IT MAY look like a line-dancing bar stool—but scientists at MIT reckon
their nanowalker will make even Michael Flatley look flat-footed. Their agile
robot can take 4000 steps per second. It can tiptoe along in 4-nanometre steps
or stride around at up to 20 centimetres per second.
The three-legged, 3-centimetre-tall walker is the brainchild of Sylvain
Martel at MIT’s Bio-Instrumentation Laboratory. Martel wants swarms of
nanowalkers to act as precision tools to manipulate individual atoms or
molecules to build nanomachines. “You can use this for manipulating atoms,
changing molecules, developing new materials or studying DNA,” says Martel.
The first…
