

Eye-surgery by magnetically-guided microrobots moves toward clinical trials - robotgal
http://robohub.org/minimally-invasive-eye-surgery-on-the-horizon-as-magnetically-guided-microbots-move-toward-clinical-trials/

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ChuckMcM
Pretty awesome. One of the more interesting developments in robotics of late,
for me, has been huge leaps in the ability to image robot swarms and then
communicate with the swarm in order to get it to do something. The quad-
copters juggling, and now very small robots driving around inside an eye.

It suggests that a future treatment for cancers might be to "drive" a robot to
a tumor cell where the end of the robot has a resonant cavity and them beam
the patient with the required frequency radio signal which blows up the cell
that the robot has inserted its resonant cavity into. I can't imagine yet how
you could do that at the same time as imaging the cancer cells but clearly
there are interesting opportunities here.

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ihnorton
There are some non-robot implementations of this kind of idea out there,
including:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibritumomab_tiuxetan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibritumomab_tiuxetan)

and more generally:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibodies](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibodies)

tl;dr: use cancer-specific antibodies with a payload of a drug, gene vector,
or radioactive particle (!) to very specifically kill cells.

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marvin
I'm seeing incredibly versatile applications of this tecnology. One idea would
be stem cell therapy for treating tinnitus, where the hair cells in the inner
ear are damaged.

If my understanding is correct, this could be healed if stem cells could be
delivered precisely. This could concievably be possible with a system like
this.

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eknkc
Still seeing that as "magically-guided" even after reading the article.

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bascule
How long until they can fix my vitreous floaters?

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jgrahamc
It's amusing that after 2 hours on the front page there are absolutely no
comments on this story. I guess that's the HN equivalent of sitting wide eyed
with a dropped jaw in amazement.

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schiffern
Sadly the self-aggrandizing belittling comment has become standard fare on HN.
It's an evolutionary process methinks, similar to memes being upvoted because
they're quick to consume. Tearing stuff down seems to emotionally appeal to
some part of the HN crowd, and it's relatively easy to generate (or
regurgitate) intellectual-sounding but ultimately content free objections.

If novelty accounts were allowed, I should like to start one called
"HNtrarian". ;)

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sillysaurus
It's kind of mindblowing how trafficked the front page of HN is.

HN is, basically, its front page. HN gets 100k uniques a day.

I was once at an outdoor concert along with 50k others. I remember looking
around and being amazed at the sheer size of the crowd. If you've never been
at an event that large, it's hard to get a feeling for just how many people
50,000 people really is. You have to imagine all of the people you've ever
directly interacted with in your entire life, then somehow mentally multiply
them by about 30x, then gather them all into the same field, watching the same
concert stage.

HN is exactly that, except twice as big, and everyone can jump on stage at any
time and speak to the entire crowd of 100k other people. Seriously, a tenth of
a _million_!

It seems inevitable, then, that since writing a quality comment involves a lot
of effort, most people who want to say something will default to the
relatively effortless game of intellectual whack-a-mole against perceived
flaws in other people's work. I'm sure it gives some people comfort that other
people agree with them, and nothing unites people like a common enemy. So the
karma counter may have inadvertently become the fuel for the middlebrow
dismissals plaguing HN.

