It’s often remarked of technological progress that everything keeps getting smaller (with the exception of televisions). Phones, computers, appliances and more have shrunk in size since they were first developed thanks to better design and manufacturing techniques that enable more miniature components.
But some scientists are taking that concept to the extreme, with the end goal of bringing technology to a whole new frontier: the inside of our bodies. While pacemakers, artery stents and more are commonplace, medical researchers have long dreamt of creating devices so small they could swim in our bloodstreams, opening up brand new possibilities for healing and diagnosis. Such robots would be less than a millimeter in size, and often substantially smaller. The field of nanorobotics, for example, features creations on the order of billionths of a meter.
