Your Next Surgeon Could Be a Slime Robot

When you think of robotic surgery, you might think of remotely controlled robotic arms whirring over a patient, or tiny endoscopic cameras that help surgeons navigate with precise instruments. You probably don't think of a magnetically controlled slime robot slithering through your gastrointestinal tract and swallowing objects, like some kind of sci-fi ooze. But that's the exact idea behind the Reconfigurable Magnetic Slime Robot -- a stretchy, sluglike robot that can squeeze through tight spaces, wrap around objects and even "self heal" after it's been cut in two. Researcher Li Zhang says the Reconfigurable Magnetic Slime Robot is soft and stretchy enough to go inside the human body and swallow foreign objects. Created by a team of researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Slime Robot is a non-Newtonian fluid, meaning it can behave both as a solid and a liquid.