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Jets of bacteria carry microscopic cargo
- jonplackett 7y agoThis seems really cool. What could it be used for though?
- macewindu 7y agobacteria carrying magnets could generate current could generate power?
- laumars 7y agoThe speed at which that cargo was moving makes me question whether this could ever be scaled up enough to generate a non-negligible amount of power, let alone enough to solve any particular power requirements we currently have.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoWhat about power requirements we don't currently have? Ideas like these might become useful for building technology that interacts with building blocks of life in a different way than a bulk process (like lithography).
- laumars 7y agoI don't think it's a failure of imagination on my part. It's just we already have a variety of technologies available that cover the low end of the power generation and using bacteria in this way would never compete with what is already out there. That's not to say there isn't practical applications to this research. I just can't see power generation being one of them.
- ape4 7y agoEvil, perhaps
- imvetri 7y agoWe once figured out ants can communicate and we had lot of ideas to instruct them to serve our purpose. but what we have is antman. This is definitely a good start for sci-fi writers and I am hoping it doesn't just end there.
- netcan 7y agoI dunno what a version 0.1 might usefully do, but on the more speculative horizon... a lot. biological systems are really good at making things.. they made you.
- whatshisface 7y ago>The way we do that experimentally is to put the bacteria inside a liquid crystal. >but this capability of the drug delivery by bacteria, this is something new. Step one: replace the patient's blood with calculator display juice. Step two: Liquid-crystal guided drug delivery.
- pazimzadeh 7y agoI study bacteria swimming in mucus and I don't understand what the main takeaway of this paper is. Can someone translate the math speak to something a mere mortal can understand?