Trees shuttle water and sugar through its body amazingly, so scientists took inspiration to create a new “tree-in-a-chip” mechanism system.
(Photo : Johannes Simon/Getty Images)
Trees, nature’s ultra-reliable hydraulic pumps, have a constant stream of nutrients flowing through it whether its water shuttled from the roots to the leaves or sugar pumped from the leaves to the roots.
According to a report from MIT News, a group of engineers were able to design a “tree-on-a-chip” that basically functions the same way, mimicking the pumping mechanism of trees and plants. Even with no moving parts or external pumps, the chip can pump water and sugar continuously for several days.
This new mechanism can be used in robotics, powering the movement of robots with relatively cheap sugar-powered pumps inspired by trees.
“For small systems, it’s often expensive to manufacture tiny moving pieces,” one of the authors, Anette “Peko” Hosoi of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, said. “So we thought, ‘What if we could…
