Viewers may recall the first season of “The Magic School Bus,” in which Ms. Frizzle and her class shrink to microscopic size and dive into a sick student’s throat to track down the virus giving him a fever — a more educational take on the 1966 film "Fantastic Voyage," which is roughly the same premise. While the idea of sending squads of humans into another person is a common sci-fi trope, a similar concept is inching closer to becoming a reality with the development of ultra-tiny devices called nanoelectronics.
These machines, which are a mere one-billionth of a meter in size, are no larger than a mote of dust, truly living up to the name "nano." Originally proposed by physicist Richard Feynman in 1959, nanotechnology got a major boost when Austrian researchers developed the Scanning Tunneling Microscope, which zooms in to view surfaces at the atomic level, in 1981.
