Nanobots may one day be implemented to help fight diseases such as HIV or cancer. But how would they communicate with each other inside our bodies to give terrible diseases the equivalent of a tag team death match? Maria Gregori and her team from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Spain think they may have found a way for our internal robot buddies to communicate using a non-pathogenic version of E. coli. The team needed to figure out how to let nanobots transmit or receive data on a relatively small scale of a few millimeters. As radio signals are mostly absorbed by liquid they came up with the idea of encoding a message into the DNA of E. coli flagella’s cytoplasm. When a nanobot finds a diseased cell it releases the DNA encoded bacteria, that is not harmful to humans, and finds other nanobots with chemical receptors designed to accept the encoded DNA sequence and merges with them essentially telling the other nanobots where to swarm. In a computer simulation they found that it took the encoded bacteria about 6 minutes to travel from its starting nanobot to the receiver and transmit 600kb of data. Does this sound like what the ‘Borg’ do to humans? Will become part of a cyborg hive? To read the full detailed paper please visit: Here
Eavesdropper