Duncan Graham-Rowe, contributor
Powered by acid and capable of moving at blistering speeds in excess
of 640 kilometres per hour, scientists in California have created a
novel and quite lethal-sounding torpedo. But this one has rather more
of a humanitarian agenda.
Like something out of the Fantastic Voyage,
the torpedo is just 10 microns in length and designed to travel within
the human body with the aim of delivering drugs, says Joseph Wang at
the University of California, San Diego.
It's not the first
time anyone has made such "micro-rockets", as Wang calls them, but
previous efforts have required additional fuel, typically hydrogen
peroxide. Wang's differs in that it runs entirely off acid, using a
redox reaction to convert the acid into a stream of hydrogen gas that
is spewed out of a nozzle at great pace.
This means that it could run autonomously in environments that are
highly acidic, such as the stomach. And by using e-beam deposition to
add a magnetic layer to its outer surface he was even able to show how
these torpedo can be guided and used to pick up and drop off metallic
cargos, using an external magnetic field. Wang's results were published
in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (DOI:
10.1021/ja210874s).
They don't have to be used in the human body
though, says Wang. Besides the human stomach there are a diverse range
of strongly acidic environments in industrial settings, he says.
http://www.newscientist.com/
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