October 12, 2010
There is a fascinating story in this week’s Science News for Kids. Researchers at a number of universities are building nanorobots which they hope eventually will be able to fight disease right inside the human body! The prefix "nano" comes from both from Latin [nānus] and from Greek [nanos], meaning a dwarf, or a little old man. In science, we use nano- to mean something very small; it can also precisely mean one-billionth (a "nanosecond" is one-billionth of a second). So now you know why Apple named their smallest iPod the Nano!
At any rate, these nanorobots are built from DNA, which of course is the building block of human life, and they travel through the body by hooking onto other DNA ‘ladders’. At some point in the future scientists could, for example, program one of these nanorobots to attack a specific cancer cell, but leave all the healthy cells around it alone. Click here to read this very interesting story about nanorobots.
Illustration shows a nanorobot crawling along a DNA track. Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller
Posted by: Seymour Simon
