Nanodragster is 50,000 times thinner than a hair, rides on gold dust

Our sister site keeps up with the plainly-visible automated machines that are precursors to The Robot Apocalypse. But what about the microscopic machines that the T900s will be working with? At right in the picture above is a Top Fuel dragster. To the left is a nanodragster; the red guys in the foreground are the front wheels, and the chassis runs to the rear axle and wheels.

Powered by heat or an electric field and running on a path of gold dust, the nanodragster is an exercise in how best to create machines one atom at a time. Eventually, entire clouds of such contraptions will be put to work destroying puny humans building and repairing things from architectural structures to your own internal organs.

If you're waiting to see how it does the quarter-mile, you might want to leave your request in a time capsule: moving at .0005 inches per hour, it will run the quarter in about 127,000 1,327,000 days. That means we can still outrun them. For now.

[Source: Live Science]