I was reading a post by 
But, it reminded me of something else that I read years ago on Cracked.com. I am a BIG fan of zombie stuff! There is even a part of me that kind of wishes there would be a zombie apocalypse just to find out if I could rise to the challenge. I didn’t figure I’d get the chance to find out for another decade or two, but in light of the new technology presented in
NOTE - Before reading any further, please take your tongue and place it firmly against the inside of your jaw. Now, you may continue.
Image Credit
“Why”, I thought to myself, “would scientists spend so much time and money developing fart detectors small enough to swallow when all they really had to do was grab a balloon and a funnel to catch them on the way out? There must be some ulterior motive!
Then, it dawned on me… ZOMBIES!
These “fart detectors” are nothing more than covert nanobot delivery vehicles! Wondering what I’m talking about? Think I’ve gone mad? Read on…Image Credit
What Are Nanobots?
Theoretically, nanobots would be tiny robots that could operate on a nano scale, 1 - 100 nm. The prefix “nano-” means 10-9, so one nanometer would be 0.000000001 m. If you’re like me, this is an unfathomable number, but to give you an idea of the scale we’re talking about, a strand of human DNA is around 2 nm thick; or, red blood cells are 7,000 - 8000 in diameter. nm. In his 1986 book, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, K. Eric Drexler envisions self-replicating nanobots that would have the ability to build things one atom at a time. The possibilities are staggering! Imagine millions of these bots flowing through your blood stream constantly monitoring your health, fighting infection, and repairing damage on the atomic level! Break a bone? No worries! These little guys can take calcium and other minerals from your diet and rebuild it, molecule by molecule.Indeed, there are those who hope that we’ll have these little miracle micro machines running around in our bodies within the next 10 years, and it appears that we may be well on our way to hitting that mark. Scientists at Drexel University have already strapped a robotic control device to a single cell of the bacteria Serratia marcescens, a type of bacteria that contains a flagellate tail that it uses to propel itself through liquid media. The robot is able to manipulate the bacteria cell and steer it from point A to point B while avoiding obstacles in the process.
Elsewhere, researchers have developed the world’s tiniest engine composed of a single atom driven by a beam of electromagnetic waves and lasers, and at the University of Cambridge, researchers have built the world’s most powerful nanoengine. It is just a few nanometers across, but pound-for-pound, it is the strongest motor ever created. It actually has a force per unit weight output that is 100 times higher than any motor or muscle! It works by heating and cooling gold nanoparticles that have been immersed in temperature responsive gel polymers. When their temperature hits 32 oC (89.6 oF), the nanoparticles clump into a ball. When the temperature drops below 32 oC, the particles quickly expand outward. The engine harnesses this explosion of motion, much like a car piston harnesses the energy from gasoline combustion. All it would take would be a cooling mechanism, and these things could be used to drive nanobots throughout our body. Our body heat would raise the temperature, and the cooling system would drive the repulsive action.
Mechanical engineers at Ohio State University have figured out a way to make nanomachines out of DNA that has been Frankensteined together. For some time, scientists have been able to coax DNA strands to fold in particular patterns and stitch them in place using other DNA fragments. This method yielded structures that were good for simple one-time jobs like delivering medication to specific locations. The OSU scientists have improved on this method by fabricating machines with moving parts like hinges and pistons, all made from DNA! Their improved nanobio machines are already capable of performing reversible tasks. That is, once they’ve completed their job, they can reset and do it again. The idea for the future is to give them the ability to adapt to the task that is required. The scientists likened them to transformers with the ability to detect certain cues from their environment and change their shape/function to meet the task. Given our current understanding of how pH, charge, etc. can affect protein folding. It seems to me that it would be totally within the realm of possibility to design specific side chains that we could control using a nanobot computer.