By artificial muscle, I don’t mean painted-on six-packs on the abdomen that one can get in spray-tan establishments in Hollywood. Artificial muscle is another term for electroactive polymers. These are magical plastics that when you put an electric current through them, they get smaller, or bigger, or change their shape. You can get them to exert considerable force, and they promise to revolutionize a host of everyday and not-so-everyday devices. While artificial muscles could certainly be a boon as prosthetics to people with a variety of disabilities, that’s a ways in the future yet. More immediately, we’re surrounded by machines that do things using electric motors, and the basic design of electric motors hasn’t changed since the mid-18 hundreds. A different way of creating motion has huge possibilities.

For instance, electroactive polymers are already used in Mars rover vehicles, where the camera lens needs a windshield wiper to clean off the Martian dust periodically. A tiny artificial muscle moves the wiper back and forth. It uses only a fraction of the current a motor would take. This is important when your power source is solar cells, very far from the sun.

Closer to home, there are already television cameras that are small enough to be swallowed as a pill, to let a surgeon see what is going on inside of us. The pictures can be sent out wirelessly. The problem is, how do you make the camera move to where it’s needed? A team in Korea are already working on how to use EAPs to turn the camera housing into a worm that can crawl along inside you. I know that sounds quite disgusting, but I suspect we would swallow it – sorry – if our lives depended on it.

The Swedes are exploring how to use EAPs as part of the actual surgery. To repair a ruptured vein, a tube-shaped EAS would be put in place with the electric current flowing, so that it is expanded. Then the voltage would be removed and the tube would shrink down tight to seal the vein.

Many things in science work in two directions. So with EAPs. If, instead of putting current through to make one expand, you give it a good pull to stretch it, it will make some current. This points to the intriguing idea of energy harvesting – getting energy out of all kinds of ambient movement around us. A consortium including SRI International in Palo Alto is working on getting power from ocean waves. Their demonstration looks like a harbor buoy. Inside is a piece of EAP with a weight on the end. As the buoy bobs up and down it produces electricity. Not a lot, but EAPs could become very cheap, so this could eventually beat the big floating rafts and turbines that wave-power research has been using up to now.

The latest development in artificial muscle comes from the University of Texas and it’s known improbably as “frozen smoke”. It consists of carbon atoms, regular carbon like in your pencil lead, strung together in nanotubes, billionths of a meter in diameter. They are made by taking a gel of the atoms and replacing the liquid with gas, hence “frozen smoke.” This makes a material that is as light as air but when huge numbers of the tubes are gathered together in bundles they form artificial muscles, stronger and quicker-acting than ever. The same material could be used to make ever-cheaper solar cells, and glass-like panes that light up. It don’t think it can cure cancer yet, but you never know.

One of the leading figures in this field is Yoseph Bar-Cohen, who works on the Mars rovers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Several years ago he issued a challenge: make an artificial muscle that can arm-wrestle with a human. They have had a couple of contests since. The human was a girl wrestler from a high school in the San Fernando Valley. The girl won both times. The human race can breathe a sigh of relief, for now.