A team of scientists from University of California, San Diego (USA) and Arizona State University (Tempe, USA) has now developed nanorods that swim extremely fast. “These nanorods travel about 75 times their own length in one second,” report Joseph Wang and his co-workers in the journal Angewandte Chemie. “We are approaching the speed of the most efficient biological nanomotors, including flagellated bacteria.”

The first simple applications for nanomotors could include rapid transportation of pharmaceutical agents to specific target areas, or the passage of specimen molecules through the tiny channels of diagnostic systems on a microchip. However, forward motion through a liquid is not as trivial as one would like to think. One method for the construction of nanomotors that can achieve this is the fuel-driven catalytic nanowire. These are tiny nanoscopic rods whose ends are made of two different metals. Unlike macroscopic motors, they do not have a fuel tank; instead they move through a medium that contains the fuel they need.


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