I remember years ago looking at a piece of science fiction art that depicted a robotic fly with a camera on it, and I thought "wow, what an idea! I'm surprised governments aren't working on such things"! Well guess what...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co … v=hcmodule

By the way, I believe the bit about dragonflies is in fact due to dragonflies, simply because robotics has not advanced enough to make robo-flies (at least not yet)! However, that may be a reality soon...(all the more reason to swat the damn things)!

cheers,

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Everything will be fine until they are small enough to enter our bodies unnoticed.

I thought that article had your name written all over it
As for entering our bodies... well, I do wonder. Currently science fiction, but what is the size limit for producing robotics? One of the professors at my University works on quantum dots which are amazing! Not my research interest, but those are very impressive. Still, those do not function mechanically, and in fact it would be impossible to produce a robot that small. However, little robots flowing through your veins is theoretically possible...

sheesh...

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Bacteria are the proof of concept.

Sounds great 'oh lookie, 1,000's die by a heart attack induced by a faulty nano-robots'...Hate to be the unexpected beta victims of this type of tech.

Isn't that a given with anykind of advancement? I mean I'm sure lot of people in the past were lost in bringing medical science to the point it is today but you're right in saying that's the last thing "they" want you to think about.

If that article is what they are releasing to the public, imagine what is still classified.

Yes, that was my territory indeed.

This is a real stretch of my imagination, but to answer your question:

   The fundamental building blocks of matter are quarks, gluons and electrons. Quarks and gluons make protons and neutrons and are observed at temperatures surpassing 1 trillion fahrenheit, so I will ignore them for this discussion and focus on protons and neutrons. In other words, any machine that uses quarks and gluons would not be useful (or even usable) at temperatures below 1 trillion F. As we know, electrons are very happy at room temperature, which makes them quite useful. Atoms consist of a nucleus and an electron (hydrogen) or electrons. Chemistry can be defined as interactions amongst electrons that are furthest from, yet bounded to, an atomic nucleus (this is not true for plutonium and its neighbors, so my definition is only partly true). Anyway, imagine a rogue group of electrons that decides to start smacking bounded electrons. In other words, these bad guys will start turning other atoms into hydrogen.

  The idea is simple:

   Somehow remove all electrons but one. This will render everything into hydrogen. Of course, that's a horrible idea. But if a robot were composed of particles (doesn't have to be electrons) that were bound by a force, it could customize atoms. The 'force' could not be gravity or electromagnetism. It would have to be one of the other two or possibly an as of yet undiscovered force (of which I imagine there are many).