Have you ever played with a Slime toy? This toy made of glue and borax is a slimy substance between solid and liquid, which has a certain degree of fluidity, but does not stick to hands or other items.
▲ Image from: Insider
Imagine a dark slime-like mucus entering your body and swimming back and forth through your body... What do you have in mind? Is this it?
▲ Stills from the movie "Venom", picture from: Douban
▲ Stills from the movie "Venom", picture from: Douban
In fact, the above scene describes this - a deformable magnetic slime robot.
The research team at Chinese University of Hong Kong developed this result, which is made of a mixture of materials such as strong neodymium magnets, borax and polyvinyl alcohol, based on a magnetically driven slime robot with non-Newtonian fluids.
▲ Image courtesy of NewScientist
This magnetically driven slime robot, which is encapsulated in silicon compounds on the outside, is therefore not toxic to the human body. It can enter a limited space non-invasively and can be used as a solution for minimally invasive surgery, micromanipulation, and targeted drug delivery.
Thanks to the characteristics of the fluid, the robot has excellent deformation ability, only 1.5 mm of narrow channels can also pass through, plus it can be driven by magnetic forces, so it can move in a variety of complex environments.
In the face of a thin line, it will stretch out a part of it to "grasp" the line, and then roll up the thread to hold it firmly; the blocky solid is even less important to it. Even if it is divided into several parts, as long as these parts are connected at will, it can be restored immediately.
In the researchers' experiments, the magnetically driven slime robot could perform a variety of functions, including grasping solid objects, swallowing and transporting harmful substances, human motion monitoring, and circuit switching and repair...
If someone accidentally swallows an item that should not be swallowed, the slime robot can be driven by magnetism, so that it "sneaks" into the body, reaches the specified position, and "reaches out" to retrieve the accidentally swallowed item.
In fact, there are not many robots that can manipulate objects, and some even help doctors perform delicate surgical operations; "magnetic robots" that can move in a narrow space already exist, such as the City University of Hong Kong, which has developed a magnetic spray that can make pills and other items magnetic, so as to control the movement of objects in the body through magnets.
▲Image from: City University of Hong Kong
However, robots that combine these two methods are not very common. The emerging soft robots designed by this research can be "useful" not only in biomedicine, but also in electronics and other fields in the future.
Although this magnetically driven slime robot is quite useful, but if it is practically applied, there may be something to improve... For example, its shape.
This color of a moving fluid may be reluctant to swallow, and it is indeed easy to conjure up images of somewhat frightening.