Chemical power for microscopic robots in capillaries.

The power available to microscopic robots (nanorobots) that oxidize bloodstream glucose while aggregated in circumferential rings on capillary walls is evaluated with a numerical model using axial symmetry and time-averaged release of oxygen from passing red blood cells. Robots about 1 microm in size can produce up to several tens of picowatts, in steady state, if they fully use oxygen reaching their surface from the blood plasma. Robots with pumps and tanks for onboard oxygen storage could collect oxygen to support burst power demands two to three orders of magnitude larger. We evaluate effects of oxygen depletion and local heating on surrounding tissue. These results give the power constraints when robots rely entirely on ambient available oxygen and identify aspects of the robot design significantly affecting available power. More generally, our numerical model provides an approach to evaluating robot design choices for nanomedicine treatments in and near capillaries. FROM THE CLINICAL EDITOR: The power available to microscopic robots (nanorobots) that oxidize bloodstream glucose while aggregated in circumferential rings on capillary walls was evaluated in this study. The presented numerical model provides an approach to evaluating robot design choices for nanomedicine treatments in and near capillaries.

Maintaining your health from within: controls for nanorobot swarms in fluids.

Molecular electronics and nanoscale chemical sensors could enable the construction of microscopic sensors capable of detecting patterns of chemicals as they flow passively in a fluid. Information from a large number of such devices allow the estimation of properties of tiny chemical sources in a macroscopic tissue volume. Although such devices cannot yet be fabricated, estimates of plausible device capabilities in small blood vessels allow the evaluation of their performance for typical chemicals released by tissues in response to localized injury or infection. The devices can readily discriminate a single cell-sized chemical source from the background chemical concentration, providing high resolution sensing in both time and space. By contrast, such a chemical source would be difficult to distinguish from background when diluted throughout the blood volume as obtained with a blood sample. These microscopic, programmable devices could also aid treatments, such as precisely targeting drug delivery and improving speed and accuracy of microsurgery.

Human Brain/Cloud Interface.

The Internet comprises a decentralized global system that serves humanity's collective effort to generate, process, and store data, most of which is handled by the rapidly expanding cloud. A stable, secure, real-time system may allow for interfacing the cloud with the human brain. One promising strategy for enabling such a system, denoted here as a "human brain/cloud interface" ("B/CI"), would be based on technologies referred to here as "neuralnanorobotics." Future neuralnanorobotics technologies are anticipated to facilitate accurate diagnoses and eventual cures for the ∼400 conditions that affect the human brain. Neuralnanorobotics may also enable a B/CI with controlled connectivity between neural activity and external data storage and processing, via the direct monitoring of the brain's ∼86 × 109 neurons and ∼2 × 1014 synapses. Subsequent to navigating the human vasculature, three species of neuralnanorobots (endoneurobots, gliabots, and synaptobots) could traverse the blood-brain barrier (BBB), enter the brain parenchyma, ingress into individual human brain cells, and autoposition themselves at the axon initial segments of neurons (endoneurobots), within glial cells (gliabots), and in intimate proximity to synapses (synaptobots). They would then wirelessly transmit up to ∼6 × 1016 bits per second of synaptically processed and encoded human-brain electrical information via auxiliary nanorobotic fiber optics (30 cm3) with the capacity to handle up to 1018 bits/sec and provide rapid data transfer to a cloud based supercomputer for real-time brain-state monitoring and data extraction. A neuralnanorobotically enabled human B/CI might serve as a personalized conduit, allowing persons to obtain direct, instantaneous access to virtually any facet of cumulative human knowledge. Other anticipated applications include myriad opportunities to improve education, intelligence, entertainment, traveling, and other interactive experiences. A specialized application might be the capacity to engage in fully immersive experiential/sensory experiences, including what is referred to here as "transparent shadowing" (TS). Through TS, individuals might experience episodic segments of the lives of other willing participants (locally or remote) to, hopefully, encourage and inspire improved understanding and tolerance among all members of the human family.

Mobile microscopic sensors for high resolution in vivo diagnostics.

Molecular electronics and nanoscale chemical sensors could allow the construction microscopic sensors capable of detecting patterns of chemicals in a fluid. Information from a large number of such devices flowing passively in the bloodstream allows estimates of the properties of tiny chemical sources in a macroscopic tissue volume. We use estimates of plausible device capabilities to evaluate their performance for typical chemicals released into the blood by tissues in response to localized injury or infection. We find that the devices can readily discriminate a single cell-sized chemical source from the background chemical concentration, providing high-resolution sensing in both time and space. By contrast, such a chemical source would be difficult to distinguish from background when diluted throughout the blood volume as obtained with a blood sample.

Leveraging position bias to improve peer recommendation.

With the advent of social media and peer production, the amount of new online content has grown dramatically. To identify interesting items in the vast stream of new content, providers must rely on peer recommendation to aggregate opinions of their many users. Due to human cognitive biases, the presentation order strongly affects how people allocate attention to the available content. Moreover, we can manipulate attention through the presentation order of items to change the way peer recommendation works. We experimentally evaluate this effect using Amazon Mechanical Turk. We find that different policies for ordering content can steer user attention so as to improve the outcomes of peer recommendation.

Experimental implementation of an adiabatic quantum optimization algorithm.

We report the realization of a nuclear magnetic resonance computer with three quantum bits that simulates an adiabatic quantum optimization algorithm. Adiabatic quantum algorithms offer new insight into how quantum resources can be used to solve hard problems. This experiment uses a particularly well-suited three quantum bit molecule and was made possible by introducing a technique that encodes general instances of the given optimization problem into an easily applicable Hamiltonian. Our results indicate an optimal run time of the adiabatic algorithm that agrees well with the prediction of a simple decoherence model.