# Rat-Muscle Robots

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rat-muscle-robots/288716>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [February 6, 2005, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rat-muscle-robots/288716 "2005-02-06T23:30:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [February 6, 2005, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rat-muscle-robots/288716/1 "2005-02-06T23:30:20Z")

</div>

[Muscle-powered robots: Not just for the Stygian, nightmarish shores of Hell anymore.](http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050205-4590.html)

> [@](#):
>
> Montemagno and his team etched nanometer-scale lever arms into silicon chips then, without using chemicals that would kill cells, spanned the spaces from the lever arm’s handle to an anchor point with a chrome/gold ribbon. Finally, they added rat pup heart cells to the chips, which only stuck to the metal ribbon, and immersed it all in a sugary solution. The muscle cells divided and grew along the ribbon to create tiny muscles that can be stimulated to pull the levers.

So, how long until these things are throwing punches and launching fireballs out of their shoulders? When that inevitably happens, I know we’ll all be there with our D-cell rockets and double-barreled shotguns.

More seriously, this is an interesting development. Now we don’t have to wait for a post-apocalyptic wasteland to find out what cyborg rats look like. This could be a very interesting development for prosthetics. I wonder how reliable muscle cells are in comparison to more traditional machinery, though.