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, 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 could
hardly see how much it, you know, bending
. You just take advantage of that springiness. You
can build the hinges and the springs into one part
that's kind of how we accomplished it. 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 1000 times smaller
than a Nerf gun and it was still fireable.
So it's like it's perfect scale. If you're an
aunt and you have a bunch of buddies and you're
gonna have a nerf fight like I got you and
I couldn't even use tweezers because my hands way too
rough for that. We had to use a micro
manipulator and like barely turn a screw and it barely
pulls this thing back to cop it back and fire
it. And then beyond that, like it could
be done with very, very, very expensive instruments
. But for the three 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 nerve gun
. It's just a nonfunctional 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, but online usually I'll fly out and help
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 Salk Institute and decided to
make one last record shattering batch of Nano Nerf guns
. Because in nature, they automatically, you know
, DNA binds up, you create these staple strands
that will like, like bind to the uh one
half of the DNA and lock it into whatever shape
you want. And then, and 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 base 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 assembles to even check their work required. Very
special tools. It's 100 nanometers in length. Now
, the wavelength of light on average 400 to 700
nanometers light can't even bounce off it to come back
to your eye. We had to use 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 it would encounter 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. And 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 nerve 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
nerve guns that instead of firing darts, we're 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
is 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 mini nerf guns a reality as always.
Thanks so much for watching. I'm your host,
Jesse Orl. See you next time with the fam --> .