Actually, it’s an exciting innovation for figuring out what’s wrong in spinal column injuries. A team of Leading Researchers™ headed by Moshe Shoham of Haifa’s Technion have developed a propulsion system for a Very Small Robot that carries a camera to detect damage and problems along the patient’s spinal canal.

Working like an untethered endoscope, the teeny machine will send back picture and video to the waiting surgeons in the OR. Once it has been shrunk down to an acceptable, spine-swimming size with the appropriate tiny tech to enable pictures of useful quality, this little device will certainly be the talk of the water cooler.

Plus: FroBorg? CyFrog?

In other news of the self-propelling robot world, those kooky kids over at MIT are expanding on that old Mr. Wizard standby experiment with the frog leg and the electricity (was that Mr. Wizard? Or 3-2-1-Contact?).

From the Pubmedcentral Abstract:

As a demonstratory proof of concept, we designed, built, and characterized a swimming robot actuated by two explanted frog semitendinosus muscles and controlled by an embedded microcontroller.

Now if that is not enough to get your science bloomers in a twist of excitement, nothing is. The best part about this robot is if the muscle ceases to function after a while, you can always fry it up in a tasty beer batter.

Thank you, I’ll be here all night, tip your waitress.

[Thank you Engadget and the Times of India for the Spine Assist story. Thanks PubmedCentral for the FREAKING AWESOME CyFrog (FroBorg?) link.]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.