Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn from Cornell University physicists about how cell-sized robots actually communicate with each other and move around.

You'll also learn about the uncanny valley and how scientists figured out what part of your brain

gets creeped out by human-like robots.

The machines really are taking over.

This podcast at least, let's satisfy our robot overlords.

Or at least let's satisfy some curiosity.

How do you actually communicate with a cell-sized robot?

And how does something that small actually move around?

This week, you'll get to know how micro-scale machinery works,

with some help from Cornell University Physicists Paul McHughan and E. Ty Cohen.

It's the third edition of our micro scale Mondays mini series and we'll start by

asking Paul the obvious question. Can't you just use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi?

Well that's an interesting question is how do we communicate with them?

And in fact, you can't really put Wi-Fi on them because they're too small.

They don't work well with Wi-Fi.

So we're doing basically LIFI. We use light as the thing we shoot at

them to both power and communicate with them. So think of a cat chasing a laser beam. That might be the

right mental image to have. And then they have a little LED on board so that they can, at least in some of the devices, can blink back at you to communicate what's going on with them.

So we also need to invent basically a set of technologies.

...