UNSW 3MT 2018 Winner - Jonathan Berengut - Bio Nano Robo Mofos

our next contestant is John Baron guts who's going to talk to us about bio nano Robo mofos there's a bit in the most recent Avengers movie where Robert

Downey jr. is kind of gearing up for battle and taps this panel on its chest and a billion tiny robots come out and assemble themselves into an Iron Man suit around his body now that's a very

Hollywood version of what nanotechnology is but it might not be as far-fetched as you think you see in the last decade or

so we actually have gotten to the stage where we can build nano scale robots and we can program these nanobots to do nano

scale things things like position tiny electrical components or deliver drugs to cancer cells that's not science fiction that's real the bit that Hollywood got wrong is that we're still

struggling to get these nanobots to assemble themselves into larger formations and that's going to be important if we ever want them to do

larger things things like heal a wound or unclog an artery or form into some sort of crime-fighting super suit and that's what my research is about though

not the super suit part but I've been designing nanobots that do nothing but assemble themselves into very specific formations okay so what are these

nanobots and how do we build them well for starters they're very small you could fit about 2,000 of them across the thickness of a single hair and we tend to build them a few hundred billion at a

time now that makes it pretty tricky to build them using traditional materials they don't make screwdrivers that small so instead we build them out of biological molecules like DNA and that's

because DNA has those base pairing rules you know that make the single strands come together the form that double helix well if we carefully design and code those DNA base pairs in synthetic DNA we

can get them to form much more complex structures like my nanobots here and we can use those same DNA strands to make the robots move or connect to each other

now before we can go ahead and assemble an army of injectable nano surgeons or a molecular supercomputer we've got to hit the baby steps first so here I've designed my nanobots to

assemble into these neat rows and by tweaking their design I can make those rows longer or shorter so you could say

my bio nano robots modular and can create different formations hence mofos now I know this may sound like it's all a bit of fun and to be perfectly honest

it is a lot of fun but it's also serious because it's going to be this type of fundamental research into how we organize matter at the nano scale that's going to lead us to the next generation

of nanomaterials and nano medicines and nano electronics and while we might still be a few years away from the crime-fighting super suit this is us making progress

a few hundred billion tiny robots at a time thank you [Applause]