Japanese researchers have built a 17 molecule machine capable of parallel processing.

A central control molecule is able to change the states of the other 16 molecules, in a discovery that could provide a way to control many molecular machines simultaneously and eventually lead to a powerful new method of molecular assembly.

Modeled on how glial cells work to pass along instructions among neurons in the human nervous system, the machine is made entirely of the organic compound duroquinone. Sixteen of the duroquinone molecules form a weakly bonded ring around the central molecule, which serves as the control unit for the machine. Electrical pulses from the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope flip the control molecule to any one of four configurations. A single instruction given to the control unit was capable of generating more than 4 billion possible outcomes.

The researchers believe a first application could be “mimicking the 1965 movie ‘Fantastic Voyage,'” injected in the bloodstream to repair a tumor or other damaged tissues.

Another application would be building a massively parallel supercomputer based on cellular neural networks, a combination of cellular automation and the neural network of the brain.