> In the 1966 science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, a submarine is shrunken down and injected into a scientist's body to repair a blood clot in his brain. Whil

> In the 1966 science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, a submarine is shrunken down and injected into a scientist's body to repair a blood clot in his brain. While the movie may be still be fiction, researchers at Caltech are making strides in this direction: they have, for the first time, created bacterial cells with the ability to reflect sound waves from inside bodies, reminiscent of how submarines reflect sonar to reveal their locations. I think this wins the Biggest Reach To Connect Science News With Pop-Cultural Touchstones prize. I distinctly remember reading about synthetic biology ~10 years ago, when it was just emerging as a concept, and thinking "this sounds like a fun toy, but it's not practical or useful- cells are too complex to engineer with such simple 'modules,' and what can you do with a bunch of switches to control fluorescent protein, anyway?" But the concept still exists, and advances like this one march steadily on... In a way, this kind of medical-synthetic-microbe could be thought of as a "soft genetic therapy." You could reprogram your own cells to manufacture some missing enzyme, or eat cancer cells, or whatever, but as yet (even with CRISPR and co.) we don't have a really safe way to do that in humans. But if you can find some bacteria which would get along fine in your body anyway, and modify them to fulfil your whims, that's much easier- and if things turn sour, you can just take some antibiotics.