Thanks to rapid advances in nanotechnology, it's entirely possible that at someday soon, some wiseacre doctor will say these words. In today's tag-team edition of DNews, Trace Dominguez and Julian Huguet investigate the realm of medical nanobots.

In broad terms, medical nanobots refer to very tiny machines that you can swallow, inject into your bloodstream, or otherwise introduce into the body. These bots are designed to practice medicine from the inside, as it were, and we're closer than you might think to deploy this science fiction technology.

For instance, in 2015 scientists from MIT devised an ingestible origami robot that folds itself down to the size of a pill. The origami design not only allows the bot to get small, it provides a method of locomotion while inside the body. The researchers ran a series of experiments using a simulated human stomach and esophagus, and a set of external magnets to guide the bot along the stomach wall.

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