A gear approximately 10 micrometers wide made of etched silicon viewed under an electron microscope
Gun One / My Fab Chalmers
Tiny gears, thinner than a human hair and powered by light, could be used to study human cells and power small, complex robots.
Gear systems often struggle to function at sizes less than a tenth of a millimeter (about the thickness of an average piece of paper) because the power systems that drive them are difficult to miniaturize. Some simple systems can be built at the nanoscale, such as rotors built from DNA, but these are custom-made and…
