Iimagine: battalions of robots, as big as viruses, sneaking between the cells of our body to pinch their membrane! Sci-fi nana? Not really. A team of researchers from Montpellier has just published in the journal Nature communications their work on the design of a robot whose size does not exceed 50 nanometers, a billion times smaller than tweezers. It is formed by four legs that surround a piston whose end is responsible for pinching and pulling.
Gently, all the same. The force of the piston is 1,000 billion times weaker than that exerted with tweezers when it pulls out a hair from the nose or eyebrow. It’s tiny, but enough to activate mechanoreceptors, sort of mole switches…
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