Microscopic bio-robot slaves

Shaun Saunders sends in an article from New Scientist concerning research into biological based microscopic robots that researchers envision performing a myriad of tasks. Even the smallest robots built today are far to large to do work at the micro scale let alone the nano scale. However a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues, say it may be possible to create new species of slave bacteria to do the job instead. What they envision an artificial bio construct a stripped down versions of bacteria, with only enough of a genome to perform certain tasks - for example, swimming along a chemical trail using their flagella, secreting another chemical as they go. The team proposes that thousands of these constructs could be used to carve out the kind of microscopic features needed on microprocessors and other likely tasks.

The article of course has some "lighter side" tasks that they could perform as well. Click the article title for more.