It's a research piece about nanobots treating pneumonia in mice.

INTRODUCTION;

In mice, microrobots safely killed pneumonia-causing bacteria in the lungs, resulting in 100% survival. By contrast, all untreated mice appeared within three days of infection.

The results were published September 22 in Nature Materials.

The microrobots are made of algae cells whose surfaces are dotted with antibiotic-filled nanoparticles. The algae provide movement, allowing the microrobots to swim and deliver antibiotics directly to more bacteria in the lungs. The nanoparticles containing the antibiotics are made of tiny spheres of biodegradable polymer that are coated with the cell membranes of neutrophils, which are a type of white blood cell. The special thing about these cell membranes is that they absorb and neutralize inflammatory molecules produced by bacteria and the body's immune system. This gives the microrobots the ability to reduce harmful inflammation, which in turn makes them more effective at fighting lung infection.

It doesn't exactly lay out the survival rates of one versus the other, but more about efficiency, as the microrobots only required a fraction of a percentage of antibiotics to treat the disease.

What intrigues me a lot is whether the lack of concentrated exposure to antibiotics means that the use of microrobots will reduce the chance that your body will not respond to antibiotics in the future.

NOTE;

A nanorobot was not really designed. That part was made by nature. They modified a nanorobot, algae

Humans are great at exploiting things that already exist, whether it's the horse or this.

I hope we go down this path for nano-robots. They will not be artificial constructions made of plastics or metals, they will be genetically modified viruses that are selected for specific tasks.

Viruses are already little robots. All living things are incomprehensibly complex machines designed by accident over a very long period of time.

I hope they can clean all the plastic out of our lungs

actually, the term Nanobots is somewhat misleading.

Get rid of the idea of ​​nanobos as little machines that perform tasks like shrunken machines you know.

It's not that it's impossible to make “parts”. But any functional device will more or less resemble proteins. Proteins are very well designed working nanomachines.

In nano, you cannot downscale. You can't have robots moving individual atoms around and doing things.

You must take into account things that I suppose you are not capable of imagining. Like thermodynamics, quantum effects. And incredibly strong atomic forces.

If you really want to deal with imaginary story machines, then you must imaginary story machines working in a constant storm of rocks, stones and other things moving, shaking and hitting the machine. While some parts of the machine can move unpredictably, some movements cannot be stopped...

we don't have anything remotely close to that yet.

The most advanced in the lab today, AFAIK, are drug carriers that can target a specific area of ​​the body by forcefully opening and releasing the drug whenever they are accidentally in the right conditions. They can't move to the desired location by themselves or anything, they're just in the bloodstream.

designs, which requires us to be able to move individual atoms with incredible precision, no easy feat.

the closest thing to nano-robots We call them protozoa. Understanding the living forms of nanotechnologies, why they are so efficient, so much more than the mere machines being worked on now, will result in some extraordinary capabilities over time.

The reason is that these perform more than one process at a time and therefore always outperform the simple machines that are now being promoted as nanobots. It is clear that complex systems will eventually become more capable and cheaper than machines, when we learn to duplicate certain functions of living systems as a group or group.

All bets are off if super-intelligent AI shows up next year, but I don't see traditional human paths developing before 2050. There are more viable solutions with shorter time horizons, but they're not what the average person thinks of when they hear the term nanobot.

I mean, they've already demonstrated nanoscale devices that are magnetically guided in mouse models, rabbit models, etc. and that deliver charges to specific areas of the body.

But if we are talking about nanorobotics, that is, more advanced machines with a high degree of autonomy and movement, various sensors and communications, maybe even the ability to network, etc., then yes, it is probably a type of technology. Singularity, so maybe around 2045-2055. In the decades after, they may be small enough to go directly inside cells and repair them.

There are some major hurdles to making gray viscous nanomachines.

Biggest is power They need some kind of power supply or they can't do much. Power sources tend to get more efficient the bigger they get, so depending on which one you're using, they may not be able to do anything before needing to recharge. The only viable power sources I can think of is wireless power where you have an external device transmitting power to the swarm, or mimic cellular processes by having the nanos submerged in a bath of fuel and oxygen.

The second is heat Everything these bots do will heat them up. If they are in a large swarm, the one inside will not be able to quickly get rid of this heat. If you don't implement a speed limit or insert holes for air circulation, they will melt.

The third issue is how delicate they will be They can't really be made of a single material and any components for computation and locomotion will reduce the strength of individual nanos. The connections between nanos will also tend to be weak compared to monolithic materials. They will probably be held together by frictional forces as opposed to the electrostatic forces that hold regular materials together. Hitting a brick made of nanos with a hammer might not break it, but it will certainly damage a lot of bots.

Given modern and probably future materials technology in the short term, I would say yes. Any nanoscale machine would be difficult, if not impossible, to "harden" against EMP. In fact, the robust nanobots of fiction are a long way from happening; anything we build at that scale now would be very vulnerable to heat, UV rays, etc.

These three problems combined make universally assembled type nanobots quite unfeasible in the real world. A cloud of bots won't be able to spontaneously assemble into a weapon and then fire, unless you're prepared to sacrifice a ton of them to do so.

The problem with power, and wireless anyway, is that the size of the receiver must be close to the wavelength of the transmit power. Something as small as nanites would need very short wavelengths, like X-rays or gamma rays being shot at them even. That doesn't sound very healthy

furthermore: (ie, a machine with various degrees of motion that is controllable by electronic logic to perform one or more tasks) smaller than one hundred nanometers (100 nm) in size. This is because there are some basic science and technology problems that need to be solved:

⚫ the electronics needed to control a robot are too large to fit in 100 nm

⚫ mechanics and, above all, friction at the "nanoscale" behaves in a way that inhibits or, more specifically, makes it difficult to execute the relative rotation of objects necessary for joints and bearings

Do you want to develop nano bots? Reduce the size of all electronics by a factor of 100 AND solve the friction problem at the nanoscale. Then we can start talking about development.

NO nanobots are self-replicating intelligent robots primed to turn the world into gray goo. We would need some revolutionary new science to get to that level of complexity (and it may just not be possible). Also, no matter how small the device, mechanically separating atoms to transform materials into other materials presents a new set of problems. Without any serious new science, you still need something like a particle accelerator to pull off that trick. (and the energies involved would destroy the nanobots).

Researchers have shown some useful aspects (like controlled movement) that will be useful for making nanobots, but that's like saying "researchers have invented the wheel": you won't be seeing a Ferrari anytime soon.

Until now it is not possible to create nanobots, but if it is possible in the future, it will also be expensive due to these facts:

⚫ Material availability and cost: We cannot use conventional material for production due to technical reasons and also the material used for nanobot production (such as silicon, gold, etc.) is expensive.

⚫ Production of nanoparticles: the use of the material for construction will be in the form of nanoparticles, which must be produced by different methods (mechanical or chemical methods) that require a lot of effort and money.

⚫ Assembly: After the preparation of the nanoparticles, the main task is assembly, which cannot be done by hand: e.g. Therefore, it again requires special equipment with high precision, which again increases the cost.

⚫ Power Source: Even if we are able to produce nanobots, it requires some kind of power to perform its function. Producing such a small motor or power device will cost again.

So overall, it's not an easy task to do. Even if it is possible to produce nanobots in the future, it will not be cheap.

It is possible but highly unlikely to happen in our lifetime. Yes, technology is evolving pretty fast, but not fast enough that nanotechnology is the thing that will keep us from dying permanently.

>The work is still at the proof-of-concept stage. The team plans to do more basic research to understand exactly how the microrobots interact with the immune system. The next steps also include studies to validate the microrobot treatment and scaling it up before testing it in larger animals and eventually, in humans.

Cool, hopefully this leads to something good for humans down the road.

!RemindMe 10 years

That seems great.

All these uses of "biobots" beg the question how much one can actually cover with these. Can enough mastery over them be gained to command them to do everything we want them to do to our bodies? Targeting any disease? Aging?

Of course putting the cart before the horse would be failing to acknowledge the root causes for these diseases will need to be figured out first...