Tiny Fantastic Voyage Inspired Robots Are Starting To Get Reasonably Mature 27
szotz writes: No shrinking machine in an underground military lab (as far as we know). And no Raquel Welch. Still there is a growing microrobotics movement underway, looking at ways that tiny, untethered robots might be used to perform medical interventions in the human body. There have been piecemeal reports for years now of various designs, such as microscallops that can swim through the eye and bots that can be pushed around by bacteria flagella. This article in IEEE Spectrum gives a round-up of recent progress and looks at some of the difficulties that arise when you try to make things tiny and still have them retain a modicum (or give them more than a modicum) of function.
Tiny robots will cure cancer (Score:2)
by roaming around the body and killing cancer cells.
You heard it here first.
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The robots would rather kill everything.
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No, I heard it first in Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines ). I heard a lot of things there that I'd never heard before, but have come to pass in the 16 years since I read it. I'm sure he heard it somewhere too.
Brilliant sci-fi (Fantastic Voyage) (Score:4, Insightful)
That movie was sci-fi at its best: mostly plausible*, educational, entertaining, suspenseful, memorable, timeless, and it made you think. And it had Raquel Welch!
* Except maybe for the shrunken human passengers part, but in the near future, remote "virtual" control operators may play similar roles the way military drone operators do now. They may end up having to make quick decisions in difficult circumstances in terms of the patient's life and say limitations of batteries etc. on potentially patient-customized probe(s).
Isaac facepalming himself in the grave (Score:3)
Isaac Asimov called that novel of his a huge mistake, too much was bad scientifically with it
Re: Isaac facepalming himself in the grave (Score:2)
Maybe Isaac Asimov was unhappy with his novelization of the movie, bit I like it. It is the one example I have ever read where the novelization of a movie improved on the movie.
There is a bunch of stuff in the movie that is just there, not explained. Why will the submarine stay tiny for only 60 minutes? Where does the sub go at the end? Asimov came up with reasonable explanations.
There was one bit from the movie that was just too stupid, so Asimov just omitted it. Someone brought a little box onboard th
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Pfft. I bought the ebook recently to read it again, and, given the source material, it's a pretty good novel. As steveha mentioned, Asimov fixed many of the stupid elements of the movie in his novelization, even if he had little choice about leaving in a few of the absurdities (like, well, the whole idea of the miniature submarine).
"Starting To Get Reasonably Mature"... (Score:2)
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Falicy Is Obvious (Score:1)
No way could Rachel Welch's boobs be shrunk that small. Ergo, no way.
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And at age 74, not only will she no longer be as mobile as she was then ("My cane's stuck in the cell wall!") but the other crew will be less enthusiastic about pulling the rogue antibodies off her than they were in the movie.
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what will you treat with these robots (Score:2)
What exactly do people hope to treat with these things? You can't treat pneumonia or diabetes. You can't treat dementia. You can't treat cancer (trust me on this - the obstacles are mind-boggling). You can't treat COPD or any kind of endocrine disorder. You might be able to treat blood clots (heart attacks, strokes) and atherosclerosis. Maybe. What does the article say:
"deliver a highly targeted dose of drugs or radioactive seeds" - hmm we can already do this, and much more easily.
"clear a blood clot" - ok
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They don't necessarily have to treat, but can act as a seeing eye into what's happening in the body. Especially if they are actually tiny nanobots, capable of flowing to any part of the body and self-organizing into a vision device that takes images and wirelessly sends them to the instrument outside of the body. OK that's from Michael Crichton's "Prey."
Oh damn! (Score:2)
And I was so looking forward to Raquel Welsh's boobs rubbing up against the interior walls of my arteries.
Must be funding time (Score:2)
We get to hear about micro and nano robots every year or two, but nothing practical ever comes out of it. It's like they pop up every so often just to hype up the tech that still hasn't done anything useful to keep the funding rolling.
New world (Score:1)
What happens when they reverse aging? (Score:2)
Or is it?
[Dun dun daaaaaaaa]