As a matter of fact, technically speaking nanorobots, or nanobots, don’t do anything yet—they haven’t been formally invented.

Researchers are hard at work developing them, however, and based on their promising progress they anticipate that the public debut of a working team of nanobots will occur sometime in the next 25 years if not before then. In other words, these microscopic robots are the next big thing.

So just what is so great about having a robot that measures only six atoms across? Since this tiny size gives them the ability to interact at the bacteria and virus level, nanobots’ main function will probably be medical. They have the potential to revolutionize the medical community in almost every way.

Nanorobots are so tiny that they could be easily injected into the bloodstream, where they would then float through your circulatory system in order to locate and fix problem areas of your body.

This has especially meaningful ramifications for cancer research and other serious diseases. It is thought that once the nanobot has been fully developed, the design may be refined to produce cancer-killing nanobots that swim through the bloodstream, identify a malignant tumor, and zap it cell by cell with some type of laser or similar treatment until the entire cancerous growth has been removed, right down to the last molecule.

This has many great advantages over cancer treatments that are currently in practice; it is obviously much less traumatic to the human system than chemotherapy, for example.

Chemotherapy is a harsh form of cancer treatment that kills not only the target malignant cancer cells, but also many good non-target tissues as well. In some cases it has been speculated that chemotherapy does more harm than good, but equally effective remedies have not yet been found. Nanobots are poised to change that.

They also far outweigh the benefits of cancer surgery, since this highly invasive and traumatic procedure often places undue stress on an already-overwhelmed body trying to battle tumor growth. Surgery is also oftentimes less effective than we would hope.

If even one molecule of cancer is missed, the tumor has the potential to return and the operation will be deemed a failure. Yet no matter how trained or skilled a surgeon may be, he or she is only human and cannot naturally detect cancer at the particle level.

This is where the nanobot steps in. These microscopic robots could not only eliminate every cancer cell without touching non-target beneficial cells in the body, but they could do it in a very non-invasive, non-traumatic way. The day may be coming when cancer treatment will be nothing worse than a shot in the arm. As long as that syringe is full of cancer-killing nanobots, the patient will recover completely.

Nanobots have the capacity not only to heal cancers, but also all forms of common ailments found in the human system. They can remove particles from the bloodstream, allowing them to effectively unblock clogged arteries by removing the cholesterol molecules one by one.

If an organ is breaking down due to age or disease, it is possible that the nanobots may be trained to swim to the affected area and perform micro-surgery, thereby fixing the problem on the spot without recourse to damaging surgical procedures. Nanorobots could also be used to heal basic tissue damage, such as contusions or wounds in the flesh.

Researchers expect that nanobots will be able to engineer material using the most basic building blocks of life, so it naturally follows that they would be able to clear away dead tissue from a wound site and slowly rebuild healthy skin in its place to join the gash together again. This may even be accomplished without resulting scar tissue, thanks to the level of detail that nanobots can achieve.

When it comes to common illnesses, nanobots would be no less effective. They essentially have the ability to act as artificial helper-T cells in the human immune system, patrolling the bloodstream in search of hostile pathogens such as viruses and bacteria and then “zapping” or otherwise eliminating the unwelcome substances before they can cause harm.

This could be the answer for many people who suffer from autoimmune diseases such as AIDS. With such an effective synthetic immune system in place, their systems would be well-equipped to survive the HIV/AIDS onslaught.

Scientists in the medical field are also particularly excited about not only the healing nature of nanobots, but also their capacity for research and discovery inside the human body. For example, we do not yet know or understand many of the mysteries surrounding the human brain and how it functions.

But well-placed, highly-trained and controlled nanobots could potentially journey to the brain stem or even higher in a completely painless and non-invasive manner, where they could then observe the firing of synapses and other mental processes in order to provide a greater understanding and discovery of their functions and abilities.

This would unlock many new areas of wonder for not only brain scientists and researchers, but also for humanity as a whole. Essentially, we could use our brains to create micro-robots that can learn more about our brains, creating an everlasting cycle of learning and refinement.

But entirely apart from the healing nature of nanobots, they also have a fun side. Since swarms of nanobots can achieve any task if enough of them are present, they could perform functions like cooking and cleaning. Best of all, the nanobots are so tiny that they literally cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Since nanorobot researchers expect to have the first fully functioning prototype released to the public in the next 25 years, the day may soon come when you will have the wonderful experience of seeing your kitchen miraculously “clean itself.”

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Many of the medical procedures we employ today are very traumatic to the human body and do not work in harmony with our natural systems.

Chemotherapy wreaks havoc on humans and nearly kills them in the quest to kill off their malignant cancer cells.

Invasive surgical procedures are also quite common today, with associated traumas that cause many patients to die on the operating table rather than survive and heal.

Nanorobots are so small that they actually interact on the same level as bacteria and viruses do, and so they are capable of building with the very particles of our bodies: atoms and molecules.

The ideal nanobot has not yet been fully realized, but when this microscopic robot makes its inevitable debut it will be hailed as a lifesaver by the world of medicine.

Some might say that today’s medical advances are more than enough and that mankind should leave room for natural processes. The fact of the matter is that artificial lifestyles have given rise to all kinds of ailments that absolutely require human interference for lifesaving purposes.

Surgery’s attendant risks are not only inherent in the cutting and sewing done by medical staff but include drug-related dangers as well. Patients may be allergic to anesthetics; their organs may become infected from a variety of surgery-related sources; during an organ transplant their body may mysteriously reject the new organ, leading to death; and in the case of a tumor operation, even a few microscopic missed cells can constitute complete failure to battle the cancer.

Simply put, surgeons are people—and people are far too large and clumsy to perform the types of fine-scale operations necessary for fixing the human body.

Drugs are little better when it comes to finesse. Although they do have the ability to interact specifically with the body’s molecules and cells, they operate by way of the circulatory system. Your bloodstream is an indiscriminate cycle that delivers its contents to many parts of the body.

Any drug administered will automatically affect areas of the body that are perfectly healthy, and significant doses will most likely cause unpleasant side effects. This means that the drug which is supposed to cure you may actually leave many parts of your body in worse shape than they were before. In this sense they have much the same blunt effect as a surgeon’s scalpel, no matter how refined the drug.

Nanorobots, on the other hand, will typically measure only about six atoms wide. It is anticipated that they could be equipped with all sorts of tools and cameras in order to furnish more extensive information about the human body. Not only that, but researchers expect that someday they will have refined the nanobot design to the point where nanobots can be remotely controlled in order to perform millions of useful tasks.

Among these is the ability to float neutrally through your bloodstream, identifying problem areas of your body and fixing them. Nanorobots could be used to clear built-up cholesterol from your arteries, thereby saving you from a heart attack. If the heart itself is damaged, they work their way up to the affected area and perform micro-surgery that you would probably not feel or notice, but which would almost certainly save your life.

When it comes to major unsolved diseases like cancer, nanorobots are perfect for eradicating malignant cells. Scientists are already hard at work on nanobots that can identify and destroy cancer at its growth site so that no trauma is inflicted anywhere else in the body.

The capabilities of nanobots include their function as replacement helper-T cells in a weakened immune system, thereby greatly benefiting victims of leukemia and AIDS as well as many other such terrible diseases.

More importantly, nanorobots’ ability to interact with materials in their most basic form may enable them to effectively rebuild or “regrow” damaged tissue. In the same way that a nanorobot would be able to remove microscopic particles of cholesterol or cancer, they would also be able to rebuild individual molecules to create a new tissue layer.

This could be particularly useful for accident victims and others whose tissue has been extensively damaged due to forceful trauma. In cases where a bone has been broken, researchers have already created a “nanobone” which has all the properties of natural bone but is also much stronger and more flexible. This invention naturally leads to the possibility of a nanobot going in and repairing shattered or missing bones a little at a time. It also presages innovations such as nanobots that can rebuild or replace bone marrow, making large strides towards curing leukemia.

Nanorobots could perform a variety of similarly miraculous functions, from eating away dead flesh at a wound site (a task which is currently performed by maggots in many cases) to actually re-growing tissue so that it heals cleanly and quickly without leaving a nasty scar. Some patients even have difficulties with festering wounds, which could be easily cleared up by an efficient medical nanorobot.

People with special needs and diseases would be among those to benefit immensely from such remedies; sufferers of hemophilia cannot normally clot well enough to heal and in some cases may even bleed to death when left at the mercy of today’s conventional medicine—but a specially-designed team of nanorobots could perhaps produce synthetic clotting material for their wound sites in order to stop the bleeding.

They could also perform delicate surgical functions such as closing a split vein or a gash at the same time. No one is really sure whether this would be more or less painful than traditional surgical methods, but for sufferers of anesthesia allergies and those who don’t handle surgery well because of issues like hemophilia, it could make a huge difference.

Regardless of the individual details, it seems clear that the advent of the nanobot is destined to change the face of medicine forever. Researchers anticipate having a functional nanobot up and running in the next 25 years.

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To date, scientists have made significant progress but have not officially released a finished product in terms of a nanorobot that functions on an entirely mechanical basis.

Many of the nanobot prototypes function quite well in certain respects but are mostly or partly biological in nature, whereas the ultimate goal and quintessential definition of a nanorobot is to have the microscopic entity made entirely out of electromechanical components.

In fact, researchers anticipate that due to the complicated nature of their construction, nanobots will only fully emerge after several generations of partly-biological nanobot forerunners have been constructed in order to make them.

Nanorobots are essentially an adapted machine version of bacteria. They are designed to function on the same scale as both bacteria and common viruses in order to interact with and repel them from the human system.

Since they are so small that you can’t see them with your naked eye, they will also possibly be used to perform “miracle” functions such as cleaning your kitchen (“the kitchen that cleans itself!”) invisibly weaving fabric, cooking food slowly but steadily, and essentially performing other functions that humans could do, but—let’s face it—will probably be too lazy to do ourselves by the time these nanobots become functional.

Since the best way to create a nanobot is to use another nanobot, the problem lies in getting started. Humans are able to perform one nano-function at a time, but the thousands of varied applications required to construct an autonomous robot would be exceedingly tedious for us to execute by hand, no matter how high-tech the laboratory. So it becomes necessary to create a whole set of specialized machine-tools in order to speed the process of nanobot building.

Researchers have been chipping away at this problem for decades. In 1989 they discovered how to manually operate the system; a group of IBM engineers lined individual atoms up one by one until they had spelled out their company’s name.

In doing so they not only created the smallest business logo in history, but also discovered for themselves just how long and grueling the process of hand-building even a single nanobot would be. True, nanobots measure more like six atoms across, but they are far more complicated in design and need to be engineered in such a way that they are autonomous.

The ideal nanobot consists of a transporting mechanism, an internal processor and a fuel unit of some kind that enables it to function. The main difficulty arises around this fuel unit, since most conventional forms of robotic propulsion can’t be shrunk to nanoscale with current technology. Scientists have succeeded in reducing a robot to five or six millimeters, but this size still technically qualifies it as a macro-robot.

One possible solution is to adhere a fine film of radioactive particles to the nanobot’s body. As the particles decay and release energy the nanobot would be able to harness this power source; radioactive film can be enlarged or reduced to any scale without a drop in efficiency occurring.

Another nice side effect of this system is its ability to renew automatically. With the constant circulating nuclear energy it would supply, this fuel cell would never need to be replaced. This puts it several notches above solar cells or conventional battery packs of any size, which were previously the other two options being considered for equipping the nanorobot.

The other problem with constructing a successful nanorobot lies in breaking its materials down small enough. Metal that might be used for the robot’s construction behaves one way in relatively large quantities and a completely different way on the nanoscale—in fact, this is the entire basis for nanotechnology as a discipline.

Experts believe that silicon might make the ideal material, especially since it has been traditionally used for delicate electronics, particularly small computer parts. Microscopic silicon components called transducers have so far been successfully built into nanorobot legs.

Scientists are hard at work on designing a body built out of transducers; they are encountering slight problems in agreeing on what the final shape of the standard nanobot should be.

Very few researchers support the biped-humanoid design, since this has given test robots a strange, clumsy shuffle. The nanobot needs to be fast, aerodynamic and smooth-moving in order to complete its functions. Some people think that a spider-like body would work best, but many nanorobot researchers also think that a smaller version of the centipede might be best.

They hope that by equipping the nanobot with several sets of fast-moving legs and keeping its body low to the ground, they can create a quick, efficient machine that would also be suitably shaped for introduction into human blood vessels to perform functions such as clearing away built-up cholesterol or repairing tissue damage.

These tasks are key to the concept of a nanorobot, since it is anticipated that many of their most useful applications will be in the medical field. Doctors and researchers expect nanobots to be useful for a wide variety of things, since a robot this small can actually interact with materials on their molecular and atomic level. Because of this special capability, the nanobots can build or destroy particle by particle.

They could rebuild tissue molecules in order to close a wound, or rebuild the walls of veins and arteries to stop bleeding and save lives. They could make their way through the bloodstream to the heart and perform heart surgery molecule by molecule without many of the risks and discomfort associated with traditional open-heart operations.  Likewise, researchers hope that nanorobots will have many miraculous effects on brain research, cancer research, and finding cures for difficult diseases like leukemia and AIDS.

Although standardized nanorobot production has not yet been fully realized, scientists are hard at work developing a system for constructing these tiny helpers. Chances are good that sometime in the next 25 years they will make their public debut.

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Biological nanobots have technically been created, as have large or conventionally-sized robots with the ability to work on the nanoscale.

But the traditional idea of nanorobots involves them being all or mostly mechanical, and these types of nanobots are the next step in nanotechnology.

There are many scientists and research groups currently hard at work on shrinking and adapting the conventional robot and they’ve gotten them pretty small, but not quite down to the nanoscale as of yet. The main problem seems to be the robotic power source for such a tiny machine.

Traditionally, most robots have a solar cell or some kind of battery pack, but obviously these are many times too large for a nanobot. However, the answer may lie in nuclear technology. Researchers consider it highly likely that when equipped with a thin film of radioactive material, nanobots will be able to fuel themselves on particles released by decaying atoms.

This fuel technology is easily scaled down to nano-size. It also proves immensely efficient because with such a self-driven system in place, nanobots would be able to function indefinitely and never require a replacement fuel cell as they would with batteries or solar power.

If and when the fully functional mechanical nanobot does emerge, as it most likely will in the next few years, its primary material may be silicon. Silicon has always been the first choice for delicate electronics and has the right qualities to make a successful scaled-down robot, even one as tiny as a few hundred nanometers. It is strong enough to last and conduct electricity on a regular basis, but also flexible enough to be manipulated in various ways; this makes it the universal one-size-fits-all electronic material.

However, constructing nanobots out of silicon would subject them to the same issues that other silicon electronics face, one of which is that they are not biodegradable. If nanobots were to be produced on a large scale their enduring materials would not be as dangerous as all the microchips and computer electronics currently sitting in our landfills, but they would still be another small drain on our natural resources.

Consequently it becomes even more pressing to find a mass-recycling solution for them. Silicon can be recycled into low-grade products like solar cells, but the process is long, complicated, and usually costly.

Up to this point in time, the closest thing to a purely mechanical nanorobot that has ever been created was the work of U.C. Berkeley affiliate Kris Pister. He invented a solar-powered robot that measures only 8.5 millimeters and can walk slowly on two “legs” like humans do. True to form, Pister composed his robot primarily of tiny silicon pieces called transducers which are capable of taking the energy generated by the robot’s solar cell and turning it into mechanical power. Although extremely tiny, technically the robot that Pister created is macroscopic. But it does represent a valuable step in the scaling-down process of traditional electromechanical robots.

One of the issues associated with the final creation of the nanobot is autonomy. A suggested alternative to silicon components is installing a system whereby small clusters of molecules react to forces in their environment, convert these reactions into power, and use the resulting energy in order to move themselves forward.

But if the motive power has been generated by inevitable chemical or physical reactions, will the nanobot still qualify as autonomous? Critics say no. Since the ultimate goal is to create an autonomous self-moving nanorobot, this approach seems to miss the goal and scientists anticipate that the true innovations will lie in steadily shrinking down the traditional electromechanical components: power supply, processor, transducer, and integration.

With these components in place and adjusted to fit the scale and functioning peculiarities of the nanorobot, researchers anticipate that the nanorobot will soon be created.

These miniscule robots may be up and running within the next 25 years. One of the primary difficulties that has prevented them from being completed up to this point is the simple issue of how one goes about building things that are this tiny. In the future, scientists expect to create micro-factories that will pump out legions of nanobots for human consumption.

But so far the only tools we have for working at this level are those found on larger robots, and in some cases they are not convenient for the type of construction involved in producing a nanorobot. So the work is progressing, but slowly.

Hard oxides and metals that are typically used for electronics will be essential, but many of them (including silicon) have to be effectively reduced to the nanoscale before any serious work can go forward. Prototypes have been built using biological components, but the ultimate goal is to achieve a purely electromechanical model.

Scientists want to build mechanical nanobots on the bacteria model. In terms of characteristics and function, a bacteria is simply a natural nanomachine gone haywire. Scientists hope that by steadily adapting individual bacteria over time and potentially adding electrical components by degrees, they will eventually be able to convert them into nanobots. Probably the first functioning nanobots will have to be at least partly biological so that we can use these pre-runners to create their more sophisticated descendants.

In the middle stage of our nanobot development we will probably see high-production nano-factories emerge, staffed by partly-biological nanorobots which can then in turn produce an ultimate nanorobot: a fully mechanical, voice-programmed microscopic machine capable of performing a wide array of useful functions. Scientists consider this the end goal in all nanotechnological research, and expect that it will take several stages to get there. So, in other words, fans of the ideal nanorobot may have to wait. But eventually we will have this ultimate technology and all of its amazing capabilities at our disposal.

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