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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.
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
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.
Biology is reverse engineering, and is illegal nowadays. Better look for a new job.
Non intrusive surgery from a laser equipped nanite ? Be wonderful for clearing arterial blockages, etc...
UPS Sucks
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.
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.
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.
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.