Smart Dust Coming?

Advances Bring ‘Smart Dust’ Closer

The idea of "Smart Dust" first caught my attention in the work of Vernor Vinge (one of my favorite authors) in his 1999 novel A Deepness in the Sky.

I've posted recently about the incredible miniaturization of RFID technology, but now Hewlett-Packard is pursuing a project "to embed up to a trillion pushpin-size sensors around the globe." Pushpin-size is pretty big compared to smart dust; but its a step...

Last year, Hewlett-Packard began a project it grandly calls “Central Nervous System for the Earth,” a 10-year initiative to embed up to a trillion pushpin-size sensors around the globe... Microchip-equipped sensors can be designed to monitor and measure not only motion, but also temperature, chemical contamination or biological changes. The applications for sensor-based computing, experts say, include buildings that manage their own energy use, bridges that sense motion and metal fatigue to tell engineers they need repairs, cars that track traffic patterns and report potholes, and fruit and vegetable shipments that tell grocers when they ripen and begin to spoil.