Nano-motors For Microbots

Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting on the development of tiny motors the size of a grain of salt which could power surgical Microbots. Some surgical procedures are hindered by the size or inflexibility of current instruments. For example, the labyrinthine network of blood vessels in the brain prevents the use of catheters threaded through larger blood vessels. Researchers have long envisioned that trends of miniaturisation would lead to tiny robots that could get around easily in the body. The problem until now has been powering them. Conventional electric motors do not perform as well as they are scaled down in size. As they approach millimetre dimensions, they barely have the power to overcome the resistance in their bearings. Now, research reported in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering has demonstrated a motor about 1/4mm wide, about the width of two human hairs."

Seriously.

[Arthur Grumbine (1086397)]

I for one, welcome our new surgical microbot wielding medical overlo--I mean "doctors".

Re:

[couchslug (175151)]

"I for one, welcome our new surgical microbot wielding medical overlo--I mean "doctors"."

Me too. Yessiree.

They will swim in my brain and they carry knives.... That negates even my nicest tinfoil hat. :(

I'm thinking compliance is in order.

Then this proves that...

[RuBLed (995686)]

(bearing) resistance is futile.

Re:

[ya really (1257084)]

I forsee it as one step closer to my nanobot army and gray goo [wikipedia.org] everywhere.

... reading TFA makes better jokes

[troll8901 (1397145)]

You, Sir, have obviously read TFA, and thus is far superior to the rest of Slash... I mean, Collective.

You will be assimilated to serve as a bridge between the hairless apes and the overlords.

You will be named "Rublecutus of Borg".

Sizes

[Thanshin (1188877)]

a motor about 1/4mm wide, about the width of two human hairs."

Seriously? People are unable to visualize mm?

Who can pass basic schooling without ever using a ruler?

Maybe their's was marked in human hairs, however gross that would be. Maybe the next unit was a finger? An eye?

Re:Sizes

[Hal_Porter (817932)]

In America they have the imperial system. They wouldn't know what fuck a millimeter is. They call them "Eight hairs".

Re:Sizes

[ya really (1257084)]

As an American physics student, I'm insulted :p, but this is generally correct for most Americans. Hooray, lets count in base 12 or base 16 or "base whatever feels nice." Base 10 you say? No way that could ever be easier.

Though I'd like to add at least we stick with a system, the Brits seem to have an identity crisis where they cant seem to decide if they like the Imperial System or Metric. Pint glasses, miles per hour, liters, pounds (and not the monetary kind), etc etc. Now that's pretty crazy.

Re:

[smoker2 (750216)]

Metric measurements are precise, but not everything has preciseness as it's main aim. In an analogue world, things like half, quarter, eighth, 16th are more easily understood than 0.275, 1.1756 etc etc. You can't divide anything using base 10 for very long before you end up using a decimal point. Real world items don't have decimal points. Divide a loaf of bread between 8 people, do you work out what 0.125 of the loaf is then weigh each piece off or do you just split into halves repeatedly ? Fractions are s

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[mangu (126918)]

Divide a loaf of bread between 8 people, do you work out what 0.125 of the loaf is then weigh each piece off or do you just split into halves repeatedly ?

That's really useful to know. But one of the guys isn't hungry, how do we split the loaf among seven people?

take Pi for instance. 22/7 is exact - 3.142 is far from exact

Huh? Do you live in some state that has legislated the value of pi? In my calculator, (3.142 - pi) equals 0.000407, while (22 / 7 - pi) equals 0.00126, which means the decimal approximation

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[againjj (1132651)]

take Pi for instance. 22/7 is exact - 3.142 is far from exact

Huh? Do you live in some state that has legislated the value of pi?

Probably Indiana.

Re:

[Doctor Faustus (127273)]

take Pi for instance. 22/7 is exact
Pi is irrational. That means no fraction is exactly correct.

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[OneSmartFellow (716217)]

A thick human hair is about 0.18 mm, whereas a thin human hair may be as thin as 0.017 mm - , so the thickness of two human hairs may vary by more than a factor of 10 !

That's like saying, it's the size of a common green pea (about 0.5cm diameter) when in fact it's the size of a medium size citrus lime. That's like comparing Jessica Alba [wordpress.com] with This unkown person [weirdspot.com]

Re:Sizes

[Thanshin (1188877)]

That's like saying, it's the size of a common green pea (about 0.5cm diameter) when in fact it's the size of a medium size citrus lime. That's like comparing Jessica Alba with This unkown person

For some reason, I'd guess one or both links are nsfw.

What would be awesome

[Centurix (249778)]

"tiny motors the size of a grain of salt which could power surgical Microbots"

Or, they could power grains of salt. Hours of fun at the dinner table.

Re:What would be awesome

[ByteSlicer (735276)]

I predict that within 100 years, these motors will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.

bloodwork

[I_am_the_cheese (1264298)]

Can I finally have my artery-clearing, cancer-attacking, medicine-carrying, and blood-clotting robots that will imediately improve my lifespan, quality of life, and allow me to eat all the cheese potato chips I like?

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[master5o1 (1068594)]

Until the robots shutdown inside your arteries and become artificial-cholesterol.

Gumbercules!

[NoobixCube (1133473)]

Am I the only one who can't help but think of the parasites Fry got from the sandwich?

Worlds smallest singing bass fish

[schwillis (1073082)]

Now they can make the worlds smallest animatronic singing bass fish.

That's no nano-motor boy, no nano-motor!

[EdZ (755139)]

0.25mm is hardly nanoscale. It's not even milli-scale!

Still gonna get stuck?

[JakartaDean (834076)]

Isn't that still too big to get through a capillary? Eventually they'll still get stuck somewhere, I'd imagine, and then you get a little tiny blood clot in a capillary. Maybe that's not a problem in the brain, I don't know. I still don't think you'd want millions of them blocking random capillaries and killing random nerve cells.

No change in 50 years??!

[AaronLawrence (600990)]

From TFA:

Take a look however at the motors, and there are few changes from the motors available in the 1950s.

Er, maybe the basic design is similar, but motors are extraordinarily smaller (such as the 5mm wide specimens used in radio control kits nowadays) and there are new designs as well, such as stepper motors.

I think this article slightly exaggerates to make this seem more exciting...

Another random thought: this article assumes that a rotating motor is still needed, but why? If bacteria and other things move around by other means, maybe the only efficient methods of movement at small scales are NOT rotating?

Do the (dismal) math

[Ancient_Hacker (751168)]

If you do the math, the prospects for tiny motors is supremely dismal.

You see there's a basic problem-- the torque goes down as the cube of the motor's length, while the friction goes down as the square. In addition magnetics don't work well when you get down to the size of magnetic domains.

By the time you get down to the grain of salt size, motors can just barely overcome friction. Any smaller and they can't even turn over. You might notice in TFA there's no clear indication they've gotten one to rotate at all. Not surprising.

I would not bet any agricultural properties on this.

Re:

[jank1887 (815982)]

mirco balls?

http://eng.umd.edu/media/pressreleases/pr092208_bearings.html [umd.edu]