Sunday, 21 November 2010

Nanobots!

In Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Evolution (1989), Wesley Crusher creates Nanobots called “nanites” which unexpectedly evolve to the point of sentience.


According to the Futurama Wiki "The Nanobots were a model of Robots created by Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth that inhabited the Robo-Planetoid during August of 3010."

Recently, Prof Joseph Wang and his team at UCSD published a paper on fuel free nanomotors1. These nanomotors or nanoshuttles are designed to pick up, transport, and deliver drugs to their target more efficiently than current nanotherapy strategies.

Each nanoshuttle has a polypyrrole-cadmium nanowire containing a diode, which allows an electric current to flow in only one direction.2 In order to get the nanoshuttles to move, an alternating current electric field is applied to the nanowires - this propels the shuttle by converting electrical energy into movement. The nanoshuttles are propelled a distance equivalent to seven times their body length in one second.


1 Kagan D et al. Small Oct 27 (2010) E-pub
2 Burch H. Nanomotors go fuel-free. Chemical Science 09 February 2010. (Source) This article includes a video.

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