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www.voicechronicle.com_tech-and-science 2015 0000536.txt

#Muscle like Microbots Developed By University of Michigan In an innovative research, the scientists from the University of Michigan have devised special microbots that could possibly work as muscles in the body of human beings. These synthetic muscles, which are even smaller than a grain of sand, have a gold plating over them and can be joined together to form a chain that consequently behaves as muscles. These microbots are tiny oblong particles having slight attraction towards each other. The journal Nature Materials published this research. Flexing These microbots behave in the same way as human muscles which expand and contract in the presence of nerve signals from brain. In salt containing water, these have a natural tendency to form chains. A higher degree of attraction is exhibited on increasing the salt concentration. However, on application of electric field, things take an interesting turn. When the gold plating over the miniature robots interacts with an alternating electrical field passing through them, the microbots get joined together, resulting in an indefinitely long chain with constant addition of new particles. Not only this, the chain also acquires a stretching ability. A researcher from the project Sharon Glotzer, stated in a presser that their motive was to make the chains to work like muscles, whereas Michael Solomon, one of her colleagues and a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, explained that the chains in groups demonstrated great potential. f we can get the chains to swarm together, we can get them to lift loads, move around, do things that biological muscles do added Solomon. If the technology of microbots attains success on a large scale, depending on their strength, they can bring about a revolutionary advancement in the prosthetic limb replacement. Scientists have conceptualized these microbots doing work which cannot be accomplished by normal robots o

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