for goods & services.
In my vision, we have achieved eden. When the general Assembler hits, you'll find me in a boat 30 miles from the southern shores of Kauai, dropping a canister full of those little robots. Fsck your countries, all of them. I'll be more than happy to live out my life on my own personal paradise, where all I want is grown and controlled by me. If you'd like you can come and visit, perhaps live. Let me warn you though. My paradise involves long peeling waves that never seem to end (I can grow any kind of reef I want). Lots of the Herb growing plentifully everywhere. Don't worry about not being one of the beautiful people though.... I'll just mess with a few of your genes. it might feel a little odd for a while to shed excess fat directly onto the ground, to lose your "unattractive" features. You will enjoy it..
Surfing is religion
you are silly
I Hack You! - Ninja Fish
Man, if you're addiction requires that you resort to another man's pee... *shudder*.
- Yo, whassup with that 'redundant' mark on my first post? Man, I tell you, ever since Slashdot hired these Moderator's from the ex-Microsoft-Intern pool, things have gone down-hill here.
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seumas.com
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