Canadian ingenuity.

First full day of the conference. Can't wait. Wish I could tell you all about it, but you'll just have to content yourself with this fascinating article from LiveScience.com--forwarded to me by Marduk--which has absolutely nothing at all to do with what's happening in Ottawa this weekend: "The World’s Smallest Robot."

Researchers have built an inchworm-like robot so small you need a microscope just to see it.

In fact about 200 hundred of them could line up and do the conga across a plain M&M.

The tiny bot measures about 60 micrometers wide (about the width of a human hair) by 250 micrometers long, making it the smallest untethered, controllable microrobot ever.

"It's tens of times smaller in length, and thousands of times smaller in mass than previous untethered microrobots that are controllable," said designer Bruce Donald of Dartmouth University. "When we say ‘controllable,' it means it's like a car; you can steer it anywhere on a flat surface, and drive it wherever you want to go."