Fun_People Archive
18 Nov
Yet Another Final Frontier

Date: Fri, 18 Nov 94 18:16:32 PST
To: Fun_People
Subject: Yet Another Final Frontier

[In a pig's ass you say?  How did you know?  -psl]

From: WhiteBoard News <joeha@microsoft.com>

Los Angeles, California:

Tiny robots that mimic the deft movements of serpents could become an
important new tool for doctors.  One target is the human intestine, which
has winding recesses that are difficult to reach using traditional
fiber-optic endoscopes.

"We're designing motorized snakes that would crawl through your intestines,"
says Joel Burdick of the California Institute of Technology.  He is
conducting preliminary tests of a ten-inch-long, plastic-and- rubber
prototype in pigs.  The robot enters through the rectum now, but in the
future a one-inch robot might be popped like a pill.

In the pig experiments, a communication cable is attached to the robot.
But in more advanced devices, images from a miniature camera mounted on the
snake would be radioed out of the body, like images from a distant space
probe, and reassembled on a computer screen.

© 1994 Peter Langston