Byline: ROBERT S. BOYD Knight Ridder
Tiny machines no bigger than a fingernail, a grain of rice or a red blood cell have been twirling, buzzing and slithering across the pages of science fiction and research laboratory benches for years.
Now these Lilliputian gadgets are beginning to enter the real world. Following on the success of crash sensors in automobile air bags, new micromachines are being developed to sniff anthrax or nerve gas, to protect nuclear weapons and to resuscitate laboratory mice.
Enthusiasts say they are the advance wave of a technological revolution comparable to the introduction of computer microchips.
``Imagine a machine so small that it is imperceptible to the human eye,'' said Al Romig, director of the Microsystems Science, Technology and Components Center at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.
``Welcome to the microdomain -- a place where gravity and inertia are no longer important, but the effects of atomic forces dominate,'' Romig wrote in a description of his lab's work published on the Internet.
Sandia, along with other government …
No comments:
Post a Comment