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Magnet-Steered Nano-Fish Could Deliver Drugs and Sweep Body Toxins
dkatana writes: David Warner writes on InformationWeek how "nanoengineers" from UC San Diego have created microscopic fish powered by hydrogen peroxide that use magnets to steer themselves. "The "fish" are powerful enough to swim through your bloodstream, removing toxins or bringing medicine directly to crucial parts of your body, as cells in your blood stream do. Given enough time, the fish could be used to deliver drugs directly to cancer tumors or parts of your body that are too fragile for surgery."
So is there hydrogen peroxide naturally in blood, or it can be safely introduced, to drive these things? (It reacts with platinum particles in the tail to provide thrust, and are externally guided by magnetism via iron in the nose.)
Drug delivery is by ramming into the area in question and dissolving, releasing the payload (already proven in previous, simpler experiments.)
Bad particle "eating" is done by binding the fish with some chemical that attaches to it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Wazat? No? Go back to selling records David.
"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"
That's the last thing we need, frigging nano drug smugglers
You know what else hydrogen peroxide reacts to? Blood!
Blood contains he enzyme catalase which really likes to react with hydrogen peroxide to make a foamy mess that would not be the healthiest thing to have in your blood vessels.
Powered by hydrogen peroxide that comes from where? There is no information in the linked article. If a person's blood is flowing why do they need to be "powered" at all if steered by magnetism? No one needs tiny devices that release hydrogen gas into their blood stream. So, remove the "powered" part, just steer it and it just might work without causing hydrogen embolisms.
Are they like body thetans; shit that doesn't exists that people made up to sell you expensive therapy to get rid of?
"Of course, nanobots are often the source of speculation about the death of all humanity. There is the "grey goo" theory that one day nanobots will learn to self-replicate and quickly eat everything organic on the planet in a never-ending urge to procreate. There are several explanations about why this couldn't happen, including the fact that we could stop it with a fairly simple electromagnetic pulse. But it is fun to think that with this step toward a viable 3D-printed microscopic delivery device we are either one step closer to curing all the diseases of mankind or one step closer to just destroying ourselves entirely. Or both."
It's the way of too many of our watershed technological breakthroughs. When you ask if we are ready for the responsibility of a potential Doomsday Device, be certain to solve for (we).
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
at first, nanobots delivering drugs in the bloodstream and all...
But then, I read that they were "3D printed" nanobots, and I was all like "Whoahh, these guys are onto something!"
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
I think the last thing we want is to have carp floating around in our blood stream.
Let me know when they've got a fish they can put in my ear that will auto-translate...
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Read 'the diamond age' by Neal Stephenson.
Even more sci-fi crap by people that would barely muddle through high-school chemistry? No thanks. We seem to have enough delusional beliefs as it is.
alex chiu was right all along http://alexchiu.com/
But TOXINS! In your blood!
.."they're real."
That's a quote from the article.
This isn't sci-fi. These nano machines exist today and they work.
I'm sorry. Do you need some lotion?
Nanotech has become a buzzword that can refer to excellent research or crackpottery depending on what's desired by the speaker. I hope you're restricting your rant to the crackpottery. but tossing baby with bathwater is practically an Olympic sport around Slashdot.
On the other hand, we've long used a lot of chemistry of all sorts that we really don't understand.
Just because we're not likely to get full up assemblers in the short term hardly means that nothing good will come of what's broadly termed nanotech.
Sounds fishy to me. HAHAHAHAH sorry, couldn't help myself.
Actually sounds kinda cool. I want one I can stick in my ear to translate for me, so then I can understand ANYTHING said to me, in any language!
Almost as bad as the AI fanboys who scream about AI sentience because Siri can tell them what the latest football scores are.
"Resistance is Futile"
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Hate to agree with you but in some ways I do. I actually worked on solving the problems of assemblers way back in the early 1990's. I solved a core technical problem - which ultimately turned out to be the solution to building Strong AI. Over twenty years later and neither exists even now...
Back then they said that assemblers were 10 years and $10 billion worth of focused research away. I would say that's almost exactly true today.. (maybe it was 'almost' true even back then)
The real problem with assemblers is that there is so much BS about them. The technology's so complicated that even with a working machine it might take another 10 - 20 years before anyone can do anything useful with it. People also totally over-estimate what the things will be able to do - and massively under-estimate how long the machines would take to do it. - The 'perfect' worst example that comes to mind is the Knight Rider remake - sure assemblers could reshape a car like that -MAYBE- but it would take them months or years to do it each time someone pushed the button.
The first real problem with diamond assemblers is that they would need to be cryogenically cooled to work and kept in an environment even more extreme and clean than the current best IC factories... The things will have terrible problems getting enough power to work and even worse problems with overheating.. The real killer though is that the 'reproduction' process itself is the hardest of all - and either very slow and complex - or actually just about impossible..
On the other side of the coin, research totally away from assemblers has already achieved virtually the same thing - synthetic life. Ok today everything is still very primitive, but it has a broad front of research and things are definitely actually advancing.. The simple real truth is that new science and new technologies are difficult and don't take five minutes to get right.. Doesn't mean its not worthwhile..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..