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http://www.livescience.com/technology/0 … html]Click
*Interesting. Am not very knowledgeable about nanotechnology, so can't comment much.
Scientists recently unveiled the tiniest electric motor ever built. You could stuff hundreds of them into the period at the end of this sentence.
One day a similar engine might power a tiny mechanical doctor that would travel through your body in the ultimate house call.
Dang. I still think it'd be more fun to shrink actual human beings in an actual submarine and inject them via syringe into the patient's bloodstream...but what the heck do I know? :;):
The motor works by shuffling atoms between two molten metal droplets in a carbon nanotube [watch it run].
Varoom!
Scenes from a video of the actual motor.
One droplet is even smaller than the other. When a small electric current is applied to the droplets, atoms slowly eek off the larger droplet and join the smaller one. The small droplet grows – but never gets as big as the other droplet – and eventually bumps into the large droplet. As they touch, the large droplet rapidly sops up the atoms it had previously sloughed off. This quick shift in energy produces a power stroke.
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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