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posted by Dopefish on Tuesday February 18 2014, @07:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the science-rules dept.

ticho writes:

"For the first time, a team of chemists and engineers at Penn State University have placed tiny synthetic motors inside live human cells, propelled them with ultrasonic waves, and steered them magnetically. It's not exactly 'Fantastic Voyage', but it's close. The nanomotors, which are rocket-shaped metal particles, move around inside the cells, spinning and battering against the cell membrane.

'As these nanomotors move around and bump into structures inside the cells, the live cells show internal mechanical responses that no one has seen before,' said Tom Mallouk, Evan Pugh Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics at Penn State. 'This research is a vivid demonstration that it may be possible to use synthetic nanomotors to study cell biology in new ways. We might be able to use nanomotors to treat cancer and other diseases by mechanically manipulating cells from the inside. Nanomotors could perform intracellular surgery and deliver drugs non-invasively to living tissues.'"

 
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  • (Score: 1) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 18 2014, @12:54PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday February 18 2014, @12:54PM (#1565) Homepage

    While there are large numbers of tubbies in the world, there will always be a diabetes budget...

    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @03:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @03:45AM (#2132)

    Nonsense. If someone developed a custom biological prosthetic pancreas that didn't have the same vulnerabilities to diabetic functioning that our naturally occurring kidneys have, and it was done in an affordable manner with minimal side effects (if any), it'd pretty quickly put a damper on further diabetes research.

    Cures have a tendency of doing that, regardless of the disease in question.