Nano-based sensors and nano-engineered materials could transform the power grid, according to experts speaking at a symposium on energy and nanotechnology.
Against the backdrop of the war on terrorism, an expanding group of government researchers is at work on a nationwide sensor network that someday could provide a real-time early-warning system for a wide array of chemical, biological and nuclear threats across the United States.
Nanotechnology, biotechnology, electronics and brain research are converging into a new field of science, dubbed by some "NBIC", that may be vital to U.S. national security and economic clout.
The U.S. Army is planning a transformation based on "Future Combat Systems." New technologies will include hybrid electric vehicles, robotics, lasers, mobile network communications, and an array of smart weapons and sensors based on enabling technologies such as micromechanical systems (MEMS), biotechnology and nanotechnology.
DARPA researchers are working on aircraft materials that when exposed to heat or an electromagnetic charge, would morph -- or twist -- wings into the most aerodynamic shape for take-off, cruising, or landing, just as a bird manipulates its wings to lift itself into flight and soar.
Biologists and technologists at the University of California, Berkeley have spent the past four years developing a tiny robot, called the Micromechanical Flying Insect, that they say will one day fly like a fly. The Berkeley project is one of several similar projects with the same goal: churn out tiny, nimble devices that can surreptitiously spy on enemy troops, explore the surface of Mars or safely monitor dangerous chemical spills.
Sandia National Laboratories is working on research to use microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to counter terrorist threats ? not only to sense dangerous chemical, biological and nuclear agents, but also to identify and track the terrorists themselves.
Researchers working in a wide range of disciplines have created a series of tiny modules, complete with sensors and communications, with the aim of demonstrating 'smart dust'--self-sustaining network nodes measuring millimeters or less per side.
A world of profoundly distributed computing is upon us, if researchers at the University of California at Berkeley are to be believed. They are developing 'smart dust' ? sensor-laden networked computer nodes that are just cubic millimetres in volume.
New manufacturing processes, wireless technology and intelligent software are making sensors and tags ever smaller, smarter and, most important, cheaper. As with microprocessors and lasers in earlier decades, the novelty is not that these sensors exist at all, but that they have suddenly become cheap enough to be used in ordinary everyday products.