Bragging about teeny-tiny healthcare
Meowdy humans, it’s Adam 👋
This is my newsletter where I share cool stuff people do on the internet.
You might remember me from my CatGPT 🐈⬛ project. I created it in a single day to show that people can make fun stuff with AI, and millions of people loved it!! 😻
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You know what I’m grateful for?
Imagination.
My day job is building software for healthcare organizations, so I get especially excited when I see humans thinking up cool ways to care for each other.
And as it turns out, some of the best ideas start with questions that sound a little ridiculous at first!
This week, we’re bragging about some clever humans turning insects 🪳 bacteria 🦠 and teeny-tiny robots 🤖 into miniature healthcare workers.
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The world’s tiniest emergency paramedics
You're trapped under collapsed earthquake rubble, barely able to move, while rescuers are still digging somewhere above.
Then you hear something tiny crawling toward you…
…a cyborg cockroach?? 🪳🤖
Researchers Thang Vo-Doan and Hai Nhan Le and their team at the University of Queensland are doing something wicked smart: turning giant burrowing cockroaches into tiny rescue workers! And there’s a really cool reason for it too👇
Cockroaches are already amazingly good at squeezing through tiny cracks 🤏 and unstable rubble that humans can’t reach.
So the team fitted cockroaches with cameras and tiny medical injectors, turning them into little “rescue bugs” that could one day save someone’s life 🤯.
Thang and Hai… pretty clever upgrade for something I’d normally hit with a shoe! 😂👏
A hairy robot fishing cancer cells out of your blood
*concept illustration 🐈⬛
That’s why micro-robotics researcher Jiangfan Yu from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen is building teeny-tiny "fishing nets" for your bloodstream 🎣. You’ve gotta check this out👇
CiliaVine is a tiny soft robot, covered in around 50 magnetic hairs 🧲 .
The hairs wave through flowing blood, and when researchers coat them with antibodies, they can grab circulating tumor cells passing by.
Jiangfan… what a way to go fishing! 👏🎣
Humans turning yogurt bacteria into tiny drug factories
*concept illustration 👨🎨
But what if I told you scientists are now engineering one of these gut-dwelling “bacterial buddies” to set up shop inside tumors and make medicine 💊 right where it’s needed?
Ralph Weichselbaum, Mark Mimee, Jaehyun Lee, and their team at the University of Chicago are giving these friendly bacteria a brand-new (and potentially life-saving) job👇 They engineered a probiotic bacterium called Bifidobacterium longum to colonize tumors and continuously release a souped-up version of IL-2, a protein that helps activate cancer-fighting immune cells.
Go Team Yogurt!! 🥄 👏👏
A robot that grows through your arteries to stop a stroke
Normally, doctors have to manually push and twist rigid tools through delicate, winding blood vessels.
And there’s another problem: lots of patients live too far from the specialists who can do the life-saving operation in time.
So Tania Morimoto and her team at UC San Diego flipped the whole idea around. Instead of pushing a robot through your arteries… they’re building a robot designed to GROW through them. 🤯👇 By building a surgical tool that unfurls from its tip instead of being pushed from behind, the team hopes to make it possible to treat stroke clots at local hospitals when specialists are miles away.
Tania… what an amazing way to rethink brain surgery! 🧠👏
🏆 Know a human worth bragging about?
If somebody you know is building something weird, useful, kind, or just ridiculously awesome, hit reply with their name + a link to what they’re doing.
I love how optimistic all these humans are.
You don’t spend years building a tiny robot for stroke care or a cyborg cockroach unless some part of you believes something better is possible.
My favorite part is...
None of these ideas had to exist. But for some wonderfully motivated reason, these smart humans saw the possibility of a healthier future and said “why not?”
That’s worth bragging about. 🧡
 Adam Bragg |
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 Bragging about cool stuff humans are doing on the internet. |
