Plumbers could soon be sending miniature robots off to inspect your pipes. Jinwan Lim at the Korea Aerospace University in Goyang, South Korea, and colleagues have developed a 10-millimetre-wide robot, equipped with a tiny camera, that can crawl through domestic pipes like a caterpillar. The complicated pneumatics used to propel previous wormbots made them too large for narrow pipes, but the new robot needs only a single air line to power its “inching” motion (, in press).
It’s easy to get lost on the moon: one dusty crater looks much like any other. So NASA is
