Post by Vene on May 23, 2009 13:23:42 GMT -5
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8044200.stm
Now, I've got nothing against mechanical robots, but I make it no secret that I have a greater interest in biology and chemistry. Go figure that I would find this type of robot absolutely amazing. Also just another example of the ingenuity of science. Creativity is a wonderful thing.
But these won't be typical robots with gears and motors; they will instead be made of carefully designed chemical shells-within-shells, with receptors on their surface.
Instead of software and processors to guide them, their instructions will be written into the chemistry of their constituent parts. They are chemical robots, or as the 1.6m euro project's title has it, chobots.
In fact, notes Frantisek Stepanek of Prague's Institute of Chemical Technology, they are more like the robots described by Capek himself, formed of "a blob of some kind of colloidal jelly that not even a dog would eat".
Instead of software and processors to guide them, their instructions will be written into the chemistry of their constituent parts. They are chemical robots, or as the 1.6m euro project's title has it, chobots.
In fact, notes Frantisek Stepanek of Prague's Institute of Chemical Technology, they are more like the robots described by Capek himself, formed of "a blob of some kind of colloidal jelly that not even a dog would eat".
Dr Stepanek sees them as one-time use chemical factories or repositories: cheap, expendable soldiers in the fight to, say, deliver medicines or seek out contaminants.
"They are synthetic single-celled organisms," he told visitors to his lab during the Research Connections 2009 conference.
Although they borrow ideas from life, he cautioned, they are not alive: they will neither evolve nor reproduce.
"They are synthetic single-celled organisms," he told visitors to his lab during the Research Connections 2009 conference.
Although they borrow ideas from life, he cautioned, they are not alive: they will neither evolve nor reproduce.
Now, I've got nothing against mechanical robots, but I make it no secret that I have a greater interest in biology and chemistry. Go figure that I would find this type of robot absolutely amazing. Also just another example of the ingenuity of science. Creativity is a wonderful thing.
