The U.S. government is researching whether the best defense against a chemical, biological or radiological attack might one day be right in everyone's hands - or on their ears.
The U.S. is developing a set of palm-sized, networked sensors that can be scattered around, and work together to "detect, classify, localize, and track dismounted combatants under foliage and in urban environments." It's part of a larger Defense Department effort to establish "military omniscience" and "ubiquitous monitoring."
Sensor networks promise a mammoth extension of the Internet. Within five years, these sensor computers could be shrunk to the size of a grain of sand and deployed over much of the globe, resulting in thousands of new networks.
Military researchers are developing what could be the next internet -- a network of millions of tiny but intelligent embedded sensors.