Behold: molecules that can walk and deliver payloads in a straight line. This could lead to some interesting breakthroughs.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here are some interesting pictures of semi-conductor junctions and charge carriers, at the nano-scale:

“There’s no major surprises here,” says Andreas Heinrich of IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. “But the fact that they are actually imaging the electric properties is a big step forward.” Surprises may show up when de-vices shrink below around 50 nanometers, Heinrich says, because dopant atoms will be so scarce that their individual positions may affect the de-vice’s function. Tomihiro Hashizume of Hitachi’s Advanced Research Laboratory in Hatoyama, Japan, says the ability to see precisely how charge carriers move “will be indispensable for the further progress of de-vice miniaturization.”

[Update a little after 11 Eastern]

A surgical microbot.

The scientists are designing the 250-micron de-vice to transmit images and deliver microscopic payloads to parts of the body outside the reach of existing catheter technology.

It will also perform minimally invasive microsurgeries, said James Friend of the Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory at Australia’s Monash University, who leads the team. The researchers hope the de-vice will reduce the risks normally associated with delicate surgical procedures.

The piezoelectric approach seems promising.

How much further behind will be nanobots?

Conventional wisdom has long been that there are many types of cancers, and that we won’t come up with a single “cure for cancer”–that there will be many different treatments for different problems. But some researchers think that they may have in fact found a low-cost drug that cures many types of cancer, with few side effects.

This seems like pretty big news.

[Via Geek Press]