(On a personal note: Did you read that title? And, uh (chuckle) I simply can't believe that there's people in this day and this age that do not believe in . . God. Yes, God. I know that particular name/title is not flattering, that it has become a 'dirty' word to many of us here in the west, but that's exactly the way those currently in power want it to be . . to sound. Precisely so we . . will not believe. Duh . . . )
** We, the silly little humans that we are, have barely had electricity for even a hundred years - step back for just a moment, really; pause for just a second - since that's how long it should only take a halfway intelligent person, and think . . we have only had electricity for barely a century, and look at what we are capable of. What, might you imagine, are those that have had various forms of electrical generating power for lets say, hmm - TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS - capable of? A MILLION YEARS? One can only imagine . . how about trying for a second? **
** Okay, this one's a little complicated, but super cool. So, hang with me. **
*Doctors would really like to fight diseases such a cancer in precise, directed ways. That means delivering cancer-killing therapies to ugly cells, while leaving healthy cells alone. One way that could happen in the future is by using super tiny robots -- nanobots -- that work together inside the body like an infantry of warriors armed to battle cancer.
*But there are some big challenges. Among them, communication. Like any battlefield army, soldiers need to coordinate their attacks. And nanobots, in theory, would have a difficult time. They can't use nano-sized cell phones, for example, because radio signals don't travel through liquids. (What about sonar? Has anyone looked into nano-sonar?) And chemical forms of communications only seem to work over long distances.
*So, a team from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, are looking at a way to use bacteria as messengers that deliver instructions to nanobots wrapped in DNA. Researchers Maria Gregori and Ignacio Llatser encoded the cytoplasm of non-pathogenic strain of E. coli with a short DNA sequence. Think of it as a tweet.
*Here's how it might work: A scout-like nanobot in the body encounters a cancerous tumor. It wants to call over the troops for an attack, so it releases bacteria encoded with packets of information in the form of DNA. The bacteria swim towards soldier nanobots, where they attach to the nanobots and then download their DNA message. Orders in hand, the nanobots arm their attack.
*It's way cool, but keep in mind this is all theory and simulation. In the simulation, bacteria equipped with flagella -- whip-like tails that propel them forward -- took about 6 minutes to travel 1 millimeter. And the amount of data they carried in DNA is equal to about 600 kilobits of information. That's 3G, which provides typical download speeds of 600 kilobits to 1.4 Megabits per second . . .
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