Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 109 posts

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#61

Post by monocasa »

dragontamer wrote: post #49
wmf wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone agrees that they could; the question is whether they did.

This. Those Bloomberg reporters showing pictures of lol capacitors did them no favors. We know the difference between processors and capacitors around here. ------- The picture in this article is actually plausible. It's not just a capacitor that is getting hyped up by ignorant reporters.

The picture in the Bloomberg article was obviously thrown together by some graphic designer because they didn't have actual pictures, and modern journalism wants many forms of media for a front page article. That doesn't take away from the claims the article made.

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#62

Post by SavantIdiot »

wyager wrote: post #58
SavantIdiot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High frequency = high power. Energy harvesting is in the femptoWatt range.

> High frequency = high power This isn’t true in any sense applicable to this discussion. For example a near-optical laser transmitter can be as or more efficient in joules per bit than an RF transmitter, depending on the situation.

> A near-optical laser transmitter

Do you have to aim that laser transmitter?

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#63

Post by smackay »

carapace wrote: post #3

AKA "smartdust" > The concepts for Smart Dust emerged from a workshop at RAND in 1992 and a series of DARPA ISAT studies in the mid-1990s due to the potential military applications of the technology.[2] The work was strongly influenced by work at UCLA and the University of Michigan during that period, as well as science fiction authors Stanislaw Lem (in novels The Invincible in 1964 and Peace on Earth in 1985), Neal…

This is an idea that has been extensively explored since 1996, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_sensor_nodes

It's a pity that the theme is now surveillance as the utility of sensor networks is rather high. Perhaps larger devices that could roam the planet and especially the oceans would be to better to spend money on. There's so much to learn yet we waste the opportunity snooping on each other.

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#64

Post by Filligree »

tonmoy wrote: post #48

> "We think that we beat nature," Rogers said. "At least in the narrow sense that we have been able to build structures that fall with more stable trajectories and at slower terminal velocities than equivalent seeds that you would see from plants or trees." I don’t think nature had the same goal. As long as the local minima is good enough for survival nature would be happy

To the contrary, erratic seed dispersal would be an advantage.

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#65

Post by danellis »

dragontamer wrote: post #49
wmf wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone agrees that they could; the question is whether they did.

This. Those Bloomberg reporters showing pictures of lol capacitors did them no favors. We know the difference between processors and capacitors around here. ------- The picture in this article is actually plausible. It's not just a capacitor that is getting hyped up by ignorant reporters.

> We know the difference between processors and capacitors around here.

Maybe for a two-legged device like a capacitor, but for something in, say, a SOT-23 package, you can't be sure what it is from the outside.

Then again, maybe even something in a capacitor-like package could both communicate and be powered.

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#66

Post by danellis »

isoprophlex wrote: post #26
Filligree wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lithium ion battery toxicity is… Why is this a thing? I shouldn’t need to worry about swallowing gnat-sized batteries! But it’s Not Good, yes.

Doesn't lithium have antidepressant properties..? It's okay citizen, don't fret, breathe some more surveillance dust!

Lithium carbonate.

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#69

Post by farisjarrah »

noindiecred wrote: post #7

We will monitor pollution by (checks notes) dispersing a huge swarm of tiny robots, themselves made of heavy metals, that are infeasibly difficult to recover or recycle.

There is a video that demonstrates and explains the nano bots in the article and near the end of the video they stated that the bots are made out of biodegradable materials that will degrade with time/rain

Re: Flying microchips size of a sand grain could be used for population surveilance

#70

Post by jmwilson »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #24

These devices don't even have space for an antenna (limited by physical size). The power required by the sensors is dwarfed by RF transmit. The current challenges of powering a radio device with an MPU at this size are far too great for this to be useful. Unless there is a breakthrough in radio physics, drones need to be a certain size that is much larger than this. Unless they plan to release a billion of these, swe…

> Unless they plan to release a billion of these, sweep them up, and then have interns/grad students probe each one to extract the collected data.

After reading the article and watching the video, I think that's what they are aiming for. The coil can couple data and power through near-field interaction, so they'll release a large number, hope to recover a sample of them, and extract the data through field or lab instruments. I could see this being useful for recording environmental data and forensic tracing, but they look closer to RFID tags than a computing platform.

Post reply on HN