These Robots Are Chains of Tiny Magnetic Beads

Healing with magnets might one day be considered legitimate medicine — at least if those magnets are also microscopic surgical robots. By manipulating the same magnetic fields that were shown to control the swimming motion of microscopic robots, a team of engineers at Drexel University has demonstrated the ability to assemble and disassemble chains of tiny magnetic beads. "If you have these simple geometries as building blocks, you can put them together to make more complicated shapes that