Although robots are getting increasingly smaller and more precise they're still completely unsuited to move on a microscopic or even nanoscopic scale. Jan Liphardt, a physicist of the University of California, Berkeley has patented an idea in which bacteria's are stripped until they have only the amount of DNA that allows them to perform a specific task, for example 'swimming' past a chemical path looking for chemicals to take along.

The team shows that thousands of these 'biorobots' – or minicells – as a true force for example can be have the characteristics cut in the microprocessors.

Future Vision by Erwin Van Lun on this article

The world is made of energy, from which matter is built up. To control the world, you need to go as small as possible. We’ll utilise these techniques to clean our body, get all the rubbish out, all the chemicals, all the cancer cells, all aged cells, and have it replaced by new, young material. It’s just one example that connects to the ‘surviving human’, the human who wants to be immortal, a wish that has existed since humanity. And we’ll go on until we have a solution, and that solution will come.

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