A SILICON microrobot just half the width of a human hair has begun to crawl around in a Los Angeles lab, using legs powered by the pulsing of living heart muscle. It is the first time muscle tissue has been used to propel a micromachine.
This distinctly futuristic development could lead to muscle-based nerve stimulators that would allow paralysed people to breathe without the help of a ventilator. And NASA - which is funding the research - hopes swarms of crawling "musclebots" could one day help maintain spacecraft by plugging holes made by micrometeorites.
Whatever the ultimate applications of the technology, no one was more surprised to see the tiny musclebots finally move than Carlos Montemagno, the microengineer whose team is developing them at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has spent three disappointing years trying, and failing, to harness living muscle tissue to propel a micromachine. But when ...
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