Lots of people have warned about robot invasions, but not like the one we’re about to tell you about.
This is a healthy invasion, one launched by robots that don’t want to take over the world, but want to help clear your sinuses of germs.
Research teams in China and Hong Kong have been developing what they call copper single–atom–loaded bismuth oxoiodide photocatalytic microrobots (catchy name).
Interesting Engineering reports these bots are the size of dust specks; they’re activated by light and they’re meant to help people who have chronic sinusitis.
A health care provider could inject them into a patient’s sinus cavity.
Then, using a magnetic field, the provider could direct the little bots to the infected areas, where they “exert collective mechanical forces that disrupt bacterial cell walls.”
The swarm essentially could break the logjam of goo and bacteria that makes sinus infections so painful and annoying.
And then, when they’ve finished their work, the robots can come back out of the sinus cavity as easily as they went in (though how awkward would it be if you ended up sneezing out a bunch of robots?)
The researchers say this process can help clear up infections without any tissue damage, any complicated invasive surgery, and without any traditional antibiotics.
That means there’s no risk that the treatment could further any antibiotic resistance.
There’s a lot more testing still to do on this approach, but the team behind the robots thinks they might have potential for treating other diseases of the sinus.
Me, I wouldn’t mind if someday when we caught colds and coughs we could just go to the medicine cabinet and get out our first aid robots to clear it all out.
Today in 2010, a news report on a very unusual happening at Kyoto University.
A group of 15 monkeys living in the school’s primate research institute figured out a way to escape their habitat.
They used tree branches as catapults, just like in cartoons, to launch themselves over the electrified fence!
But once they were on the outside, the researchers lured them back in with peanuts.
Light-powered robot swarms may replace antibiotics for tough sinus infections (Interesting Engineering)
Monkeys use trees to catapault themselves out of Japanese laboratory (Daily Telegraph)
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Photo By Mikael Häggström, M.D. – Own work, CC0, via Wikicommons
