Dammit.

Dammit.

Just…whoa wow cool I guess and….

dammit.

Originally shared by Yi Yao

Robotic Micro-Scallops Can Swim Through Your Eyeballs

Yesterday, Nature Communications announced a robotic micro-scallop that can swim through your body (blood, joint fluid, eyeball goo, etc), all by themselves.

Unlike water, our blood is a non-Newtonian fluid which behaves differently depending on how much force you’re exerting on it. For example, when you mix water with corn starch and rapidly push on it, it will turn from liquid to nearly solid.

Although it might sound more complicated to swim through, it is actually an opportunity for robots.

At very small scales, robotic actuators tend to be simplistic and reciprocal. That is, they move back and forth, as opposed to around and around, like you’d see with a traditional motor. In water (or another Newtonian fluid), it’s hard to make a simple swimming robot out of reciprocal motions, because the back and forth motion exerts the same amount of force in both directions, and the robot just moves forward a little, and backward a little, over and over. Biological microorganisms generally do not use reciprocal motions to get around in fluids for this exact reason, instead relying on nonreciprocal motions of flagella and cilia.

However, if we’re dealing with a non-Newtonian fluid, this rule (it’s actually a theorem called the Scallop theorem) doesn’t apply anymore, meaning that it should be possible to use reciprocal movements to get around. 

Right now, the micro-scallop is more of a “general scheme” for micro-robots rather than a specific micro-robot that’s intended to do anything specifically. Maybe one day they can simply be injected/swallowed into our body like swallowing a Tylenol. 

via: http://goo.gl/3FjcIc

original article: http://goo.gl/Ty4Hkr