These little robots can clean up drinking water.
A video posted at the American Chemical Society shows swimming bots that capture waterborne bacteria using gold plating. Developed by Diana Vilela, Samuel Sánchez Ordóñez, and other researchers in Germany and Spain, the bots attract bacteria using gold and kill it with silver nanoparticles. The little bots propel themselves with a surface coated with magnesium, which creates hydrogen bubbles when immersed in water. They can only keep up this propulsion for 15 or 20 minutes, but early tests have shown that they can clean more than 80 percent of the bacteria in water during that time.
