You’ve probably eaten a few pounds of orcein, aka C.I. Natural Red 28, in your time. It’s a red food-safe dye that’s used in everything from Twinkies to stains for bacterial cultures. But apparently, it may also be the key to fighting Alzheimer’s.

It works by fighting small toxic protein aggregates. These, over time, get bigger and become plaques, something that doesn’t sound awesome, but your brain actually seems to be OK with them. But it’s the seeds of these plaques that are the problem; researchers believe that their toxicity is what starts certain brain diseases.

Most of the research was focused on changing these aggregrates structurally to be less toxic, but orcein takes another tactic entirely: they step on the gas, turning the aggregates into plaques a lot faster, and reducing the brain’s exposure to those toxins.

It’ll be a while before we’re injecting food dye into our brains: animal testing hasn’t even launched yet. But there’s hope. And in the meantime, eat lots and lots of red stuff. We’re starting with the Twinkies.

Why, yes, we intentionally went out of our way to write the weirdest headline we could think of for this news story, but it’s 100% true. A bunch of Canadian scientists, specifically the guys up at the Nanorobotics Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, have figured out how to make certain bacteria do their bidding.

It works because the bacteria are “magnetotatic”, which means they swim in the direction of a magnetic field. So it’s fairly easy to manipulate them into moving around small blocks of epoxy and get them to build simple structures.

This may sound pretty goofy and pointless, but it’s not. This is actually a major step forward for nanotechnology. This is a proof of concept: we can actually do the stuff that heretofore was limited mostly to cyberpunk novels and hand-wringing by fundamentalists who barely grasp how robots work but can understand the term “gray goo”. Now it’s just a matter of making it effective. Check out the video under the jump and marvel at how kinda gross the future looks.

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