Edited by Lianne Lee
Recent advancements in technology have made it possible to form rigid structures of a certain desired shape from soft material through microscopic robots which replicate the natural process of bone growth.
Natural bone growth occurs in stages, first beginning with a soft bendy material by the name of cartilage, a soft bendy texture found in your ears or nose. Later, the cartilage undergoes a process with many organic compounds and processes that convert it into bone, such as calcification, depositing minerals into the bone structure (Britannica, n.d.).
In a similar way to cartilage hardening into bone, there have been microrobots developed by scientist Edwin Jager at Linköping University. These robots function with uncanny similarities to our own bodies: by using an alginate base, polymers are grown on one side, which makes that side conductive. This means by running a current through that side, they bend and form different structures, which then leads to the other side of the alginate reacting and solidifying in quite an intricate way (ScienceDaily, 2022).
Many potential applications of this newfound robot is as a method of healing bones, and surprisingly, the materials for said robots are also found within the human skeleton. By having the robots injected directly into the body and shaped accordingly with correct electrical currents, they can wrap around the bone and assist with stabilizing fractures. While this is not the end of the applications of this new technology, new methods are still being developed to move the robots properly by embedding these movements into the very structure of the microrobot via different concentrations in the conductive polymer in different areas, making programming redundant (ScienceDaily, 2022).
This new advancement is quite astonishing in the sense that this is almost a direct replication of a growth process, but mechanized. This is the beginning of one small step towards a world that runs on nanotechnology, and with such unexpected advancements that are happening right now, the future of technology is now looking brighter than ever.
Bibliography
Linköping university. (2022, January 17). Bone growth inspired 'microrobots' that can create
their own bone. ScienceDaily.
Britannica. (n.d.). Bone formation. Britannica. Retrieved January 18, 2022, from
https://www.britannica.com/science/bone-formation
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