Credit score: Gaurav Gardi
This intriguing picture reveals the sample that shaped when dozens of microscopic robots had been launched on to water and made to spin. The ‘microbots’ are magnetic discs a fraction of a millimetre in diameter. When made to rotate by a magnetic area, they organized themselves right into a sample with bigger ones within the centre and smaller ones on the surface. The scientists who carried out the research1 confirmed that they might program the microbots to cluster and transfer. The phenomenon may someday be used to assemble microscopic buildings, and to grasp the method of self-organization, through which native interactions — between molecules, cells or animals, for instance — result in order in a system.
