Micro Musclebot: Wee walker moves by heart cells' beats

When I was little, one of my favorite shows/book series was The Magic School Bus. You remember? The crazy, red-headed science teacher and her unassuming pupils get to go on the wildest adventures in their old yellow-dog. I especially remember one episode where the school bus shrinks down to the size of, you guessed it, a nanobot and enters the teacher’s body. At eight years old, I never thought the Magic School Bus might not be quite so magic, but just a slightly ahead of its time.
This article depicts the project of researchers at UCLA interested in “living micromachines”. Their tiny gold machines are coated with a thin layer of rat cardiac muscle and shaped in an arch. The researchers placed the machines into a glucose solution, and the cardiac muscle began to beat. The design of the arch allows the machine to move with each beat as the “arch tightens, dragging its back leg forward…then, as the arch loosens…the front leg takes a step forward.” These machines are only able to move in one direction, but the researchers promise more versatile models are coming soon.
I enjoyed this article and thought it was very relevant to VTPP 434. Hope you enjoy!
http://sciencenews.org/articles/20050122/fob6.asp