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Smart Dust
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.
There has been a movement in AI for a few years now called 'behaviourism', which started with a paper by Rodney Brooks 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.
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
They have some of the slides used in their presentation on their web site. Lots of other informatian as well including many links to numerous MEMS related research projects.
My favourite must be the wrist communicator (Star Trek!) and the delta-wing control system 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...
something wicked this way comes...
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.
New Scientist has a related article .
Comment removed based on user account deletion
First you needed PGP. Now you'll need PGD (Pretty Good Duster).
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
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.
--sugarman--
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.
--
--
Victor Danilchenko
Combine a little AFM with massively paralleled MEMS robotics, and you have your nanotech assembler.
;-)
Do it using balls instead of wafers, and you could (in theory) build an entire microfab into a rod, say 5ft high, 2" diameter. But I digress...
--The more you know, the less you know.
Here's some more cool MEMS research at Berkeley: Solid Fuel Microrockets.
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.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
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.
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.
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, sensors, and radio communications, and you're on to something!
I work on software for a MEMS-related project (the MEMS Exchange). 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.
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.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
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."
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.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
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
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
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.