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."

bloodwork

[Iamthecheese]

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?

Re:Then this proves that...

[ya really]

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

Re:Sizes

[smoker2]

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 still useful, take Pi for instance. 22/7 is exact - 3.142 is far from exact. Analogue watches convey the information you need, ie. how long until ... or how long past. Digital watches just give you a figure which you then have to convert into your desired answer.

In short we don't have a crisis at all. And we don't make the mistake of mixing the two together like some people ... And we can spell litres properly. But then judging by past American localisation, the liter is probably 0.827 of a real litre.