Cottage Industry

Estate agents are known for describing smaller houses as 'bijou' or 'cosy'. But imagine the tiny clunks of roof panels slipping together in this house, a million times smaller than a cottage. Pictured with a scanning electron microscope, the tiny abode is assembled by robots on the tip of an optical fibre (looking like a podium here), inside a nanofactory. An ion beam laser cuts a template of the house out of a sheet of silica 'paper', which then folds itself up. A tweak on the laser settings welds the house together. But this isn’t a rehousing project for bacteria, rather a proof of principle for an even more ambitious idea – constructing tiny, yet sophisticated sensors on the ends of optical fibres as thin a human hairs. At home inside the body, these could measure our blood pressure, changes in temperature or the monitor the fight against infections.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Image from work by Jean-Yves Rauch and colleagues
• Dept. AS2M, Nanorobotics Team, Femto-ST Institute, Univ. Bourgogne Franche-Comte, UMRF CNRS 6177, Besançon, France
• Reproduced from JVSCT Vol 36, Issue 4, 2018, with the permission of the American Vacuum Society and the authors
• Published in the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology, May 2018