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"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!
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
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
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.
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
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
Biology is reverse engineering, and is illegal nowadays. Better look for a new job.
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.
Non intrusive surgery from a laser equipped nanite ? Be wonderful for clearing arterial blockages, etc...
UPS Sucks
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
The first 1x1 pixel Quicktime videos...
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.
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.
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...
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
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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
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.
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?
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!"
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.