BIOTOOLS
Most of us remember poking around a frog's innards during high school biology with a pair of rusty tweezers. But imagine tweezers that let you grab not just a liver, but individual cells, or even snippets of chromosomes. Just such a device has been built by Katsuhiro Ajito, an NTT senior scientist in Atsugi, Japan. Ajito's nanotweezers can capture tiny pieces of organic material with the radiation pressure generated by a laser beam, while using the laser's scattered light to identify a sample's chemical composition. Just as today's surgeons poke and prod at a patient's major organs, tomorrow's may operate at the cellular level with nanotweezers, repairing us from our genes on up.
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