Scientists develop piezoelectric motor for medical microbots
By Ross Miller 
posted Jan 20th 2009 7:23PM
posted Jan 20th 2009 7:23PM
[Via Yahoo! Health]
posted Jan 20th 2009 7:23PM
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
"70% smaller" or "70% of"?
70% smaller than the smallest design out there.
70% ______ ?
Whoa...if anyone here has read Michael Crichton's Prey, eek, wasn't the initial design based on something like this: small machine through blood stream, small motor, flagella...not a camera, but still...
and btw: "which they claim is 70% than the smallest design out there"
I think its missing the word "smaller" after the 70%. :D
"We have demonstrated a piezoelectric ultrasonic resonant motor that uses coupled axial and torsional displacements, derived from a helically cut stator. This novel stator design enables us to overcome many of the problems associated with current designs and produce a stator that is less fragile, simpler to control and more than 70% SMALLER than the smallest stator design produced thus far. With further research, such motor designs potentially open the door to new areas of in vivo surgery and micro-robotics."
From the read link.
Engadget wrote: "uses an E. coli-like flagella to swim"
'Flagella' is plural. The singular form is 'flagellum'.
It's supposed to be singular. You FAIL.
I think you completely missed his point, blueangel.
Then, you managed to tack on a giant FAIL on the end to make yourself look like an asshole.. way to go.
@ blueangel
take latin. your fail comment FAILED.
and i thought angels carried God's words...
wow, engadget's gettin ripped on hard. lol @ family guy reference..
The Zissou society would be proud
Shoulda used a picture of Stewie inside Peter thanks to his shrinking ship.....its the episode where he is killing off all the sperm and fights Bertram.......
@ game_playa
maybe i'm just assuming that was a racist remark, and by all means low rank me if i'm wrong, but wow did it seem like one to me. on top of that on inauguration day of all days.
btw Aggie just changed his profile pic; a few minutes ago it was a black guy (probably him), if that makes my above comment make more sense. either way, game_playa, you should be ashamed
and I actually changed my pic like back in December.....but for some reason it keeps swithing between the old one(Vegeta) and the new one(Me).......dont understand that at all
This is cool, but I don't think it'll catch on. Not because it's too futuristic, but because I think electronics is going to take a back seat to biological engineering in the future.
Rather than send a robot around, I think we're going to be using synthetic biological organisms that have life in the same way bacteria have life. We already do something like that with gene therapy, which uses genetically engineered viruses to repair faulty DNA (best known example is cystic fibrosis).
Physics has had it's time IMO. In the future we'll be using biological machines that eat and photosynthesise for their power needs.
I actually study biological molecular motors, so I'm a bit biased, but I agree with you. This is some impressive bit of engineering, but it's still about 1000 micrometers wide at the rotor. How will this thing squeeze through capillaries, which are about 10 micrometers wide? Also, for comparison's sake, an actual flagellum is about 200 NANOmeters wide, 3 orders of magnitude smaller than the analogous part of this artificial motor. In this case, biology still trumps human engineering.
I have tried using the new tiny PCs but after about a month I am back to using my chunky laptop, simply because its so much easier to type on.
http://doe4.com
Hmmm ... I'm thinking "Inner Space".
Wow. I was soo impressed by Fantastic Voyage as a kid. It's easy to see the set construction in that pic....