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Science Technology

Fantastic Voyage Microrocket Technology Coming To a Body Near You 19

coondoggie writes "In the 1966 science fiction classic Fantastic Voyage, a tiny submarine with a crew of five is miniaturized and injected into a comatose man to surgically laser a blood clot in his brain and save his life. At this week's American Chemical Society Nanoengineering expert Joseph Wang detailed his latest work in developing micromotors and microrockets that are so small that thousands would fit inside this 'o'. Such machines could someday perform microsurgery, clean clogged arteries or transport drugs to the right place in the body. But there are also possible uses in cleaning up oil spills, monitoring industrial processes and in national security."
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Fantastic Voyage Microrocket Technology Coming To a Body Near You

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  • Isaac Asimov was approached and agreed to write a novel from the movie, but he was so embarrassed about the logical and scientific fallacies of the whole tale even though his version fixed a few. The book was released before the movie so everyone thought the film was based on his novel.

    • He was actually so embarrassed that he later rewrote the whole story into another novel of the same name. I quite enjoyed the (newer) novel, despite what the few Amazon reviewers may think.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Can we get a Roomba that doesn't get stuck in the corner before we start talkin about shootin rockets into our arteries please???

  • Itty bitty spy cams, coming to a bodily organ near^H^H^H^H inside you,

  • Slightly off topic, but I recommend the novelization of Fantastic Voyage [google.com]. It is the one novelization I have read that was actually better than the movie from which it was taken. This is because it was written by Isaac Asimov in his prime.

    There are all sorts of weird little things in the movie that are explained in the book. Like, why can the mission only take 60 minutes? And, at the end, whatever happened to the submarine?

    (There was one scene from the movie that was just too stupid to explain, so Asimov

  • But there are also possible uses in cleaning up oil spills, monitoring industrial processes and in national security."

    I read that and the first thing I thought was... after the robots kill the protesters, they'll just crawl out of their ear and shimmy into the storm drain. But then I realized, who am I kidding? The government would never do something like that.

  • You'll never guess where I've been!

  • TFA says one type of rocket uses water as fuel. How do they extract energy from water?
  • But does it have Raquel Welch, at the age of 28 or so, in a skin-tight wet suit? Yeah. I thought not.

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