Story highlights Advancements in nanotechnology have created robots small enough to enter the human body Using magnets, they can be steered to the desired location to target diseases Clinical trials on human patients, targeting the eye, are about to begin Other potential uses include environmental cleanup operations, such as oil spills <\/p>\n
They are ready to be injected into the most delicate areas of a human body -- the heart and the brain -- to deliver drugs with extreme precision or work like an army of nano surgeons, operating from within. <\/p>\n
If it all sounds like science fiction, that's because it is: the plot of the 1966 sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage revolves largely around this concept. <\/p>\n
In the film, four people board a miniaturized submarine to enter the bloodstream of an American scientist, left comatose by the Russians as a result of a Cold War quarrel over the technology. They only have an hour to remove a life-threatening blood clot before they return to full size. The crew manage to escape the body in the nick of time via a teardrop. <\/p>\n
But reality has a way of catching up with our fantasies, and nanotechnology is yet another field of science that bears that promise. <\/p>\n
At ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, mechanical engineer Brad Nelson and his team have worked on nanobots for a decade, and are now ready to think big: \"We're making microscopic robots that are guided by externally generated magnetic fields for use in the human body,\" he told CNN. <\/p>\n
The first to suggest that you could one day \"swallow the surgeon\" was beloved physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman. He coined the idea in the provocative 1959 talk \"There's plenty of room at the bottom\", which is widely considered the first conceptual argument for nanotechnology. <\/p>\n
\"You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and 'looks' around,\" Feynman said, \"It finds out which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out.\" <\/p>\n
Nelson's microrobots might not yet have a little knife, but they sure have something special: their shape is inspired by the common E.coli bacteria, which is propelled by a rotating \"tail\" called the flagellum. <\/p>\n
\"Bacteria have a rotary motor,\" he explains, \"Now, we can't make that motor, we don't have the technology for that, but we can use magnetism to move these things, so we actually take these flagella and we magnetize them, which allows them to swim.\" <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
See the original post:<\/p>\n
Meet the Nanobot<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Story highlights Advancements in nanotechnology have created robots small enough to enter the human body Using magnets, they can be steered to the desired location to target diseases Clinical trials on human patients, targeting the eye, are about to begin Other potential uses include environmental cleanup operations, such as oil spills They are ready to be injected into the most delicate areas of a human body -- the heart and the brain -- to deliver drugs with extreme precision or work like an army of nano surgeons, operating from within. Continue reading