Imagine a computer so small that it can swim around your body and hangout within living cells. Now imagine if you will that this computer is able to act as your own personal doctor, detecting disease and using its preprogrammed medical knowledge to output a therapeutic drug.

This sounds like something you would see in a science fiction movie but the fact is this is very real and is currently being worked on with amazing progress.

There are many names for this technology and the concepts have been around for several decades. I recall about ten years ago one of my professors telling me how he was part of a new startup organization which was researching “Nano Biological Technology”. He described this new technology just as I have above.

Well, it seems scientists have come a long way in ten years. They have currently built a solid foundation for which these biological computers can process simple commands and interact with other living cells. Before you get too excited, they are not yet at the point where these biomolecular machines can run around with a micostethoscope asking cells to cough in a human body but they are at the point where scientist can program molecules to do certain tasks within test tubes.

According to Ehud Shaprio (Professor, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) and Yaakov Benenson (fellow at Harvard University, USA) in a highly detailed Scientific American article;

“We have already succeeded in creating a biological automation made of DNA and proteins able to diagnose in a test tube the molecular symptoms of certain cancers and ‘treat’ the disease by releasing a therapeutic molecule”

As for their sophistication, don’t expect biological computers to replace electronic computers anytime soon. The speed of molecular machines can only process a few hundred operations a second whereas modern day devices can process billions of operations a second.

Every once in a while we get the opportunity to hear about new things that will certainly change the world. These new computer species could possibly change the future of healthcare for everyone. This is definitely one exciting area to follow.

Every morning I eat breakfast while watching the Science Channel and today there was an episode on black holes and the universe. That led me to start daydreaming in the car ride to the office this morning about the concepts of Infinitely Small.

I am starting to get a handle on some of the various theories of black holes. Take a matter 100 million million times greater then our sun and compress it to a size of a small piece of dust. If space was laid out like a trampoline, this dust particle would press so deep into the trampoline fabric all other objects on it would be destined to fall into its indentation.

Basically this is one of Einstein’s theories of how gravity works.

So today I think I understand how not even light can escape the gravitational force of a black hole. The gravitational force is so infinitely large it breaks apart the smallest of smalls as it enters the black holes center.

But I am still struggling with the idea of Infinitely Small. I was focusing on one question for about 45 min today. Where does all the stuff go when it falls into a black hole?

In an effort to try to solve this, I had to ask myself a new question.

It’s completely theoretical but I thought, “Imagine the smallest possible thing”. (My mind is not capable of actually thinking of such a small object, but I just picture the word “small” in my mind).

Now that I have an image of the smallest possible thing in my mind, could I split that in half? Sure I can and theoretically I could keep splitting that in half many times over.

So, if black matter is the end result of all matter that falls into a black hole, then black matter should be something right? Theoretically we should be able to split that in half? And if it is something, where does it go?