First Walking Microscopic Robots (Nanobots) To Change The World

Although it has been said several times that the future of nanoscale technology with nanobots is immense, each day researchers continue to expand it. Recently, in a first of its kind, a Cornell University-led collaboration has manufactured the first microscopic robot that can walk. The details seem like a plot from a science fiction story.

 

The collaboration is led by Itai Cohen, professor of physics, Paul McEuen, the John A. Newman Professor of Physical Science – both in the College of Arts and Sciences – and their former postdoctoral researcher Marc Miskin, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The engineers are not new to producing nanoscale creations. To their name they already have a microscopic nanoscale sensor along with graphene-based origami machines.

The microscopic robots are made with semiconductor components that allow them to be controlled and made to walk with electronic signals. The robots have a brain and torso, and legs. They are 5 microns thick, 40 microns wide, and 40-70 microns in length. A micron is 1 millionth of a metre. The torso and the brain were the easy part. They are made of simple circuits manufactured from silicone photovoltaics. But the legs were completely innovative and they consist of four electrochemical actuators.

According to McEuen, the technology for the brains and the torso already existed, so they had no problem with it except for the legs. “But the legs did not exist before,” McEuen said. “There were no small, electrically activatable actuators that you could use. So we had to invent those and then combine them with the electronics.”

The legs were made of strips of platinum. They were deposited by atomic layer deposition and lithography, with the strips being just some dozen atoms thick. Then these strips of platinum are capped by layers of titanium. So, how did they make these legs to walk? By applying a positive charge to the platinum. When this is done, negative ions from the solution surrounding the surface of the platinum are adsorbed to the surface and they neutralize the charge. Neutralization makes the platinum to expand and the strips bend. Because the strips are ultrathin, they can bend on neutralization without breaking. To enable three dimensional motion control, rigid polymer panels were patterned on top of the strips. The panels were made to have gaps and these gaps made the legs to function like knees or ankles, enabling the legs to move in a controlled manner with generated motion.

A paper describing this technology titled: “Electronically integrated, mass-manufactured, microscopic robots,” has been published in the August 26 edition of Nature.

The future applications of this technology is immense. Since the size of the electronically controlled microscopic robots is that of a paramecium, one day when they are more sophisticated, they could be inserted into the human body to carry out some functions like cleaning up clogged veins and arteries, or even analyzing the human brain. Also this first production will become a template for the production of even more complex versions in the future. This initial mcroscopic robot is just a simple machine but imagine how sophisticated and computational complex it will be when it is installed with complicated electronics and onboard computers. Furthermore, to produce the robots do not take much in terms of time and resources because they are silicone-based and the technology already exists. So we could see the possibility of mass-produced robots like this being used in technology and medicine to the benefit of the human race. In fact the benefits are immense when one calculates the economics involved.

“Controlling a tiny robot is maybe as close as you can come to shrinking yourself down. I think machines like these are going to take us into all kinds of amazing worlds that are too small to see,” said Miskin, the study’s lead author.

The frontiers of nanobot technology is expanding by the day. With these mass produced robots in the market, I see a solution in the offing for various medical and technological challenges. This is an innovative nanobot.

Material for this post was taken from the Cornell University Website.

Internet Security: Is There Such A Thing As An Unbreakable Code?

For centuries, people have been searching for ways to keep information from getting into the hands of the public. Cryptography gave them an answer to that. Cryptography has been used, both in its basic and sophisticated forms to hide sensitive information. Egyptian hieroglyphics contain the first known and verified example of ancient cryptography. In our age where internet is so rampant and people want to keep their personal information private, cryptography is gaining traction. But one cycle exists for all cryptography. First, someone finds a good code and starts using it, it becomes effective for some time and eventually someone somewhere breaks the code, rendering it ineffective. Because of this, people ask: Is there such a thing as an unbreakable code?

 

To help them answer this question and solve it, scientists came up with the concept of one-way functions. One-way functions are functions that are easy to compute on the given inputs but hard to invert. That is, you cannot get the inputs from the output when reversing it. One-way functions could make good candidates for code that cannot be easily broken. That is, it would be close to impossible to find an algorithm that would revert the output. Unfortunately, one-way functions are just a conjecture. But that conjecture has been behind much tools that have been built in cryptography, authentication, personal identification, and other data security applications.

Getting a one-way function that is feasible has huge ramifications in the internet age. It could solve the Internet security problem for good. Industries such as banking, telecommunications, and e-commerce would be in a hurry to apply it. Yes, it has been elusive but that is not to say that there have not been candidates.

One well known candidate for one-way functions involves the multiplication and factoring of prime numbers. To get the outputs, two prime numbers are given to a function and their product is computed. This function takes a quadratic time complexity. It is really hard to factor out the prime numbers given the output although it can be done in exponential time. Another candidate is the Rabin function which gave rise to the Rabin cryptosystem on the assumption that the Rabin function is one-way.

The two candidates above can be broken though if a really good mathematician knows how to write an efficient algorithm.

This problem was what Rafael Pass, Professor of computer science at Cornell Tech wanted to tackle. He believes that if he could find a really good and valid one-way function, then all internet security problem could be solved. Internet encryption would be safe for all. According to his postulate, a good one-way function is like lighting a match. After a match is lit, you cannot get back the sticks. They are now ashes. So, a good one-way function would be an encryption scheme in which the decryption would lie only in the hands of the person who encrypted it. To get a candidate, he looked to mathematics and to a field that is unrelated to cryptography – quantifying the amount of randomness in a string of numbers, or what is known as the Kolmogorov complexity.

The Kolmogorov complexity of an object is defined as the length of the shortest computer program that can generate that object as an output. The Kolmogorov complexity of a string that has a definite pattern to it, like ababababababab, which is writing ab 7 times, can easily be computed. But what if you have some random string? asdwer2345tgdhncjmckkjkd? How do you compute the Kolmogorov complexity in an efficient manner? It has been found that the Kolmogorov complexity for such random strings is computationally close to impossible. What makes it more infeasible is computing the time bounds of such an algorithm.

Taking from this idea, Professor Pass focused his research on whether an algorithm can solve the time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity. If such an algorithm exists, his research posits, then all cryptography can be broken. On the other hand, if no efficient algorithm exists for such a time-bound Kolmogorov complexity, then one-way functions do exist and they can be found.

His research has implications for encryption schemes that are widely used in the Internet. Popular social media platforms use encryption to make their platforms more secure, banks in e-banking platforms rely on encryption being more unbreakable, and overall, we depend on making sure our internet lives are kept free from the prying public. So, Professor Pass’ theory is of great interest and only time will tell when a really good algorithm can be found based on his research that would make sure our Internet security is compromised no matter what platform we are using.

Source for this article was from Cornell University.

IF ONE GREEN BOTTLE ACCIDENTALLY FALLS DOWN…

We all love nursery rhymes. I do remember, as if it was yesterday, the rhyme about counting ten green bottles on the wall, subtracting them by one until all the bottles on the wall have fallen down. I think it is a skill children learn about subtracting and how to count backwards.

Counting has always been with man since he knew how to acquire things. When one discovers that he has started accumulating material objects beyond the singletons, then he develops the innate ability to be able to remember how many they are, if one is lost, which it was and plan towards acquiring more. That is counting. While counting, one also develops the innate ability of naming the things counted so that he can group them together for remembrance and memorization. Therefore, a man possessing goats, yams and lands, names these things and counts each of them so he can distinguish all of them while being able to group them as his properties.
The simplest way of counting, which we all learn even from infancy, is to count by watching others. Then we express this ability with our lips. This is what some call recitation. From recitation, we decided to develop the number system so that counting can be done easily and quickly. Numbering can be done through tally or writing out numerals depending on whatever system one desires.

If you visit the market, you will be astonished that counting is a skill traders practice and have learnt to master. They have to know the totals of what they possess. They count as if by rote, even while sleeping, while walking and eating. They count the cash they have, the goods in the store, the debt they owe, the number of times the relative or girlfriend who comes to solicit for funds come every month. They have learnt to count so well that this skill has become a personal sin.

I think that is why from counting, they have also learnt to calculate.
Without the ability to calculate, we wouldn’t find a meaning to what is being counted. If you are counting forwards, do you wish to do addition or multiplication? Do not forget that multiplication is addition done in groups. Some count by adding one to the things before, some in groups of five i.e in multiples of five; some can also count backwards, doing subtraction or divisions.
Calculation makes it possible that you can predict the outcome of future counting. For example, if you know you have x goods in the store and you sold y number of them, by calculation of the subtraction, you can predict the outcome of a future count of those goods taking y from x.

Calculation also helps the counter understand the outcome of past counting and design appropriate counting projects. By calculating our counting, we can derive patterns from them due to repeated counting. For example, I have found that while counting the sum of the license numbers of Nigerian plate numbers that every time the sum is a multiple of 3, I can juggle the numbers so that they can fall in ascending order. Imagine a plate number is LH855KJA, the sum of the numerals adds to eighteen (18), which is a multiple of three, so I can rearrange the numbers as 666, then take one from the leftmost number, six (6), and add to the last six to derive a number that falls in ascending order: 567. Quite some maverick practice, but it works when you find pleasure in counting and numbers.

Abacus, one of the earliest mechanical calculating devices

Counting and calculation has been as old as man itself. A short history of counting involves when we counted by recitation and with the fingers. A mechanical calculation device, the abacus, was thereafter invented to aid in faster counting and calculation.

William Oughtred, the inventor of the slide rule

A Scottish mathematician, John Napier developed logarithms in the sixteenth century. Logarithms made it possible that multiplication and division were converted to addition and subtraction respectively, thereby making counting and calculation of numbers more easy, especially for very large numbers. William Oughtred, an English Mathematician, built upon logarithms to invent the slide rule, a mechanical calculation device, for logarithms.

Calculators which are electro-mechanical devices successfully replaced the manual devices above and eventually, they have all been usurped by the computer. The beauty and sweat of man’s efforts to count and calculate efficiently is embodied in the computer. Thanks to the computer, the absolute impossible, for example, genotyping living beings, is possible. Every single gene in the human body can now be counted and understood.

So, even if all the green bottles fall off the wall, you and I will still be counting in some other way, either through an app on a mobile device or a computer game.

Talking about games, I intend doing research on games that can aid in numerical ability in the nearest future.




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