14 DAY TRIAL // There are many reasons behind my attraction to the Japanese culture. I don't really know if it's about the way they make everything so tiny yet efficient or about the determination of this nation but there's one thing I like most. The fact that they love making robots.
Anything from human-like robots to nanorobots is accepted. All technical universities in Japan battle in projects regarding the movement of the robots and their capacity to act as humanly possible. This story however concerns smaller robots.
The guys at the University of Tokyo are developing nanocables that have the ability to convert light into electricity. While the idea itself may have a lot to do with power cables, it can also translate into a method to fuel nanorobots. The nanocables are 16 nanometers in diameter, several micrometers long, and share characteristics with the light-harvesting antennae, design that has been borrowed from some subspecies of bacteria.
"This is the first example of a photoconducting nanostructure," says Takanori Fukushita, a member of the team that has developed the technology. The process is somewhat similar to the solar panel one but is implemented at a much smaller scale. Because the cables are so tiny, the obtained power is very low but yet enough to power armies of nanobots. Researchers say that the idea is still in its pretesting stages and that a fully capable product may not come out in the next years.
It seems that the applicability of such cables could also be extended to living creatures. Franz W?rthner at the University of W?rzburg, Germany, suggested that the technology can be applied to living organisms creating hybrid devices. While the term hybrid sounds a little cyborg-like, I imagine that power sources that are always online and have that dimension could be very well used in medicine to power up things like heart-stimulating devices, integrated audio amplifiers and of course, nanorobots that work inside your body.