Nobody is yet plotting to shrink Raquel Welch and inject her into your veins, but engineers are making notable progress toward the Fantastic Voyage vision: creating miniature probes that could dart around in your blood and treat disease from the inside.
This past year, mechanical engineer James Friend of Monash University in Australia crafted a robot motor just a quarter of a millimeter in diameter and 2 millimeters long, smaller than the head of a pin. It is built out of piezoelectric materials that vibrate when exposed to an electric field. Those vibrations can be converted into rotary motion to propel a miniature swimming robot. Inserted into a patient, such a device could transport catheters and guide wires, carry a camera, or deliver drugs to the site of an injury. “It will increase the ability of the doctor to see and control what is happening during surgery,” Friend says. His ...
