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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.
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.
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.
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.