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Swarms Of Tiny Robots To Monitor Water Pollution
savi writes "The University of Southern California School of Engineering has received a research grant to create swarms of microscopic robots to monitor potentially dangerous microorganisms in the ocean. Basically, nanoscale robots with electrical and mechanical components that can propel themselves, send signals, and do basic computations. "
Will the nanoprobes monitor the water supply for pollution by nanoprobes? Huh? Huh?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
.. until we have to send out the second swarm to monitor for the pollution levels the first swarm cause? ;)
Yeah, it might sound like a troll, but it's not! Honestly, how do we know these robots won't affect the ecology of the water they are placed in?
"Old man yells at systemd"
So can you end up drinking the microscopic robots? Couldn't this raise as much protest as floride in the water? (We must protect our precious bodily fluids!)
Oh well, I suppose I don't have enough iron in my diet anyhow...
This is fascinating, but I'd prefer to see these studies being done in tanks, not in the ocean. This smells a lot like somebody solving a problem by creating a different one.
Just great.
I give it two weeks before they get in to all the systems, shut down our life support and start calling us ugly bags of mostly water.
BAH. Where is Wil Wheaton now to save us?
And I thought lead in the water supply was bad enough. Now I have to have my water tested for excessive robot levels.
this will be the first step towards nanobots inside the human body. If these things can monitor pollutant rate, then they can be easily modified to check for oxygen level in the blood, nutrient level, etc. If they can start moving things around, maybe they can fix internal damage . . .
There's lots of great application for this . . . if it starts by fixing pollution, cool, but I'm going to continue to look ahead to all of the great thigns that this can lead to.
K
This is cool, Im all for minature robotics, like the
one the Brit came up with that feeds and then powers itself on their bodies. They could gather invaluable
information on the oceans, BUT are hey going to put a JONAH circut in these things ?
I mean what happens when a plankton feeder sucks up a hundred thousand or so of these, it will (may) register a higher temp, movement pattern etc.
I love the idea of a self sufficient ocengoing robot, I always have, I saw a solar robot creature
demo a few years ago, neuralnet stuff, that the jellyfish would react to the crab etc, Why no use a larger scale verson, build em in Taiwan at 2 bucks a pop and set em loose, A larger unit could accomplish this, perhaps much more efficently, Miniturization for Minituriztions sake has always eluded me.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Wouldn't "swarms of microscopic robots" constitute "potentially dangerous microorganisms"?
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Is this anything like those Sea Monkeys I had as a kid? :-)
From the article:
"I don't think these robots will be confined to the ocean. We will eventually make robots to hunt down pathogens..."
Quoth Agent Smith: "Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are... the cure."
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Hehe, yeah just imagine if one got into some geeks stomach.
"Sir robot 1,344,533 is reporting that the whole ocean has turned to Mountain Dew!"
The Anti-Blog
It's okay. Just boil tapwater before you drink it; that will destroy any microscopic robots within.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
BTW, read in the Sunday paper that Erin Brockovich is on the trail of another suit against PG&E for Chromium 6 in ground water.
Interested in a history of water use and mis-use? Read Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The robots probably live longer...
Best Slashdot Co
Now for those of us that read the Damn article. The ability for the project to suceed on only 1.5 mil is pretty ambitious, the article mentions that they need the software to link together millions of these 'bots via weak radio link, and a mass producing method of creating the other 999,990 units. I would really like to know how they fit a device that transmits a unique indenitifer and a binary digit in an envirment that would seem to distort any type of transmission and amplify electric interfernece.
"Get them before they get....
The problem I've always seen to nanobots is where does such a small device store energy? In looking at various proposals and ideas on how they would work and what they'd do, it seems energy storage is always the missing component. Propulsion, RF transmission, anything involving actuators are all going to be energy-expensive activities, where does the energy come from?
They article mentioned that these would be used in oceans near industrial areas, not your local artisan well or mountain spring. And if you did *drink* them, well then you would *release* them later on, a billionth of an inch is so small you could breath these in a 1,000 at a time and they would get stuck in the mucus membrane in your lungs. Ok..Ok.. You get injected with these things via a crazed scientist in your local mall, your white blood cells, liver, and kidneys would desolve them in you blood stream and release the waste o'natural.
"Get them before they get....
The gut of a whale or other plankton-eating creature.
-- yawn. --
Phillips has entered into an agreement with USC to piggy back encrytion software into the nanoprobes. The purpose is that "humans" would serve as node-receivers in wireless networks. The nanaoprobes would then be able to scramble and encrypt data before arriving at its final destination.
...
*sigh*
Wasnt there an article some time about shooting lasers from the moon to create electricity?
repeat after me
"To much Star Trek"
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
Microscpoic to humans, yes, but not to fish. Will fish eat these things or at least chew them up enough to destroy them?
Fish are unintelligent enough to mistake a hairy peice of silver for a fly, why wouldn't they mistake these robots for some food?
void women (int money, time_t time);
No, I can't do it.
Jokes aside, that's interesting stuff - but also a little scary. Once you have free-roving nanites monitoring pollutants in the Pacific, how long is it before someone comes up with a way to have them monitor, say, intoxicant levels in your blood?
Just imagine having your workplace demand the ability to monitor what you do with your body 24/7. "Have a few margaritas last Saturday, Wilson? You should really keep an eye on that sort of behavior. You are a company asset, after all..."
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
If you read the article you will learn that they don't even have a fully functioning prototype yet, and anything they say they are going to do is wild speculation at this point. As are the comments here forcasting ecological disaster or weird effects when ingested.
Also, from the article, they currently are trying to learn how to control 5-10 robots. They are a long way from learning how to control the millions of robots needed for any monitoring to be effective. The researches said that nanotechnology today is at the same stage of development as the Internet was in the late 1960's.
I'd say we are a decade or more from seeing any of these things actually released into the wild.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
BREAKING NEWS
It is no secret that those "tiny robots" which monitor the quality of our drining water end up in our body system. However, the big puzzle about why we are seeing so many good citizens coming to a temporarily halt and turning into "blue" color for a short period of time, has been explained.
It turned out that the government has used an Operating System called TinyXP (tm) produced by a company called Microsoft to be the source of the problem. Aperently those robats are "crashing" and emiting "blue" color until they recover.
While Microsoft did not acknowledge the problem, nor did they deniy it. They simply said that they didn't have any comments.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
I'm not that big on the mechanical nanotech, we have a long way yet to go before we can duplicate some of the most perfect nanotech systems out there: microorganisms.
We have the ability right now to craft custom virii and bacteria which can replicate and destroy other creatures. If we want to kill cryptosporidium and giardia (two common water-bourne parasites) then we should find the natural predators of such creatures and turn them to our needs.
It's similar to the chemical spraying of crops to prevent insects and other pests from destroying harvests. For years we have been laying on the pesticides in order to stop crops from being ruined. Instead of relying on chemicals, we should instead be investing in natural methods of reducing pests, such as the use of preying mantis, ladybugs, egg-laying wasps, and other natural predators.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that all chemicals are evil and should be eliminated. I'm a chemist myself. I do believe that we can be much more effective if we cut back on the more toxic chemicals and replace them with more gentle alternatives. Many of the harsher chemicals build up and end up destroying the producing potential of our farmlands.
Sapere aude!
/.
The article specified weak radio signals as the method of inter-nodal communication, but propagation of radio frequencies through water that isn't nano-pure really sucks.
Sonar seems more feasible, particularly in salt water where radio doesn't work worth a damn. Of course then you'd have to worry about noise pollution... hey, wait, even if the radio signals work you are going to be really messing with electrically sensitive organisms (electric eels being the obvious example, but they aren't the only ones).
--Charlie
But yes, the effect needs to be addressed. Although, these aren't self-replicators it should be noted. The density of the bots will be crucial. Assuming they don't build up to a measurable level of "silt", I don't see an immediate problem. Organisms can cope with drinking grains of sand, and these will be comparable to that, or smaller. From what I can gather from the article, they are planning to use inorganic materials for the most part (metals, silicon). If that's the case, I would expect them to be treated much like any other piece of grit. Its the organic compounds that really stick with you.
I like this idea in general, but I'm a little dubious about how well it will work, regardless of side-effects. If you want to use antibodies, you'd better get the binding affinity just right, or you'll end up with a lot of false positives (low affinity) or a bot with all its sensors permanently clogged up (high affinity). Passing through fish digestive systems, getting sucked up by filter-feeders, and generally tossed about in a well-lit, ion-rich solution doesn't do much for long term operation. Are we planning to pump these things into the ocean nonstop?
Still, good luck to them. I'd love to see something like this made to work.
Entropy gets everyone.
... that allready does this. They're called frogs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
available here. The applications of the general techniques they are developing are pretty interesting. Even the further development of SPM's into three dimensional probing is pretty remarkable. Not to mention the greater ends of nanotechniques on manufacture.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Once this technology is developed it can also be used to monitor for other things. Send a swarm of nanobots into the sewer system looking for traces of illegal substances in waste for example. Just have the little buggers "backtrace" through the sewer network to find your house.
Have a nice day.
I assume that the effective distance for communication between these things is relatively short. Given the rather large body of water they'll be released into, wouldn't a prohibitively large number of these things be required?
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Perhaps I am missing something here, but from the short description, it sounds as if the concept is to put millions of "free floating" tiny robots into the ocean, where they would communicate amongst each other and thence to the outside world. Each robot would have negligably little computational power, but in combination, the robots could have a great impact.
However, it is easy to see that if the robots are indeed freely floating, and are allowed to drift around for long periods of time, they will become separated. Indeed, given enough time, the equilibrium density of robots reached will simply be the number of robots over the entire oceanic volume! The robots will have become so far removed from their neighbors that they will have become useless. Unless the robots are physically tethered together, it is difficult for me to see how they will remain close to one another for any significant duration. And if they are physically tethered, in esseence to form a larger body, why bother with all of the nanoscale complexity? Why not just monitor using conventional silicon technology attached to floating buoys?
It seems like the grant will be pushing nanoscale technology further, which is great for everyone, but I have serious reservations as to their chosen application. It would seem to me that an application where the probes would be fixed in location (in human tissue, for instance) would be a better application
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
What's the problem? I don't know what the best way to produce energy from pressure difference is but I know a few ways to do it (like spinning a magnet in a solenoid) however there are much better ways of producing energy by using various membranes - you can actually use the salt water of the ocean to charge your capacitors by using diffusion of a membrane (fuel cells can be built on this principle) Here is a link (of-course the temperatures they are talking about are out of range, but still...) http://www.dechema.de/f-und-i/europa/englisch/erns t/i_er5d02.htm
You can't handle the truth.
Sounds a great deal like Roger Meyers Sr.'s movie, "Scratchtasia". I can just see billions of axe-wielding, mouse-shaped nanobots hacking away at each individual cell in our bodies, causing rapid decay into dust.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
This kind of unscientific bullshitting by unqualified people just kills me. There are many fundamental flaws in this project. Here's a few
Here's an example of the kind of rigorous though that has gone into this research proposal. Here we have "David Caron, professor of biological sciences and a co-investigator on the project" stating:
Oh is that all it is? And who says that a robot that can do all of that isn't complicated or powerful? And pray, do you know how well radio signals travel in water? Here's a hint, the US Navy subs only use it for extremely short range communication and extremely long range communication (with frequencies in the 10's of Hz range). Oh and did you know that your antenna needs to be proportional to the wavelength you are going to transmit and recieve? Your nano-bots are going to be how big? How are you going to figure out where the signal is coming from? direction finding? GPS?
And pray tell, how are you going to power these microscopic wonders (which need to transmit radio waves mind you)? Remember volume shrinks by the cube.
This is the one that really had me rolling on the floor
Is that all? So, we just need to duplicate the functionality of bateria without the self-duplication but with added radio communication, telemetry (to figure out where signals are coming from), and data acquisition. Oh and social/aggregate organization. Piece o' cake. Is next Tuesday good for you?
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Yes, I remember The Diamond Age. Diseases and toxins were eliminated to be replaced by hostile nanites.
Frankly, I prefer diseases. At least we know how to handle most of them.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
Really? When did this happen?
Most infectious diseases are controlled by antibiotics, but many are now resistant. What we've been doing to diseases is roughly like spraying the swamps with DDT - it works to start with, but eventually the bugs become resistant and then you're screwed and need to find something else. We're rapidly approaching the "screwed" state in infectious diseases, without much in the way of ideas when everything's resistant to the latest *cillin.
Then there's cancer, where the only cure so far is either to hit the patient's body with something incredibly toxic and hope it kills the cancer before it kills the patient, or to cut it out and pray to God you got it all.
Then there's congenital disorders, which are utterly unsolved.
The best we can say for diseases is that we understand the symptoms - they're the devil we know. Are you happy with that status quo, or would you rather investigate the devil we won't know, just in case he's going to screw you over less?
Grab.
...if that's not a reason to quit drinking sea water, I don't know what is!
Liberty uber alles.