(Julian) There is officially only one thing cooler
than giant robots:
(Trace) Microscopic robots.
(Trace) Hello decepticons, Trace and Julian here for
DNews.
Medicine and robots go together like ice cream and robots.
(Julian) Everything is better with robots.
(Trace) Correct, but some robots are better than others.
When it comes to the robots, we mostly talk about ATLAS or Big Dog, but maybe you should
be thinking smaller -- like the size of a red blood cell.
(Julian) Right!
Why not have tiny robots that you could ingest?
It’s not easy to achieve robots on the nanometer scale just by miniaturizing the systems we
already have, known as the top-down approach.
You know what they say, nanobottin' ain't easy.
The other method, which might be better, is to build machines from the bottom-up atom-by-atom,
small enough to swim through the bloodstream to monitor our health, deliver drugs, and
perform surgeries as needed.
Obviously, we aren’t there yet, but we’re making progress.
(TRACE) That’s right, scientists have made machines
that you can eat.
In early 2015 scientists from MIT devised an origami robot, which is exactly what it
sounds like.
It’s a robot that can fold itself into a shape that lets it propel itself.
(JULIAN) Sure it’s much bigger than nanoscopic or
even microscopic, but because it’s foldable it can be accordioned down to a size that
fits in a pill.
The scientists who made it think it might be useful for removing button batteries in
the stomach that were accidentally swallowed, and look awfully cute doing it, though that’s
just my opinion.
It can’t control its own movement yet though, it needs an operator applying a magnetic field
to swim14.
(Trace) Do people swallow that many button batteries?
(Julian: yes.)
Not to be outdone, scientists from UC San Diego tested tiny bots just 20 micrometers
in length that could actually propel themselves through stomach acid.
When fed to a mouse, these machines shot off towards the stomach’s walls and imbedded
themselves in the lining, where they delivered a drug.
It was the first instance of a nanobot being used on a living animal.
(Julian) Another group of researchers from ETH Zurich
also came up with the idea of using external magnets to solve the problem of locomotion
like the folks at MIT.
They’ve invented robots so small 3 billion of them could fit in a teaspoon.
(TRACE) You actually won’t swallow these bots, though:
their creators imagine they’ll be more useful if they’re injected into your eye, where
they would swim through the vitreous humor and poke the blood vessels to break up blood
clots.
(JULIAN) But the goal is to get even smaller, totally
autonomous machines.
To quote the late Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, “It would be interesting,
in surgery, if you could swallow the surgeon.”
That’s my Richard Feynman impression.
(Trace) With just a hint of Walken.
WOW.
Feynman proposed that in 1959 and is generally credited with kick-starting this nanotechnology
movement.
He laid out two challenges to the scientific community.
1) Shrink the information on the page of a book down 25,000 times and 2) Create a motor
that was just 1/64th of a cubic inch.
The reward for completing either of those challenges was a princely.
Ten HUNDRED DOLLARS.
(Julian) Within a year someone claimed the prize for
challenge number two.
Bill McLellan used watchmaking techniques, toothpicks, and the patience of a saint to
build a tiny conventional electric motor.
That was over 50 years ago, so why isn’t my body filled with nanobots that will keep
me healthy and immortal?
Probably because Feynman, genius though he was, didn’t make the size requirement small
enough.
The motor is about the size of a grain of salt, which is absolutely huge compared to
something like a red blood cell.
(TRACE) Feynman’s dream is alive and well and
in fact, even though his original challenges were met, the Foresight Institute has offered
a $250,000 prize, named the Feynman Grand Prize, to anyone who can build a nanoscale
robotic arm and computer.
(JULIAN) Since this nanofuture is being built at universities,
maybe the person to claim that new prize will be you.
But could robots ever evolve on their own?
Could they even one day be indistinguishable from us?
Seeker Stories took a look at that and met a robot named Bina 48.
Check it out here.
Well would you swallow a robot? No stop it.
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