While artificial muscles stand poised to bring a new world of
tactility to touchable devices, there's still hope they might fulfill some bigger, loftier goals -- like helping to save lives. That's a large part of where the research at Micromuscle is focused, creating a series of electroactive polymers that do impressive things when placed under small voltages, changing shape and even volume as demonstrated in the
Engineering TV clip embedded below. In it you can see a few examples of these things folding into complex, golden structures on their own accord, but the main application seems to be things like catheters that can steer themselves through the bloodstream, drug delivery mechanisms that can deploy multiple substances on command, and even microscopic robots that can pick up tiny things and move them tiny distances. You know what this means: robot armageddon might actually start from the
inside.
[Via
Engineering TV]
posted May 1st 2009 7:54AM
First!
stupid
gtfo
Sloppy seconds.
Where do I sign up for the war?
I'm sure Martin Short is out of a job. (Inner Space reference)
At this point I'd rather have swine flu than untested picorobots in my body to be honest.
maybe swine flu is genetically engineered by the government and is spread via food with these devices in them wich activate when exposed to the tiny currents running trough you so the flu is released and only the government has the antidote but you have to accepts a special training where they brainwash you to believe 9/11 never happened and coca cola doesnt in fact still have some coke in it!
except swine flu isn't spread through food...
...maybe you watch too much x-files, lol
For a second I thought this was a crash test of a microbot.
I for one welcome our new catheter overlords.
I'm all for having more things live inside of me!
That's what she said.
Don't ever embed an auto-playing video, engadget.
That's what NoScript is for! And besides, what's the worst that could happen?
...
We're no strangers to...
Snake, you've been injected with nanomachines!!!