We don’t do a whole lot of medical news here at SiliconANGLE – in fact, I’m pretty sure this is the first post on the topic. None-the-less, I do like to pepper in a fair share of bleeding edge technology news and views when I can, and I caught a brilliant and stunning piece of tech from a newspost at KurzweilAI Network.

Technion-Israel Institute of Technology researchers have created a prototype micro robot that can crawl through the human body.  It is only a millimeter in diameter and 14 millimeters long, so it can get into the body’s smallest areas. It is powered by either actuation through magnetic force located outside the body, or through an on-board actuation system.

Made of silicone and metal, it can be made completely biocompatible, so it could remain in the body much as a stent placed in arteries does. In the future, they hope the robot will be able to travel through a blood vessel, the digestive tract or the lungs, delivering targeted medicines to specific locations, clearing blockages, performing biopsies, or placed inside a shunt to drain body fluids from clogged areas.

The pace at which technology is advancing is beyond stunning. I remember back in the late 90s, reading Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about medical science treating the body “more like a machine, and less like a chemical soup,” meanwhile learning through pop culture references like Star Trek: Voyager about nanotechnology.

We’re watching science fiction become science fact before our very eyes – the convergence is here.