Slashdot Mirror
"Noocyte" Microrobot Can Work On A Single Cell
xemu writes: "This 670 m small robot designed to manipulate single cells inside your body reminds me of the noocytes in Blood Music by Greg Bear. Both the complete article from Science and an abstract are available online; the first link xemu points out has Quicktime videos of the beast in action, for those so equipped. According to the article, "[t]his microrobotic arm can pick up, lift, move, and place micrometer-size objects within an area of about 250 micrometers by 100 micrometers." That's small.
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Vote Homer Simpson for President!
The "standard" form of measurement today (the SI, or systeme internationale), with meters, grams, liters, etc, was invented by the French around 1793. This was "officially" adopted by the rest of the world at various times throughout the twentieth century.
Most people consider July 4, 1776 to be the first date that the United States "existed".
You were about 17 years off, or so.
- Mike Hughes
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Um.. Raquel Welch...
Gee, I guess you've never heard of the +1 bonus. You get it as a default option in your reply window once your karma level breaks 25. Of course, if you're so negative in your posts, you may never get there.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
This shows that the robots are possible. Everything else will follow. Given time the robots could do everything you say.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
... sorry but i just thought that was really funny, not even sarcastic.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
A bunch of these could fight cancer. Also there is a sharp increase in resistance to modern medecine. This threatens to create epidemics. Pretty soon, lice, scabies, ghonorhea, etc antibiotic resistance will be untreatable and we will all be affected. Luckily these diseases cannot become resistant to nanobots. We need nanobots in medecine now.
You want to see Reductionism, take a Biochemistry class. Anyway these 'bots aren't so small, they're talking a few hundred micrometers. The average eukaryotic cell is 3 to 30 micrometers (not counting muscle cells, which are huge), so the best this could probably do is to manipulate a small cluster of cells, presumably cancerous tumors(or benign ones for that matter). Don't buy into the Hollywood image of science, 99% of biotechnologists have a heart and wouldn't use their tools for evil. The 1% that would are weeded out as quacks and never get promoted beyond lab tech.
UGH! Did I just confuse muscle cells with nerve cells? OK time to put the beer down and open up a textbook...
Very Wise grasshopper.
This is why some GI problems and yeast infections are better treated with yoghurt than anti-biotics/anti-fungals.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
why the hell would i have to "keep track" of anything. all you have to do is look at what he posted retard.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
It's just the advancement of medicine, not a vile process.
This would be to the scalpel, what the scalpel is to using leeches. It's just an advancement in the tools, it has nothing to do with our humanity except to help us live longer.
It seems that lots of folks are frightened and even offended by the idea of a technology so advanced that it might allow for significant advancements in health and medical research. It's really the same old concern played out on a different topic.. "This new technology is so powerful...A truly evil dude could wreak havoc on humanity."
This sort of unwarranted fear of technology has resulted in Big Brother type intrusions into our lives. Just look at Carnivore. "If PC's fall into the wrong hands, some truly evil dude could destroy the world with one." Well... so far, we're all still around. Here, most of us are concerned as ever that we maintain free usage of our machines and freedom to mess with all sorts of techie stuff.
Like they say, knowledge is inherently neither good nor bad. It's the use of technology that defines its nature.
I'm getting tired of hearing every religious wacko called 'right-wing'. The loony liberal left (how do ya like it when you're labeled, politico-bigots?) has plenty of religious nutlogs as well, among them Joe Lieberman, Louis Farrakan, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton. Just being a God zealot doesn't automatically qualify you for membership in the Republican Party.
We are the borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Actually, that's not too far off...if there were humans whose skulls were sufficiently resistant to bullets.
I like the bible: it's one of the reasons why I believe in a compulsory religious education. It acts like an innocculation against rabid fundamentalism later.(Alas not original, would thqt I could be so witty. 'Corruptions of Empire' Alex Cockburn).
Elgon
Nah, he's just an arsehole.
(OTOH I would defend to the death his absolute right to spiel whatever liberal horseshit he wishes.)
'Liberalism - You can do anything you like as long as we agree with it.'
Elgon
The imperial system has its uses - namely in the handloading of ammunition for firearms: The numbers are just so much more convenient.
OTOH for just about anything else (barring spectroscopy in chemistry I admit) the good old metric system kicks butt.
Elgon
Nah, just skip out the electrical bit by using biopolymers and other such exotic materials which turn chemical energy into motion directly à la muscle.
Elgon
virus -i n slime; poison; pungency; saltiness.
So there.
http://sysopmind.com/singularity.html It is very interesting. Scroll down to the part regarding nano tech if you would like.
-
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Be wonderful for clearing arterial blockages, etc...
And if those Jack 'n the Boxes keep popping up on every corner down here in the South, there will be plenty arteries to clear...
-Antipop
Wow, do us a favor and don't link to articles that ask for money to read them. The NYT sign up thing I can deal with. But $5 for temporary access to one article? No thanks.
-Waldo
I know sometimes I would :)
Of course their is the potential for disaster, as their is with every new technology that comes out. In this case these nanobots have the ability to change the field of medicine radicaly. Imagine sending in a few thousand nanobots into a cancer paitent. They go through the cells cutting out the ones that cause cancer, or are cancer growth while leaving the healthy ones alive. Thats just ONE example of what these little things can be capable of in the future.
If you plan on taking a standardized test... according to most authorities on the matter, viruses are not considered life because they can't reproduce without a host cell. I won't engage any philisophical debates here, I'm just saying how your answer would be scored on a test.
It's very easy to imagine an organism becoming resistant to a nano-attack -- depending on what a nanobot would plan to do. Suppose a nanobot concentrates on puncturing a cell wall (for cellular organisms). Presumable, there are limitations on how much pressure a nanobot could exert. Perhaps soon there would only be organisms left that had a harder cell wall, impenetrable by nanobot -- or perhaps just hard enough to make it so that an organism tends to be pushed away, rather than punctured. Or perhaps some variants of an organism have more of an ability for motion.
In short, no matter what kind of attack you think of -- whether "chemical" or "physical" or "nano" or psionic (and at the nano level, they're sort of similar, except for maybe psionic) -- chances are, there's some variant of the organism that's resistant. When used massively on the organism, soon only the resistant variant is left. Then the attack is less effective...
Sometimes I wonder if using the attack actually makes things worse by the following mechanism in addition to the above selection: Presumably, a variant organism and a "standard" organism compete for resources in an environment. Thus the standard
organism keeps resources from the variant that it would otherwise have. So the standard organism actaully inhibits the spread of the variant (not to mention providing something for immune systems to cut their teeth on). Remove the standard organism, and the stronger variant has less competition....
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Non intrusive surgery from a laser equipped nanite ? Be wonderful for clearing arterial blockages, etc...
Did anyone else think of MST3k's nanites when they read this? The little buggers'd probably be consulting their union shop steward before agreeing to embark on such a large-scale industrial project.. Probably involves overtime, particularly on an American...
I miss MST..
Your Working Boy,
Let's hope that they don't run on WinCE :)
Oh NO!!! The Blue Face of DEATH!!
Trying is the first step toward failure. - Homer Simpson
hmmm, the link didn't work for me. I got the same ol' registration page. Am I missing something? I really hope someone with access will post it.
Take your fucking life then...
Biology is reverse engineering, and is illegal nowadays. Better look for a new job.
Maybe we don't want you around any way. While I'm sure you expect flames, this is some of the more narrow type of thinking I expect from the hard core bible thumpers. This is the type of thinking that probably cause the Norse colonies on Greenland to fail while the indigenous native population. You probably think the earth is flat, too. "The world is not stranger than you suppose, it is stranger than you can suppose."
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
When I read this, I thought Emmerson was the best troll ever on slashdot, and in the top ten on Usenet. I was so amazed at how articulate this guy was, I wanted to see some of his other art, so I checked his history. Consider:
If this guy really is a troll, then he is the best troll ever in the history of Usenet, all bbs's, fidonet, arpanet, and all other such mediums!. Think about it, is it more likely that this guy is a genious with nothing better to do than troll Slashdot, or that he is really what he looks like: a psychopathic right-winged extremist?
I don't really find this guy funny.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''Go to forum.borngraphics.com to read a few published science fiction short stories about nanotechnology and what it is like living with it. Many of the comments are good, and well reasoned, but a few, well, lets leave them in the trash. Hope this link helps clear up some of the craziness about nano machines that has been airing here.
And, *shrinking* was never part of my cunning plan to enter Rachel Welch's body.
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
Non intrusive surgery from a laser equipped nanite ? Be wonderful for clearing arterial blockages, etc...
UPS Sucks
You forget that "Lightbringer" was Ja's right-hand-man before he got sent down. Whoever said Ja is omnibenevolent? (hint, ask Job.)
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
(Poly)dimethylsiloxane is fuser lubricant used in printers. Basically it's the mechanical equivalent of Astroglide. Whoever was writing this did not 'write down' for his audience at all.
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
Teeny little problem there --- the only "biopolymer" I can think of offhand that does direct chemical->mechanical would be a cellular contractile/walking protein. Every such system I know of requires a fairly complicated array of tubules and filaments, which in turn requires a whole buttload of stuff to keep it organized and working. Moreoever, any system like that is in constant need of renewal and repair; tubules turn over very fast.
Sure, you could do it. But if you've got the machinery to be continually synthesizing and maintaining a tubular network, plus the machinery to turn glucose into ATP for the motors, you're getting damn close to being a muscle cell. Seems to me you'd be better off skipping the robot arms, engineering an antigen-based targeting system for whatever you want to kill, and packing the whole thing up into a little proliferating purely biological bundle of joy. (This is, IMHO, why we may never see nanites at all --- it may turn out to be always easier to just design a bacterium.)
Awesome. Now they can finally get around to circumcising Signal 11's cock.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
What I need is a microbot to fill out fake stuff in needless free registration pages and make up usernames and passwords so I can see stuff in site like this that I'm just visiting once cuz /. says I should. Is that too much to ask?
That sounds like a breakfast cereal for bald people.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
designed to manipulate single cells inside your body
The potential for either malicious use or unanticipated disaster is HUGE here! What steps are being taken to ensure that this doesn't turn in some kind of Frankenstein disaster?
And don't tell me it can't. We've got kudzu in the S. US, rabbits in Australia, and Dutch Elm disease in the N.E. US just to mention a few examples of carelessly poking around with biological systems.
The first 1x1 pixel Quicktime videos...
There's this little thing called entropy. Your nanowhatsises that are busily trying to reconfigure large quantities of molecular bonds in bulk: where do they get the energy to do so? If they're something capable of using the energy available in your body (metabolize sugars, etc), they're almost certainly something our immune system is designed to attack.
Even if they can get over the energy, thing, they're not going to be able to act TOO much faster than the reactions we're used to. The inherent chaos in the system (brownian motion) means molecules are whipping by darn fast, and everything at that level is twisting and jiggling. Standard reactions just grab and hold something and wait for the appropriate molecule to wander by and stick. They work because there's zillions of molecules wandering by, and if the reaction's to have any chance of working there's zillions of the appropriate type. When the right one hits, it sticks, and the various vaguely ionic attraction/repulsion forces (think magnetism, static cling, and the kind of constant vibration that turns sand into quicksand, all rolled into one) the molecule twists into a new shape (still twisting and bending and wobbling and jiggling, it just now spends the majority of its time in the new shape) and the reaction proceeds to the next step.
The reactions that ARE capable of proceeding rapidly aren't the kind that create more order. They create more DISORDER. Set fire to something. Dip it in acid. Blow it up. It's easy to rearrange molecular structure real fast, but the end result is scattered gasses and buckets of waste heat. Increasing order is a PAINFUL uphill climb, that's very slow and consumes a lot of energy.
We've had four and a half billion years of evolution fighting on this point. If there was a better way to do it that didn't have DARN obvious down sides, it would be the way it was done everywhere. Anything capable of taking over the planet in a week or two would have already DONE it at some point over the past few billions years.
There's a bunch of fun reactions we can't use locally. All sorts of exotic compounds that j ust so happen to explode on contact with water or oxidize amost immediately in our remarkably corrosive atmosphere. (Memo: rust ain't normal elsewhere in the universe. The life on this planet made the atmosphere that way a billion or so years after the fact (in part to kill off competing microorganisms that were poisoned by excess oxygen because their guts essentially rusted), and anything from elsewhere that was NOT used to a 20% oxygen atmosphere (where self-sustaining exothermic reactions can be set in motion and just continue! I.E. fire.)... It probably wouldn't live very long.)
I'm not TOO worried about this. :)
Rob
It's bad enough that robots are taking jobs in factories and production lines all over the place. Now, it's going to affect the little people.
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Liberty uber alles.
What an abomination this is to the name of both God and human life! Not only must human life be reduced to such a tiny level, we must also find ways to modify with the very seeds of humanity? What's next, a device which can transcend earthly existance and modify the human soul? Are we so vain?
I'm horrified by the thought that life can be treated as some sort of vile mechanical process rather than the sacred and beautiful thing it is. I'm all for the curing of diseases, but modern medicine is going too far with this. I'm worried that in several years, humanity will be replaced with robotic drones who serve no purpose other than to work and perform. And we're throwing praise and money into this abomination?
Were it not expressly forbidden by the 6th commandmant, I would rather take my life than live in such a horrendously blasphemous society.
Emerson Willowick: Thinker, Writer, Human Being.
Does this mean the ability to alter card markings undetectably? Or would these teeny robots only work if water were "accidentally" spilled onto the cards? What about hard liquor?
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Yes, I think people did realise that a few months ago. Then something (maybe it was timothy or something) set it all straight, saying something like: "Andover does the ad stuff; the Slashdot editors do the content stuff; never the twain shall meet". So Slashdot's policy has nothing to do with Andover's policy and vice versa.
I'm pretty knowledgeable in the ways of science (what also floats? A duck!), but even I had problems reading this one. So, raise your hands, who really understood all of this one? Actually I read Science on a regular basis but usually skip over stuff that make my head hurt.
Still, this is a pretty cool device.
Cool. Maybe an even smaller version can cheat lithography and fix the many circuitry bugs within the AMD Athlon Processor. Sure, people will say "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Reality check: all of AMD's processors are broken. The proof is in their 92.816% x86 compatibility.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
In your free country? Man, you're lame. Metric system was (and will be) de facto standard long before your free country even existed.
Now if I'm hearing or looking at any "unlicensed" content, I simply will not be able to interact with it. If I don't agree to be implanted with their robots, all I will see of their works is gibberish.
Crap. I forgot to renew my subscription to "The Outside World(tm)." I stepped outside to enter my car and suddenly went blind. Guess I'll have to call in sick to work today...
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
If you want to keep the patient inside a constantly varying magnetic field for a long time, maybe, but that doesn't strike me as a particularly sound idea. Even a low-amplitude pulsed field has effects on cells --- not carcinogenic, but it messes with the electrical balance. You could charge the batteries this way (brief exposure to the field every day or so), but I personally wouldn't volunteer to have it going constantly.
There *is* another option I forgot, though... have them feed off the blood glucose or better yet, from the stuff they're destroying. Of course, the efficiency of taking chemical energy and turning that into electrical energy and turning that into mechanical energy is really poor. However, that might actually be beneficial --- most patients could stand to be using their energy reserves less efficiently.
I noticed that. I wish whoever posted the link to the article here would kindly place the full text of the article here as well.
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Dyolf Knip
--
Whoever has played Homeworld: Cataclysm should see some similarity between this, and the game (which is a little scary really). Little ittie bittie spoiler here: For those of you who haven't, here's the gist of it: You're crusing around space and pick up a chunk of metal. On it is this semi-organic stuff. It actually is made up of lots of really small, nano-sized, half-robot, half living beings. They take over whatever they touch (basically) and convert it to whatever is needed. People's bodies are converted to neural networks (and are torn apart in the process, quite painfully). Ships are converted to be used by the nano-organism. Cataclysm page. There really are some scary implications to this. Say someone sprayed a whole bunch of them on you, or dumped some in your glass, what then? They get inside of you, and could basically do whatever they wanted to. Not fun.
"I know how hard it is to put food on your families." - GW
Hey kids, Someone, please mod this up for awhile, just so that they'll fix the HTML in the story. As you all know, it looks like somebody forgot to put a tag and it's making the rest of the site look like one big link. Hopefully timothy or one of the other editors will notice and fix it. toodles
If you're not wasted, the day is.
If you're not wasted, the day is.
The I-tags are the wrong way around! At least on my Netscape Communicator 4.7 it shows the whole rest of the page in italics, underlined and in the same color as links (ie. looks like one looong link)! (OK, it seems like a but in netscape, but still could it be corrected....)
The effect of which is like having your brain smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.
--Douglas Adams, HHGTTG
I doubt, therefore I may be.
Sounds like you know your stuff - in some ways an engineered bacterium or virus is a nanite!
Elgon
Well I can't remember exactly what Rob said, but I don't think that's completely true. I think Rob would have said something to the effect that Andover's take-over wouldn't have any impact on the editorial content, which is true.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Well so far humans have not developed armored skin to hamper the penetration of scalpels. I dont think a simple life form like a virus or a bacteria could use evolution to stop precision nanodevices. A diamond scalpel with an edge 1 atom wide could penetrate any massive lifeform like a bacteria (massive in comparison to the tools.) At the scale we are talking about (still decades away) the huge wet sloppy defenses of life forms will be no match for precise engineered devices. No virus or bacteria is as smart as humans. The reason they develop defenses to antibiotics and such medicines is the crude sloppy nature of these medicines, which jam machinery in the bacteria, or use some other mechanism which isn't controlled or precise in any way. If a machine grabs a bacteria and proceeds to slice it up, there is no hope of natural selection defeating this, ever.
"Know my stuff"? Maybe. I know bio and I'm trying to become a decent engineer. I work on MEMS, but I'm not good at it; I'm theoretically as good at manual lithography as anyone in the lab, and I get crap for fabrication yields.
Anyway, you're absolutely right, a bacterium or virus is a nanite. OTOH (and IMHO), it's not what people are thinking of when they think of nanites --- they're thinking of things that are basically a robot made really small.
Actually, I need to revise my prior statement again. If we can actually make them, there may indeed be a role for mostly-nonbiological nanites. Since most biological stuff is really working on a statistical basis, it always gets a few false positives and negatives. There might be tasks (not medical so much, but perhaps industrial) where absolute 100% precision is required, and then you might need the digital paradigm. Maybe. I can't think of such an application offhand (even an advanced material can be made to self-assemble if you're clever), but I'm a lousy futurist.
Out of the first 18 posts to this article, 5 had comments that were posted with serious intent. One was a first post, one was a random troll, and 4 were about using this to manipulate people's small dicks. The rest were stupid jokes. -Splat
-Splat
I'd like to have read the articles, but to pay for them, what if they turn out to be shit....wouldn't I feel silly having forked over my hard earned bucks. What gives? Obviously, not this site! I wonder if they pay for referrals?
I wish I could think of a witty Sig. Sigh!
I saw the article when it was first printed this summer, and this thing is indeed cool. However, don't fool yourself into thinking that you're going to see arterial plaque-scrapers or tumor hunter-killers anytime soon. There would be two major problems with having something like this living inside the body: power and control. It may only draw a volt, but we still don't have small batteries. Along the same lines, you need to be able to hit the target, which means you're going to need sensors and either a transceiver or an onboard processor; none of those is even remotely cell-sized yet. There might be a use for it in microsurgery, if they can come up with something that lets the surgeon control an array of arms fairly naturally.
Still pretty neat, though. My lab does MEMS work, but we don't have the lithography capabilities to build something like this.
You can download a PDF version of the paper (without registration) from here
- El Nino
This thing is about a millimeter large.
It's visible with naked eye. It's not
autonomous/programmable, and has no
built in power source. It is not useful
as is.
Real stuff is decades away, if feasible at
all. Take grand words like nanotech
with a bag of salt.
It is -misuse- of a technique that is the problem. This provides unnecessary selection pressure towards the variant you can do nothing about, which is why there is a big stink about overperscription of antibiotics and what have you.
Mankind has been manipulating its environment since the dawn of time, and will continue to do so, ever more effectively. Evolution ceased to be a natural (in the sense of blind) process from the moment when lifeforms started to think for themselves, and our own evolution is most emphatically in our own hands now.
It is of course your choice not to take part in this science-driven future of our own making, but I have no idea how you could possibly avoid it: almost everything you wear, eat, touch and see around you in daily life is a product of technology (unless you grow your own vegetables, peel them with a flint knife and eat them raw), so if you are sincere you will need to travel to one of the few untouched parts of the planet, throw away all your man-made cloths and implements, and go back to extreme basics and a life on the edge of existence. I doubt that you would succeed in your quest though; even the most primitive groupings of people use modern technology these days. You'd have to be a hermit as well.
On the other hand, you may be happy with modern life up to now and just consider these latest advances as one step too far. Well, in that case you're just a blinkered Luddite and I have no sympathy for you.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
How 'bout we call them robits?
<A HREF="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/N668.SlashDot /B20201;sz=468x60;ord=969347632969347632 ?">
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It seems to be somewhat random, intertwined with their own ads, but it's there. Just reload a page a few times and watch your proxy logs.
D:\ijb20\junkbstr.exe: GPC slashdot.org/x 60;ord=969347632969347632? crunch!9 347632617 crunch!7 632617 crunch!3 2677 crunch!3 2697 crunch!
D:\ijb20\junkbstr.exe: GPC ad.doubleclick.net/ad/N668.SlashDot/B20201;sz=468
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D:\ijb20\junkbstr.exe: GPC images.slashdot.org/pagecount.gif?/index.pl,96934
D:\ijb20\junkbstr.exe: GPC images.slashdot.org/banner/swag5001en.gif?9693476
D:\ijb20\junkbstr.exe: GPC images.slashdot.org/banner/swag5004en.gif?9693476
All those web bugs, too...
(Yes, I'm using NT. Shoot me.)
--
For some background on emersons hilarious bigoted(and just plain stupid) posts go to his info and read the post he just made on linux in africa. Either he is a toal idiot or one the most fantastic trolls ever!
Oh my god emerson! Did you eat dinner tooday!? Holy shit you were "modifing with the very seeds of humanity" by altering their glucose content. You'll surely suffer eternal damnation for this abomination of tinkering with life's sacred inner workings!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
I'm worried that in several years, humanity will be replaced with robotic drones who serve no purpose other than to work and perform.
And in what way is this different from how most modern corporations now treat their employees?
Personally, I'd be glad to see myself replaced with a robotic drone that served no purpose other than to do all my work for me while I lounged in an easy chair watching the latest episode of "Battle Robots Meet Crazy Machines".
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
This is a robotic arm capable of moving individual cells. Exciting, but only a step to something useful.
The noocytes in Blood Music were self-contained computers designed to mimic white blood cells, who could network together and create a very powerful (sentient, in the story) computer.
How do the two have anything to do with one another? I'm confused. Or was the Blood Music reference just name-dropping in an attempt to get the story accepted?
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.