The microbots help to explain how order arises in a disordered system — image of the week.
This intriguing image shows the pattern that formed when dozens of microscopic robots were released 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 field, they organized themselves into a pattern with larger ones in the centre and smaller ones on the outside.
The scientists who conducted the studyshowed that they could program the microbots to cluster and move. The phenomenon might one day be used to assemble microscopic structures, and to understand the process of self-organization, in which local interactions — between molecules, cells or animals, for example — lead to order in a system.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA
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