For years now, scientists have been trying to develop microscopic robots that can swim through bodily fluids and repair damaged cells or deliver medicine. Now, a team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany believe they’ve got the perfect design – in the form of scallops so small, they can barely be seen by the naked eye. These micro-robots move back and forth to swim through blood, eyeball fluids and other liquids inside the human body. The scientists believe mimicking the way a true scallop swims is ideal, due to a number of reasons.
First, moving backward and forward is the best way to swim through Newtonian fluids, or liquids that can grow thicker or thinner, depending on the situation. Second, the micro-scallops don’t need much power be able to move that way. They don’t require batteries or even motors: just the energy provided by an external magnetic field.
According to the scientists, they don’t have a particular purpose in mind for their minuscule scallop. Instead, they’re hoping it becomes a reference design for other teams and companies that want to develop advance medical technologies. Read the whole study at Nature where the team’s paper was recently published.
[via Nature]