I lost my sister to a glioma a few years back. I've always known that eventually better treatments would become available, but this is novel and not something I envisioned. I hope it works and saves children who have these brain tumors.
I recall seeing early trials on horse / pigs cadavers at a robotics conf. The robot is actuated / steered externally using a closed-loop MRI imager and magnetic field steering. So, the "robot" isn't exactly miniature if you count all that. Just the end effector, which is a small blob of metal and plasticy stuff. Still, really cool.
You can - look for a hot chocolate mixing mug or magnetic mixing mug on {large retail site}. Gave my son one for Christmas a few years ago cuz he's a nerd like me and adores hot chocolate. He loves the thing!
Yeah, I think most "solutions" in the kitchen are far too concentrated. I wouldn't expect a stirring bar to do much for stirring dough or any but the thinnest batters.
Yup. Anything bigger than 500mL or anything more vicious than a water solution gets an overhead stirred in the lab.
Magnetic stirrers are great for small scale or even larger scale if it’s just mixing water with acid (for example), but they stop working well after that.
Robots seems like the wrong word, which seems a comfort in the this case. They mention that both moving it around, and activating the plunger is done via magnetic fields from outside the body. It actually sounds relatively "low tech", which perhaps means faster to approval.
Was curious about this also. "Brave new words" (Jeff Prucher) says the Star Trek reference was probably the earliest. Here's a screenshot from the book: https://imgur.com/a/UPahc1w
- Several previous attempts have been made to develop minimally invasive systems that rely on magnetic fields to move devices with several limitations. It turns out that this is considerably less reliable and precise than you might initially guess.
- The article doesn't state exactly how the microrobot is delivered. If it is into the vascular system there are several challenges with guiding a device through vessels at the scale that they're talking about. There are also significant challenges with moving such a device between different tissue or vascular compartments.
- The critical issue with treating gliomas is less the ability to get drugs into the tumor (this is achieve-able through various mechanisms which breack down the blood brain barrier) but more the fact that gliomas are infiltrative pathologies which can't be separated out from functional brain tissue.
I feel like the investors have probably been duped by nice sounding speculation from people with limited knowledge of neuropathology and endovascular therapy.
I've had this vision of a set of tiny robots that live in your stomach and perform some amount of pre-processing of the foods you eat.
They would do things like cut food into smaller pieces using small crab-like arms, digest and render inert sugars that are well beyond what your body needs and detect if you've eaten something that is rotten.
I'm not sure that "Our digestive systems are too inefficient" is the most important health problem to solve. If anything, in general our digestive systems appear to be too efficient to optimize the health outcomes of diets in the developed world.
Part of the problem of our intelligence is that we adapted our environments to us instead of the other way around. Cats can eat an all-meat diet. Dogs can do fine on rice and meat.
Why?
It's because their bodies produce the vitamins they need to survive. We created agriculture and had such rich diets that when we lost our ability to create certain vitamins in our own bodies, we never even noticed. The genes are still there, they're just broken.
"Fixing" that issue would be one of the greatest feats in the history of humanity. If mankind ever wants to leave this rock and colonize other worlds, they better figure out how to fix that problem. Would suck to have a starship travelling for hundreds of years only to land on a planet suitable for colonization and realize you ran out of Vitamin C so everyone is going to die of scurvy.
Are you saying agriculture cause humans to lose the ability to create vitamins (specifically C)? I don't think that is true, at least according to Nature:
The article posits the loss of Vitamin C to be much earlier:
Notably, not only all humans, but also gorillas, chimps, orangutans, and some monkeys have this inborn genetic flaw, meaning that the loss of vitamin C biosynthesis must have occurred first in one of our primate ancestors.
Cats are obligate carnivores, their bodies don’t produce taurine.
And all animals need to eat something because none of us are photovores.
And some plants are carnivores.
If we colonise other worlds, rather than O’Neill habitats or mind uploads, we’re almost certainly taking the farms with us for the trip, not rely on local stuff.
And, our metabolism depends on Vitamin B12, which is ONLY made by bacteria. Every plant and animal that needs B12 has to get it by eating something else with B12 in it, or having the bacteria responsible in it's digestive tract.
It’s far from being fully understood. The Wikipedia article isn’t accurate. Many animals including humans have been found to have B12 producing bacteria in the small intestine. B12 producing bacteria has been found in human small intestine as far back as 1980:
Guinea pigs also lost the ability to manufacture Vitamin C; it's hard to blame that on their development of agriculture.
It's also not necessary to eat a rich diet to maintain levels of Vitamin C. Everything alive contains it. (Even the guinea pigs.) The things that suppress it are probably things you would associate with "rich food", like cooking and long storage periods. Eat one onion and you'll get far more Vitamin C than you need.
I'm not sure fixing it would be good. Genetics is tricky, and we don't know what we would lose by fixing that gene. Loss of intelligence is one trade off I've seen suggested, but I don't know what would really happen.
Interesting that the size of the devices is limited by imaging technology rather than the ability to fabricate smaller ones. I guess the trade-off is that imaging small things with X-rays requires more ionizing radiation.
Control, as discussed in the article. You have to distribute a protein via diffusion through the blood. You can't drive it to the site of a tumor. Also, the robots are not that small.
How will these robots be ejected from the body (see note below) and what other application they may have? I look for most sinister applications possible, disguised as beneficial.
Asking for a friend, of course.
Note that human immune system cannot properly dispose particles above some diameter. This is the reason for silicosis and is a reason why tatoos do not disappear after some short time.
In my view, this "invention" is more harm than good.
Robots really seems the wrong word here, after reading about the magnets. Especially with the whole anti-vaxxers "Bill Gates is injecting nanobots in my Covid vaccine" rubbish that's perpetually doing the rounds on social media of late.
