YOU’RE making such a racket it’s a wonder you can hear yourself think. Noisy bacteria are carousing in your gut. The mitochondria in your cells are humming like power stations in overdrive, and replicating DNA strands are unzipping with a noise like tearing metal. Every bit of you drums out a unique acoustic signature. Up close, your body sounds like a badly tuned orchestra playing Times Square at rush hour.
Now imagine that somewhere in all that biological commotion, cancer cells have started to divide. As they spread, they play a melody that to a trained ear is as distinctive as the strains of Elgar’s cello concerto. No artificial ear, however well trained, is sharp enough to penetrate the cellular caterwauling to pick out the distinctive sounds made by those cancer cells. But Flavio Noca hopes to change all that.
Noca, a physicist and engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is part of a team that has built a prototype of the ultimate in microscopic ears. They hope these ears will eventually, be so small and so keen they will be able to tell apart two kinds of cell simply from the racket they make. By injecting them into your bloodstream, the nano-ears could be used to eavesdrop on your metabolism like miniature stethoscopes, spotting diseased or cancerous cells before they get a chance to spread. If they are keen enough, Noca’s nano-ears might even be sent to other planets to listen for creatures or identify chemical reactions in alien oceans, using nothing more than the symphony of clicks, shrieks and bangs they produce.
It’s not as bonkers as it sounds. Talk to ...