PROTOTYPE

Roach Bot
You never know where cockroaches are lurking -- maybe clinging to a pantry door or skulking on the underside of a commode. That creepy ability to cleave to almost anything was the inspiration for SpinyBotII, a six-legged, half-meter-long prototype spy robot capable of scaling vertical surfaces ranging from stucco to smooth concrete. Developed by mechanical engineer Mark Cutkosky and his team at Stanford University, the robot skitters around on feet that, like roach feet, grip climbing surfaces with tiny spines that can find pits and protrusions even in seemingly smooth terrain. Each of SpinyBotII's feet has 20 hardened steel spines whose tips are just 25 micrometers across. There are other climbing robots, which use everything from suction to adhesive pads to ascend. But they have trouble finding firm footing on dusty or irregular surfaces, and none of them is capable of hanging around securely for weeks on end. The Stanford prototype can do both, so it could augur not only new spy robots but also robots that inspect the outsides of buildings and, maybe someday, the surfaces of other planets.

Nanopatch
Tiny polymer patches on the surfaces of living cells might soon help drug developers and medical researchers see if drugs are reaching their targets or if viruses are mounting attacks. Such events cause changes to the membranes that enclose cells, but the changes are usually imperceptible with standard monitoring techniques. Raz Jelinek of the chemistry department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel, has found a way to attach 30- to 150-nanometer-wide patches of a color-changing polymer to human cells. If something perturbs the cells' membranes, the patches turn red and fluoresce. When, for example, Jelinek adds the anesthetic lidocaine to a sample of cells, the nanopatches affixed to them spark on like minuscule red Christmas lights. Jelinek hopes to soon develop a kit that would marshal the technology for use in both drug development and basic research.