Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Mark Rober’s DNA Nerf Gun Raises Possibility of Medical Breakthroughs”.
It’S smaller than that actual wavelength of light light can’t even bounce off it to come back to your eye when Mark Rober set out to make the world’s smallest nerf gun, he didn’t know it would lead to this. I talked with Mark to learn about how this Saga could lead to Medical breakthroughs, how his friendly rivalry with Mr Beast pushes, both of them to Greater extremes and what inspired him to make a nerf gun out of DNA. What inspires me to do any of the dumb stuff I do on my YouTube channel, I don’t know. Mark also holds the record for the world’s largest Nerf gun, which he built himself, but going smaller and, to such an extreme degree, presented new challenges so Mark, with the help of some experts. First, set out to simplify the Nerf gun and try to get the whole thing in just one part: all materials are Springs, you know.
Even glass technically is a spring, but it’s it’s just so stiff. You can hardly see how much it’s you know, bending you just take advantage of that springiness you can build the hinges and the Springs into one part, so that’s kind of how we accomplished it. The this one part design broke the record a few times, but still reached its limits. We got to the size of three orders of magnitude, smaller so a thousand times smaller than a Nerf gun, and it was still Fireball. So it’s like it’s perfect scale.
If you’re an aunt and you have a bunch of buddies and you going to have a Nerf fight like I got you and I couldn’t even use tweezers cuz my hands way too rough. We had to use a micromanipulator and, like barely turn a screw, and then it barely pulls this thing back to it back and fire it, and then beyond that, like it could be done with very, very, very expensive instruments, but for the sakes of this video, it’s Just like way out of scope, then we started just making the shapes of them, which I would argue is still it’s. It’S a Nerf gun.
It’S just a non-functional one. It looks like it. You know the outline Mark kept going smaller in part because of his friendly rivalry. With Mr Beast, we’re friends, you know I’ve done a few World Records, in fact, whenever he breaks one of mine, usually I’ll fly out and help him break it. But in this case, once I learned about the DNA, it’s like – oh there’s, actually there’s still some room here. So I need to protect this one against Mr Beast. Before finishing his video Mark learned about a technique called DNA, origami being studied at the Suk Institute and decided to make one last record shattering batch of Nano, Nerf guns cuz in nature. They automatically you know, DNA binds up.
You create these staple strands that will like like bind to the one half of the DNA and lock it into whatever shape you want, and then all you do. Is you take a bunch of those staple strands? You can order online that have a very specific sequence of DNA and then a bass strand that has a very specific sequence of DNA. You throw that into a test tube at just the right temperature for just the right amount of time and it literally self assembled to even check their work required very special tools. It’S 100 nanom in length now the wavelength of light on average 400 to 700 nanom light can’t even bounce off it.
To come back to your eye, we had to Ed an atomic Force microscope, which is basically a lever arm that goes out, and it just feels its way back and forth across the surface and then when encounters something as small as a single atom. It moves up a little bit and then, when it passes by that atom it moves down and then you’re shining a laser off that lever. So you can like accentuate the movements up and down sure enough when we did it.
We saw in like a single drop of saline solution. There was like 1.2 trillion of the world’s smallest nerf guns. There are now more of the world’s smallest nerf guns than there ever have or ever will be actual Nerf guns in a single drop. The technology behind Mark’s, final and smallest nerf guns might hold the key to some medical breakthroughs when you think of like oh robots in your bloodstream. That can help in the future. It’S looking like machines made of metal and clicking parts and gears and batteries right. But it’s not that with a very targeted approach. If you had 1.2 trillion mini Nerf guns that, instead of firing darts, were firing, something like the right sequence of whatever to kill a bad cell cancer or to fortify a good cell hijacking. What we would call Natural biological machines, our body’s already making but kind of tweaking them and rewriting them in a way. That’S even more beneficial for ourselves check out Mark’s, fantastic, in-depth video for much more from the team of leading experts. He assembled to make these many Nerf guns a reality, as always thanks so much for watching. I’M your host Jess oral, see you next time with the fam .