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Science

Smart Dust 109

Posted by Hemos from the fun-with-miniturization dept.
kris writes "The german Telepolis magazine from Heise put up a small article about Kris Pister and Randy Katz creating small laser-driven wireless communicating swarm-computing nano-devices called MEMS. This is right out of a Neal Stevenson novel, The Diamond Age. The article is in english language. " I wish there's was more details to this article-if you find more, please post below. Update: 09/08 12:15 by H :Check out New Scientist for more information too.
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Smart Dust

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  • Having the motes only communicate with peers will also not work. Just use a Faraday cage or RF jammer or something, and they're blown away. Which makes me think it's only useful for spying on *civilians*.

    Now, if the things didn't communicate at *all*, but could store information and then physically travel to a "drop point" to deliver that information, without using RF at all, that would be something.
  • No, what you are talking about is LSD, which like
    BSD, comes from Berzerkeley.
  • There has been a movement in AI for a few years now called 'behaviourism', which started with a paper by Rodney Brooks [mit.edu] advocating the building of robotic insects with simple 'behaviours' which interacted with each other to produce an apparent limited intelligence which could cope with the real world. Just thinking that the possibilities for building apparent intelligence into swarms of such robots - a 'hive mind' if you like - must be considerable. You wouldn't need super processing power in each robot if you could achieve good results through their interaction, but could churn out intelligent and semi-autonomous swarms with the 'mind' being apparent only when the dust is together.

    Savant
  • How do you maintain a clean room at a smart dust fab?

    Sorry.
  • Wasn't that from A Deepness In The Sky?

  • Hm, that makes me think of electronic paper. I wonder if you could build a huge, thin display panel using these guys as intelligent pixels?

    Sure, the dot pitch would be terrible, but that's why you use a whole wall!

    --
    QDMerge [rmci.net] 0.21!
  • note: Ray Kurzweil mentions briefly 'Utility Fog' in his "The Age Of Spiritual Machines", which is why I imidately thought this stuff was akin to it.
  • Just another reason to stay away from Snow Crash.

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  • Where does all the cool stuff come from today?

    • Xerox PARC
    • Lucent Technologies
    • occasionally Hewlett-Packard
    • . . . and sometimes, but not often, IBM
    I can't think of anything cool that's come out of the military in the last 10 years, though perhaps someone can come along and prove me wrong. Then again, they're liable to keep anything cool they discover a secret so they can use it to ensure national security / spy on citizens / kill people in other countries. Does anyone get the feeling that the first useful quantum computer will live at the NSA and not be revealed till the late 2020s?

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  • Vernor Vinge also also has been thinking about smart dust. Check out his latest novel "A Deepness in the Sky". About midway through, he introduces 'locators', microscopic microwave-powered sensors/computer systems. There are some interesting shenanigans the main characters get into with them. The novel is also good because of an interesting alien race.

    The civilizations in the novel don't develop full nanotech nor smart AI because they're stuck in the "Slow Zone" which It should be noted, that Vinge invented to keep the action at a human-comprehensible level. Mr. Vinge was one of the first SF writers to realize that with AI and IA (intelligence amplification) that our civilization will quickly develop individuals who are many orders of magnitude smarter than we are now (literally Marvin the Android's "brain the size of a planet" stuff).

    This creates a problem for him as a SF writer, because a realistic, hard SF novel that takes place 100 years from now would be incomprehensible to us now, and of course impossible for him to write. So he's created a significant crutch in the "Slow Zone" to prevent people from getting too smart, and nanotech from getting too good.

    An earlier novel "A Fire Upon the Deep" gives us a peek at the "Beyond" where FTL and limited nanotech is possible, and the "Transcend" where super-AIs and unlimited nanotech is possible. A very good read, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the future.

  • Yes. This is an interesting story, but it's still a long way from 'dust'. These things are currently 5mm big, which they hope to halve.. Half is still 2.5mm. About the size of a tick, for instance. Something you'd notice stuck to your skin, and definately way too large for inhalation. They could have some novel uses, but it's still a far far cry from nanotech.
  • woa this dust stuff was created at "Berzerkeley" also. (oh dear)
  • After all, do we really need something better than anthrax etc? I think it works pretty damned well as it is.. ;)

    Anthrax works TOO well. That's why there's a push for "something better". You don't want your bioweapons to turn on you. Ideally, a bioweapon should infect only the enemy. Easily transmissible diseases are thus a rather poor choice, as they might well end up infecting ones own people. An effective bioweapon is also fast-acting and short-lived. You don't want the enemy to be able to fight for months or years before getting too sick, nor do you want to keep on slaughtering them after they surrender.

    A disease agent transmissible only by injection seems an ideal biological payload for these "nanites". They'd have to have enough processing power to identify friend or foe, and then deploy the payload only in foes.

    Better than a biological agent, though, would be some sort of concentrated toxin. No replication means fewer problems with containment. Then when the war is over, nanites with antitoxin payloads could be deployed.
  • Silly me. I thought hunter-killer nanites would seek out and destroy (the other guy's) nanites. Sort of a defensive or counter-surveillance weapon. But I suppose they might tackle bigger targets...
  • It's a sad commentary on the current state of affairs that the first thoughts are of tracking users (presumably so that they can be rounded up for punishment) with nanites.

    If these devices are to be recruited into the war on (some) drugs, why not use them to cure instead of punish the addict? If dust-sized nanites are snorted/injected/whatever along with illegal drugs, it seems so much more sensible to have them to bind to the drugs receptor site, so that the user could no longer get high from that particular drug.
  • think of it a new computer virus that affects bio life , a drug , a epidimic , and if you make them reproducing then we could be over run with these lttle things , my allerys are kicking up just thinking of it , LA is now in a dust bowl as it sinks into the pacific . if this is a sign of the times then boom we could be picking up a pack of smokes with little mites that kill smokers faster , we could make them to speed up the brain , or even communitcate from brain to deck think of it wet wear at last , and no need for wires.
  • This stuff is still not real nanomachinery (the first M imn MEMS stands for micro).

    Some years ago I used to read sci.nanotech and a couple of guys there had an idea they called "utility fog". It started out as a design for a really effective nanotech seat-belt and then developed other applications to the point where it was practially the only machine you would ever need.

    The idea is to build really small general-purpose nanobots, each (say) 5 um on a side, but with 4 reasonably strong arms capable of reaching out about 50um. They can fly easily by flapping the arms suitably, so you fill your surroundings with a grid of these things spaces 100um apart (replacing 0.01% of the air). Normally they have their arms mostly folded, and are a hardly noticeable dust in the air, but when needed, they can join arms and form a diamond-like grid, which would be very strong. Used as a seatbelt, they would grab each other, or your body (including the insides of your lungs) and lock everything solid, while crumpling from the outside to absorb incoming impacts. They might even be able to double as an ejector seat to throw you clear (and then turn into a parachute!).

    If you could do this, the fog would have an incredible number of other applications -- tent, umbrella, clothing, personal digital assistant, furniture, diving suit and air-hose....

    Speculating about this struff is great fun, but I never saw the thermodynamic problems addressed -- how do you get power in and waste heat out? Also the idea of someone hacking into your personal fog cloud is frankly terrifying.

    Steve
  • There's also a site here [darpa.mil], courtesy of DARPA. Not that much there (looks like a corporate, rather than research site, IMHO), but a related links page I haven't followed completely, if you're interested.
  • Some people at my company recently attended a small satellite conference in Utah. The MEMS group from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) had a fascinating presentation relating to their research. (DARPA is the central R&D organisation for the DoD).

    They have some of the slides used in their presentation on their web site [darpa.mil]. Lots of other informatian as well including many links to numerous MEMS related research projects.

    My favourite must be the wrist communicator [darpa.mil] (Star Trek!) and the delta-wing control system [darpa.mil] which allowed the plane model to do a 1-wing-span-radius turn by identifying and then altering critical areas of flow on the leading edge of the wing.

    It is possible that off the shelf MEMS devices may be available within the next decade - maybe sooner. And I mean realy sophisticated stuff, not counting easily standarised components like accelerometers and ink-jets which are already in commercial use.

    However it may be, I have the distinct feeling that MEMS will alter the future of micro-electronic systems...

    ...by the pricking of my thumbs,

  • Where does all the cool stuff come from today?
    • The Military
    • The Space Race, an extension of the Military
    • Some industries

    Why? Because of competition. We see neato processors from Sun and Motorola/IBM because they need to keep ahead of Intel. We had lots of innovation during the Space Race because we needed to keep ahead of the commies. We have lots of innovation in the military because we want to remain the best. What do these things have in common? They're all competetive. And perhaps the stakes are a little higher when you're talking about the military... if you don't have the best technology, you die.

  • I don't know about anyone else, but I'm looking forward to Toner Wars! :)
  • As a lapsed Microbiologist, yeah.


    These things could potentially spread some fairly nasty stuff, but so can practically anything ( a slight breeze would do!). The problem, as in all germ-warfare stuff is the delivery system. If you can find some method of keying the nanites so that they only release the payload to their intended target(s) then you are onto a winner, but you would have to be pretty certain that they would a)Reach the intended target and either b)Destroy the payload or c)Hold onto the payload indefinately if they don't find their target. Just how you would achieve all this is beyond me.

  • Haven't gotten around to _The Diamond Age_ yet, but the ref that popped into my head when I read this was Pham's armour mites from _A Fire Upon the Deep_.
  • I want my Nano-Bar!
  • I recently attended the AIAA/USU conference on Small Satellites, the keynote speaker talked about MEMS. MEMS devices are the future, they are capable of active vortex control on delta wings to performing as near ideal filters to micro gyros. It is only a matter of time before they are as common as the tranister. Those mechanical engineers are a smart bunch.

    This is a technology to watch.
  • A prof. at my university has done a lot of reasearch on the subject.
    If you are really interested you can e-mail him at
    osterberg@egr.up.edu
  • "Every technology has a dark side - deal with it."

    Good to see responsibility in science is alive
    and well.

    K.
    -
  • these things were using optical transmissions...
    faraday cage/etc. wouldn't have any effect.
    You'd have to make the room really dusty, an really bright, broad spectrum, scattered, changing light sources to confuse them...but then you'd be in a dusty room with a bunch of chaotic strobes lights...oh well
  • What a load of nonsense. They abhor dying No, killing people is part of their training. Therefore they do not "abhor dying". And you don't have to go back to the trenches of WWII to see how armies value life - the generals didn't exactly "abhor" killing thousands of Vietnamese *and* American soldiers in a not just fruitless but criminal war. Nobody has devised a better means... Have you heard of the NSF? The whole point about science is that much of the most groundbreaking discoveries were done purely to find out things - Pure Science as opposed to science which has obvious "applications". That's why a culture of "publish or perish" or even worse "everything must have an application" is highly detrimental to progress of pure science. And physicists *know* we haven't discovered all the fundamental laws yet. ...there is an altruistic purpose to this after all Govt? Altruistic? What??? If you ever read about how the US government supported the genocide in East Timor in the 1970s by stepping up arms sales - the largest genocide relative to population since the Holocaust - you'll realise the govt is never altruistic in a significant way. There's too much at stake. That was the most ridiculous post I've read in a long time on /. and that's saying something.
  • The idea is that they would communicate, constantly reacting to each other's messages. Look for the analogy to a flock of birds detailed in the post entitled "Diamond Age, Van Eck, locus". That's an excellent real-world example of emergent behavior.

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  • killall -SIGINT NSA

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  • Come on down to Bloomington. It's not a hick town, but rather a college town. Living here is pretty cheap, especially if you share a house with some other geeks. (We've got plenty around.) You might be able to get a hacky job with the university (like mine), which will take up only 40 hours per week, leaving lots of time for other geeky activities.

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  • It's all coming along peachy, except for AI. If I ever see anything approaching credible AI, I will really be bowled over. (And don't come at me with examples; I'm quite familiar with the literature.)

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  • Sounds like a little, tiny Beowulf cluster :-)

    Do you think they'll go for PVM or DIPC? :-)
    This reminds me of the krikkit(sp?) wars in Hitch-Hikers Guide, and the dust-cloud around their home planet, was Hector its name?

    Tom

  • And he's actually educated in math and science, unlike many SF writers.

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  • And last but not least, for you biologists out there. Would nanites of this size be large enough to deliver a biological payload? Remote-controlled, precise plague-bearers?

    Oh sure, virii are really really small (technical term.) A virus would look like a speck of dust to those mites. But then again, why go to all the hassle of creating a nano-technological disease carrying weapon when we have perfectly good bio-chem weapons going unused now? After all, do we really need something better than anthrax etc? I think it works pretty damned well as it is.. ;)

  • Bob Shaw got there first (Score:3)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @11:19PM (#1696234)
    Okay, it wasn't exactly the same, but Bob Shaw's 'slow glass' was around decades before Neal Stephenson. Not that I'm dissing the great man; but Bob Shaw was one of my favourite writers ever.

  • illegal drug tracking? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    couldnt you mix some of this with some crack and then when someone sniffs the crack they can be tracked from their nose? ...just a thought

  • New Scientist Article (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @11:28PM (#1696237)
    New Scientist has a related article [newscientist.com].
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This would imply the drug supplier would have to do the mixing surely...not really in their best interests to get their users arrested...

    :-)
  • First you needed PGP. Now you'll need PGD (Pretty Good Duster).

  • Surveillance is the key... (Score:3)

    by sugarman ( 33437 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @11:33PM (#1696241)
    Interesting how the first use that the article mentions for them is suirveillance. Or, to quote the article:

    It is not inconceivable that motes could be fitted with minaturised microphones or tempest attack technology...

    With a (reliable) 150m range. Superfreakyscary.

    Is it to late to get a degree in nano-mechanics so I can have my homemade (open-sourced) Hunter-Killer Nanites surrounding my house 24/7?

    In any event, I think we all know what the new growth market in tech in 10 years will be.

    And last but not least, for you biologists out there. Would nanites of this size be large enough to deliver a biological payload? Remote-controlled, precise plague-bearers?

    Good-morning. Welcome to the brave new world.
  • There's a link right at the top to a page at berkley on the stuff. Check it out here [berkeley.edu]

  • minimal -- at least in the civilian arena. Yes, I can think of a number of applications for a dustmote-sized observation units, but most civilian applications don't have a need for such minuscule size. Military and spy applications, on the other hand, would most benefit from such a technology.

    I am not dissing the invention -- it is indeed a substantial step forward for science and technology. Rather, I am lamenting the fact that the coolest and most powerful stuff is most useful for applications other than peaceful ones. It is a sad state of affairs, when the our military and spy needs are far ahead technologically of the peaceful ones. Almost as bad as back in USSR, where all the cool tech went to the army, and the civilians got the dregs of it.

    What can I say? I just wish that we as a species simply thought for a moment about this perversion, about the fact that our best and brightest is spent on either spying on, or destroying, one another -- still so now, even after the Cold War is over.

    --

  • Hmmm - now those who believe the US Government is spying on them from space really will let their paranoia loose.

    Will people who dust their houses too regularly be pulled in on suspicion of being spies? ;)

    Savant
  • some education:

    crack is the street name for freebased cocaine, which is a process that makes the substance smokable. it is sold in 'rocks' (large crystals), so anyone snorting it would be as obvious as someone with drugs stuck up their nose.
  • Not SETI@Home, the real quote involved LSD and BSD.
  • Is that related to FreeBSD?

    J.
  • I think it's likely this is the last we'll hear, publicly, about this technology for about two years. It'll probably go top secret for a while, actually go into production, and then be revealed on Hard Copy or something. ;-)

    I am fascinated by the heat issue though. One means of detection of these nanites could very well be the effect they have on the ambient temperature of a room or something. IR cameras could probably pick them out from normal dust.

    Hmmm...do you think the U.S. or Japan will get to these things first? US researchers made the announcement, but the Japanese are incredible at applying such technology and mass producing it.

    Just some thoughts...
  • The (undoubtedly heroic) future efforts of EFF inter alia on this issue aside, absence of a surveilance signal will be seen as suspicious signs (just as use of cryptography is now) by certain authorities. This is a basic principle of SigInt (Signals Intelligence), also used by some crackers (go where the security is)

    The budding nanoengineers among you would be better served by rigging 'nothing interesting to see here' nanites - maybe transmitting endless hours of you playing Quake. Badly.

    But, honey, I'm not playing a game. I'm recording part of the house security system -- because I'd be lost, if something happened to you.
  • to the tune of "My Buddy"
    My Nannites,
    My Nannites,
    Where ever I go
    They are
    My Nannites
    My Nannite
    Reporting to D.C.

    So if we can now be surveyed by the dust around us... who cares who has a picture of my driver's liscence? (NSA, FBI, CIA) They can now follow me where ever I go...

    These make imperial probe droids look so out-dated.
  • * new generation motion (intrusion) detector :
    place some intelligent dust, and noone can bypass the hall without being detected. You can even make them talk to some digital ID-pass so that they do not alert MPs all the time

    * audio/data network nano-relays ? some kind of new wireless networks ?

    * new drug deliverer medium : you pass, you inhale them and they deliver you some drug (illegal or not) according to some criteria (coupled with the intrusion detector, that can be very efficient to stop intrusion...)

    * bug : you bypass, they fix on you and you'll be traced

    * circuits surveyors : put them into your engine and they monitor it (ok they ought to be quite resistant), they can more easily detect a leak in the oil circuit or just monitor your performance and talk to the engine so that it adapt itself to have greater performance
    [air is not the only fluid...]

    * ocean waves surveyors, ideal for biologists

    * air/fluid cleaner ? not anymore wored by your smoker neighbourg (in countries less strict than US with smoking)

    * perfume diffuser

    * nano-painter : ideal to have a nice paint/coat on your car ?
  • Combine a little AFM [bbc.co.uk] with massively paralleled MEMS robotics, and you have your nanotech [foresight.org] assembler.

    Do it using balls [ballsemi.com] instead of wafers, and you could (in theory) build an entire microfab into a rod, say 5ft high, 2" diameter. But I digress [turner.com]... ;-)
  • Easy way, to borrow from the previous drug joke, is to shove them up one's nose. When a target comes by, sneeze. Then just have them break on impact, or burrow, etc.
  • Here's some more cool MEMS research at Berkeley: Solid Fuel Microrockets [berkeley.edu].

    They are suggested as a method for delivering Smart Dust. I think they just want to blow stuff up.

    Jason
  • Endust - Sure, a roll of sticky tape would stop them. Nanite Motel. Nanites check in, but they don't check out. Problem: Unless you are stupid, hard to get caught in a sticky tape roll.

    Graphite powder - Any fine ground conductor would play havok on them. Problem: The fine powder wouldn't be healthy for you.

    Diatomacious Earth - a personal favorite. It kills bugs by cutting them. The cuts do not kill, but the resulting dehydration DOES kill the bugs.
    Again, this dust is a health threat to humans. And I'm doubing the earth would be a real problem for the nanites.

    You forgot radiation, electric shock or maganatisim as ways to affect them.

    Given however that inhalation of this technology would not be healthy, the best 'citizen attack in the courts' would be a health threat.

  • Wow... (Score:2)

    by tgd ( 2822 )
    This is really amazing. Scary, in some ways, though. I'm about ten pages away from finishing Diamond Age (and as such, I'm not reading any comments on this post in case anyone did something dumb like offhandedly say something that gives away the ending...), and much like Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson seems to have really hit the nail on the head, probably even more so than in Snow Crash.

    What this article immediately makes me think, however, is what happens during the early stages of the "Diamond Age" where nanotech isn't widely used and available, where technologies like the security motes in "The Diamond Age" aren't available, and there's the possibility for extensive exploitation of the technology.

    The referances in "Diamond Age" to the eastern-european terrorism and things like that seem to echo that feeling as well. This sort of nanotech is going to have far-flung effects on society, but there's going to likely be a really rocky road getting to a point where its so integrated into the way we interact with the world, that it no longer poses a security and safety threat.
  • If you can get 'em to self-replicate and re-charge reliably (Say, go solar...) then yeah, it would make a hell of a beowulf cluster. Hundreds of thousands of these guys in the upper atmosphere doing bulk computing would be pretty interesting.
  • Greaaaaat....just what I need...dust bunnies that run away when I try to vacuum them...*g*

    But seriously, folks...after the military uses and all that...think of the commercial applications. Want a clean room? How about a REALLY clean room? Or...I'm sure a lot of us are familiar with this problem--you want to have a clean carpet but have lotsa furniture/periodicals/old components salvaged from dumpsters all over your apartment.

    I'd LOVE to see a commercially available "hoover-hive"--a pack of nanocleaners that pick up individual dust particles and evil dust mites and basically anything smaller than an earring back...and get rid of them in a receptacle of some sort...regardless of how much crud one has on the floor. Think of an AirPort type thing giving em directions. Put it on a timer and leave for work or whatever. Two hours later, your pad is dust and dander free...and you didn't have to hastilly stack/move/burn all of your old copies of InfoWorld to do it. All the little 'nans are back in the hive, recharging, when you return.

    Also, I remember reading that one of the major problems with super-large fuel tankers is that there are something like 50 MILES of seals--all of which can leak--to inspect, not to mention ultrafine stress points that can pop any minute. Again, imagine a Volkswagen-sized hive of 'nans that runs all over a ship while it's in port, and does a complete surface stress test. Hell, make em hardier and perhaps a little bigger and give every square inch of a supertanker instant stress-test analysis ALL THE TIME. Take this idea and apply it to other hard-to-inspect systems like any major city's water supply (ever get stuck in Midtown Manhattan due to a water main break?), power, gas, etc. Given the info in the articles tagged up, this is all doable.
  • We would hope not, but I think there is reliable evidence to the contrary. The CIA was exporting cocaine and distributing it down thru the various levels of dealers to fund their covert actions in South & Central America for the past 30 years. The distributers and dealers were mostly protected leaving the users to fend for themselves in the "war" on drugs.

    It is very likely that most drug dealers and users are very well tracked and could have this information used against them if it was necessary to put them away for awhile, e.g. the case against Dewayne Holmes.

    For more info [parascope.com] read Dark Alliance by Gary Webb or some essays by Michael Parenti and others on the misguided efforts of the drug war.
  • They have a prototype, and they discussed it at Mobicom 99 (in Seattle)... basically they're targeting 1mm^3 but they've got it down to 2cm^3, so it's only a matter of time.

    They do seem rather power-hungry though... especially if they try to communicate amongst each other (as opposed to a base station). And come on, if you saw someone coming through your house with a huge laser pickup and dark glasses on, I don't think you'd seriously consider your actions private.
  • True enough, that this stuff is not utility fog, but it's an interesting step in the general direction. One thing that pops up pretty consistently in discussions of utility fog is the question "how do you program it?", and this stuff will prompt us to start working on that.

    There is an interesting effort [mit.edu] at MIT, and similar efforts elsewhere, to develop the flavor of software engineering that will be appropriate for these kinds of things. It stretches the imagination a bit: each dust mote will have a pretty small amount of memory available, but the whole cloud of them will have a large amount of memory taken together. So it's not inconceivable that a large cloud might run a large program, where each mote held only a small amount of the entire executable.

    If you draw a space-time diagram, and imagine how information passes around as a program is running, you can quickly convince yourself that this would be an excellent architecture for large-scale simulations, like molecular modeling, weather prediction, economic modeling, finite element analysis, and so forth.

    The great hope for making such computing clouds economical is fault tolerance. The programming model requires you to assume from the outset that you won't know the exact location or orientation of the neighboring motes with which you are communicating. It is a very small step to say that some percentage of the motes might not work (say, 10 or 15 percent). This means you can be very sloppy about some QA issues that, done well as is required with current systems, are very expensive. So 85% reliable dust motes may end up giving you many more MIPS for your computing dollar.

    It ain't real nanotech, but it's worth doing. It will put computer science where it needs to be when real nanotech arrives.

  • As I remember from the story, the "slow" property came from sort of hugely long molecule coiled up in a helix. Photons impinging on one end of the molecule would travel its entire length before being released at the other end. If the molecules making up the glass were n light-years in length, then the glass had a "slowness" of n years.

    I don't remember any direct reference to or mention of nanotech, though. Not that that couldn't be worked into a more modern version (how do you build those molecules, after all)?

    Wow, what a great memory -- I haven't though about slow glass in ages. I read about it ages ago, in a sci-fi anthology my cousin got in a high-school reading class. I wish I could remember the name of the anthology because I remember it had other mind-warping stories in it. At least knowing the Slow Glass author's name is a start.

    --JT
  • His name is Rodney (Rod) Brooks. Anybody interested in robotics should definately check out Mr. Brooks, he has some cool ideas for crowd behavior and teaching robots to think, not just process data.
  • That article is both freaky and enthralling. Yes, I did make the Diamond Age connection the moment I read the subject, and gosh, this is exactly the motes(mites?) from Diamond Age.

    It made me think more of Pham Nuwen's Localizers from Venor Vinge's excellent _A Deepness in the Sky_.
  • Look at Pister's Smart Dust [berkeley.edu] page.

    Albert Pisano, the outgoing DARPA program manager for MEMS, likes to talk about building a MEMS dandelion seed, a few mm in diameter. (I saw him deliver the talk at GWU, and he's also given it at NIST.) With current process technology, an old processor like the 8088 would easily fit in that space; in fact, you could get a few hundred 8088s in that space, so computational power isn't a problem. Add power generation [darpa.mil], sensors [darpa.mil], and radio communications [darpa.mil], and you're on to something!

    I work on software for a MEMS-related project (the MEMS Exchange [mems-exchange.org]). It's an interesting field, and one that's already having an impact in specialized areas like accelerometers, and is very close to becoming widespread.

  • ... they misspelled Neal's name.

    Oh well, I can forgive them for that. It's a German site, after all -- the article's English was still better than 90% of the stuff I see published here in the USA.
  • I can think of one big application: medical monitoring.

    If these things can be fitted to detect a range of biologicals in the air, you can just inject some of them into the air around your patients. Instead of scanning a given sample of air, you can be instantly alerted of any foreign agents entering the airspace. Whether or not the motes themselves would pose a health risk is the only question I can see that would need answering.
  • Would nanites of this size be large enough to deliver a biological payload? Remote-controlled, precise plague-bearers?

    I don't think so -- it would be too hard to control where they go. Either they would have to rely on wind (human-provided or natural) to move around, or some other delivery mechanism, to get to their desired targets. No matter how small they are, they can't break the laws of physics, which means that they've got to expend energy to move, and this would seriously affect their range of deployment. In most cases, it would prove to be more effecient to choose some other means of delivery. I'm not saying that some bright minds won't come up with new propulsion methods (magnetic, laser, etc), but at least for now I don't think we have to worry about this aspect of the devices.

  • Diamond Age, Van Eck, locus (Score:4)

    by Enoch Root ( 57473 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @11:48PM (#1696278)
    That article is both freaky and enthralling. Yes, I did make the Diamond Age connection the moment I read the subject, and gosh, this is exactly the motes(mites?) from Diamond Age.

    But surveillance? Tempest detectors? Sounds like a wonderful way to practice Van Eck Phreaking easily.

    One thing I think these motes lack; the article implies that they are all remotely controlled and emit back and forth to a single receptor. Sounds as stupid as the battledroids in SW: TPM, if you ask me. Get the relay station and you kill a slew of them at once.

    What these buggers need is something akin to "locus" communication. That is, one particular mote should communicate only with the few within a very small range, and receive communications from them. Swarms of locusts, or flights of birds work this way, for instance. A bird, for instance, patterns its flight after the birds nearer to him, and they are all connected in a single pattern that seems perfectly synchronised.

    Then, the swarm of motes can communicate as a single entity back to the central or whatever it may be, and this works regardless of how many mites are destroyed by accidental sneezing or a sudden itch.

    I'd be willing to mention this to Berkeley if I didn't fear the FBI would infest my room with them next. :)

    Hey, I can see a nice combination of borderline schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive behaviour emerging here: keep cleaning everything because the FBI may be spying on you. :)

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • From what I remember, the whole "slow glass" idea
    doesn't really have much to do with nanotech. From what I remember, those Shaw stories were centered around a hypothetical type of glass which slows down the light that passes through it. Nothing to do with nano at all, really....
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Sounds like a little, tiny Beowulf cluster :-)
    (sorry, someone had to...)

    Seriously, would this be like a distributed computing approach? I read the paper you site, yet missed any information on how to implement the 'hive mind' scenario. Would you have different groups that reacted to different stimulus (control stimulus)? Would there be some sort of hard-coded control system (instinct, if you will)? Or would these little buggers communicate?

  • This was reported several places several weeks ago. I submitted it then, but can't find most articles now. USA Today on smart dust [usatoday.com]
  • MEMS is not nanotech, it's microtech. (The "M" in MEMS means Micro.) Nanotech is machinery built at the nanometre scale (at the scale of individual atoms), while microtech is at the micron scale. Microtech was already around at the time that Eric Drexler coined the word "nanotechnology". I seem to recall that state of the art microtech at that time was tiny electric motors and accelerometers built using silicon lithography. Drexler wanted a new word to distinguish his revolutionary ideas from technology like MEMS.
  • They're working on distributed control [xerox.com] of "smart matter", where there is no centralized control. Using computer algorithms and psudo MEMS devices, they managed to increase the buckeling stiffness of a beam by 3 times. Here's a link to their research projects. I've read a lot of comments about the miliary/FBI/authoritarian uses of smart dust. But I think that we'll find some decent civillian uses.

  • Cell phones, satellite communications, the Internet, the Space Shuttle, mass murders supposedly caused by overuse of video games... Hell, look at what I do for a living! Computer programming as a vocation was SF fifty years ago.

    Vernor Vinge [fortunecity.com] was right all along (not that I ever doubted him). The real problem with writing SF these days is not that your ideas and predictions are too far out, but that they are probably not far enough. Some, like Greg Egan [acme.com], make up for this by going all out and creating new physics and related cosmologies. Others descend into psuedo-science and write fantasies set on spaceships. (You know what I am talking about, no need to include a link to some trekkie site.)

    The point is simple, there is nothing in this 'Smart Dust' - or any other new technology - that should surprise anyone who has been paying attention the last ten years. It is all going to happen, and probably sooner than anyone expects. Those of us who are mentally flexible enough to handle the changes [scifi.com] are the new elite. Everyone else will be (or are now) left spinning in the shockwave.

    Jack

  • Please get the author's name right (Score:3)

    by kzinti ( 9651 ) on Wednesday September 08, 1999 @02:11AM (#1696288) Homepage Journal
    It's not Neil. It's not Stevenson. I've seen both used here on Slashdot lately, by "fans" who should know better.

    It is Neal Stephenson.

    And speaking of smart dust, I just read Diamond Age, and that part where the Judge's assistant's book began accumulating a layer of dust just gave me the creeps!

    --JT

  • That is what I get for not checking them, and assuming the /. discussion code would handle it the way I expect. They were:

    Jack

  • What about forming a massive grass-roots media? You could film politicians in their offices, corporate board meetings, operations of secret government agencies, all undetected and, if you're careful, anonymously.

    IMHO my question is not what happens when the bad guys can take pictures of everybody, but what happens when the good guys start taking pictures of THEM.

    -ensor
  • One of Lem's books describes a spacecraft dropping a cloud of dust-like smart devices for surveillance. That description almost certainly predates Stephenson.

    The idea of using highly redundant systems for telemetry and monitoring doesn't seem to be all that new, and neither is the idea of passive readout. If MEMS can help make the devices smaller, that's a nice evolutionary step, but I won't really hold my breath...

    I highly recommend reading Lem; he has a lot of neat ideas, and his stories are often funny or insightful as well.

  • Open-sourced Hunter-Killer Nanites... that's a pretty interesting idea. I guess they wouldn't necessarily have to kill, but temporary paralysis would be pretty useful.

    If they surrounded your home (maybe stuck to the walls/doors/windows), they could jump onto anyone who approached the house. If you greeted them with a special safe-word or phrase then the nanites would jump off and go back to their positions, but if you spoke the attack command, they could inject a toxin that wouldn't kill, but would paralyze them until the police could come.

    Of course, I don't know very much about this stuff, so I don't know how high the probability is that they would turn on you. I guess this would also open up possibility of nanite detectors, and maybe there could be a nanite-repellent spray that a particularly determined intruder (or someone who just doesn't feel comfortable with nanites crawling all over them) could put on.

    Infinite possibilities, infinite possible bugs...

  • I'm a webmaster for a DARPA contractor, and we do a lot of work for the MEMS projects there, as well. For lots and lots of MEMS-related links, check out memsmarket.sysplan.com [sysplan.com]. The official DARPA MEMS site is here [darpa.mil].

    I think the original post for this article is a little confused. "MEMS" is an acronym for "Microelectromechanical systems," which spans a broad range of nano-tech applications-- including perhaps nano-computing devices. But the canonical application-- accelerometers for car airbags-- have been in use for some time now. Bet you never even knew you were already using nano-tech, huh? :-)

    Al Pisano is a very smart guy, and he will be missed. If any of you have an opportunity to see him speak, and are interested in this sort of thing, it's likely to be interesting.

    ----
    We all take pink lemonade for granted.

  • In Last week's NewScientist [newscientist.com]

  • Space exploration (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    At 5 millimeters, they aren't exactly dust motes, but they are close to being ants, or flies. Imagine a Mars lander with a few microfliers to explore the landing site and provide 3D imagery
  • Nothing to do with nano at all, really...
    Nothing whatsoever. But... if you recall the end of the book, the government took godzillions of micron-sized bitties of slow glass and littered the country with them. No-one could act without the fear of being recorded, no matter where they were. The result is the same, even if the technology (so to speak) is different.
  • Try to get hold of a book called "Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition". It's an excellent compilation that spans everything from giant spaceships to nano-nanites with side trips through cyrogenics and body-free existence. I found a copy at a dollar store once. Outstanding read on the possibilities for our future.

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