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Cottage Industry
22 July 2018

Cottage Industry

Estate agents are known for describing smaller houses as 'bijou' or 'cosy'. But imagine the tiny clunks of roof panels slipping together in this house, a million times smaller than a cottage. Pictured with a scanning electron microscope, the tiny abode is assembled by robots on the tip of an optical fibre (looking like a podium here), inside a nanofactory. An ion beam laser cuts a template of the house out of a sheet of silica 'paper', which then folds itself up. A tweak on the laser settings welds the house together. But this isn’t a rehousing project for bacteria, rather a proof of principle for an even more ambitious idea – constructing tiny, yet sophisticated sensors on the ends of optical fibres as thin a human hairs. At home inside the body, these could measure our blood pressure, changes in temperature or the monitor the fight against infections.

Written by John Ankers

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BPoD stands for Biomedical Picture of the Day. Managed by the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences until Jul 2023, it is now run independently by a dedicated team of scientists and writers. The website aims to engage everyone, young and old, in the wonders of biology, and its influence on medicine. The ever-growing archive of more than 4000 research images documents over a decade of progress. Explore the collection and see what you discover. Images are kindly provided for inclusion on this website through the generosity of scientists across the globe.

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