Engineers from the University of California have come up with an amazing new invention: a tiny fish about 1/100 the size of a grain of sand which could be used to deliver drugs to specific parts of the human body.

The idea of developing the first nano fish came from the efforts of Jinxing Li and a team of scientists at the University of California. The head and the tail of the fish are made from tiny gold segments, while its body is made of nickel - each about 800 nanometers long and connected with silver hinges.

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Ultimately, Li and his team are hoping for their invention to be used for medical processes such as delivering medication, single-cell manipulation, and non-invasive surgical procedures.

So how do these magic swimmers work?

An oscillating magnetic field is applied to allow the nickel parts of the fish' body to move from side to side, allowing the head and the tail to turn and create a swimming like movement. Speed and direction can be manipulated by altering the orientation and strength of the magnetic field.

Li mentioned that the external magnets could direct the nano fish to deliver a drug to a particular area in the human body.

Justin Goodling from the University of New South Wales, Australia said the nano fish is a remarkable and exciting piece of invention.

"A lot of work on drug delivery vehicles relies on the body's transport systems to move the particles to the site of the pathology. [But] active transport has recently begun to be explored and this work shows that active transport particles can be made smaller and faster," she said.

Other research groups have also begun developing nano-swimmers to be used for drug delivery. But most of these use helical propellers inspired by the corkscrew-like tails of bacteria, but experiments have proven that they are not so effective.

Although it is exciting to know that a tiny fish could be used in the future of medicine, the technology does not come without flaws. The materials used to create the fish are not exactly biodegradable, so the big question that remains is how they researchers planning to remove these tiny swimmers from the body.

Watch the video of the nano-fish below: