Duncan Graham-Rowe, contributor
Powered by acid and capable of moving at blistering speeds in excess of 640 kilometres per hour, scientists in California have created a novel and quite lethal-sounding torpedo. But this one has rather more of a humanitarian agenda.
Like something out of the Fantastic Voyage, the torpedo is just 10 microns in length and designed to travel within the human body with the aim of delivering drugs, says Joseph Wang at the University of California, San Diego.?
It's not the first time anyone has made such "micro-rockets", as Wang calls them, but previous efforts have required additional fuel, typically hydrogen peroxide. Wang's differs in that it runs entirely off acid, using a redox reaction to convert the acid into a stream of hydrogen gas that is spewed out of a nozzle at great pace.
This means that it could run autonomously in environments that are highly acidic, such as the stomach. And by using e-beam deposition to add a magnetic layer to its outer surface he was even able to show how these torpedo can be guided and used to pick up and drop off metallic cargos, using an external magnetic field. Wang's results were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (DOI: 10.1021/ja210874s).
They don't have to be used in the human body though, says Wang. Besides the human stomach there are a diverse range of strongly acidic environments in industrial settings, he says.
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