Wired is thinking big about something much, much smaller than a hamster in a wheel – powering microscopic machines with “bacterial windfarms”:
The natural movement of bacteria and the chaotic way it swarms can be used to “turn cylindrical rotors and provide a steady power source”.
Physicists from Oxford University have created computer simulations to show bacteria is able to spontaneously organise itself so small rotors are turned “spontaneously”.
“We didn’t have to pre-design microscopic gear-shaped turbines,” Tyler Shendruk from the University’s department of physics said. “The rotors just self-assembled into a sort of bacterial windfarm.”