Researchers at Edinburgh University in Scotland have been awarded a grant to develop what they call “smart sand”, which are speck-sized computers that communicate via wireless technology and include sensor arrays. They’d be used– at least initially– to perform health monitoring functions and transmit the data (after processing it locally).
Amazing stuff. It’s exactly the kind of thing described in Vernor Vinge’s fantastic book “A Deepness in the Sky”, and in fact parallels my own ideas for my science fiction novel “Dusk”, which includes an entire desert comprised of nano-computers. Heck, the researchers even call these things “smart sand”…