a dust-sized sensor implanted in the brain, allowing you to transform yourself into a "Magnetic King" | 新智造

A dirty boy walked alone in the streets of the city and calculated how to deal with the days when he couldn’t make ends meet. He supported the little sister who was at home with his mother.


Every night at home, he kept coughing and his lungs were full of smart electronic dust. The dust is scattered in the air by some companies to monitor the enemy and the target population.

This is the scene in Neal Stephenson's 1995 novel "The Diamond Age". Here is depicted something called "Smart Dust" that can float in the air and collect information on everything in the human world.

Recently, a miniature sensor similar to Smart Dust was developed, but with a slightly different name, called Neural Dust.

Cool, let you become "Magnetic King"

In August of this year, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, developed a millimeter-scale wireless sensor called Neural Dust. Its characteristics are: micro, ultrasonic energy (without battery), wireless. The "Neuro-Dust" sensor is 3 mm long, 1 mm high and 0.8 mm wide. It is only a grain of sand.

Its main structure is shown in the figure below: The entire sensor surface is covered by a thin film, which is a surgical resin. Piezoelectric crystals can convert ultrasonic waves in vitro into electricity, powering the tiny transistors in the middle of the small board, and the micro-transistors collect information about nerves and muscle tissue, and feed the data information back to the receiver in an ultrasonic form.

Current medical technology, in order to detect the internal condition of the human body, needs to put a wired electrode into the human tissue, or apply a cold viscous gel on the patient's skin surface, and then attach a bulky surface electrode. For example, the current electromyographic examination requires the patient to lie in the laboratory for several hours. The doctor inserts a needle-sized electrode into the patient's muscle tissue and then pulls it out. This can cause some muscle damage and pain.

And Neural Dust only needs one operation to implant the sensor into the body and it can be used for life (of course, this requires further modification of the external film material to make it less degradable and compatible with biological tissues).

At present, researchers have done experiments in mice and have confirmed that Neural Dust can be applied to the peripheral nervous system. For example, it can be used to control the bladder and suppress appetite.


The ultimate goal of Neural Dust is to shrink to 50 microns (the limit visible to the naked eye), which means that it will be 60 times smaller than it is today, because this size is the sensor's pass line for the brain and central nervous system.

That's right, the ultimate domain that Neural Dust wants to conquer is the brain, a human interface!

Ryan Neely, who is pursuing his Ph.D. at Berkeley, said: "The ultimate goal of Neural Dust is to create a new generation of human brain and machine interface, and make it a clinical technology. If a haggard person wants to control a A computer or a robotic arm, you only need to implant this small thing into your brain, you can carry it for life and use it.”

Use the brain to control the surrounding objects. . . This is not the "Magnetic King" in "X-Men!"

However, Prof. Eric Leuthardt of the University of Washington stated that before the wireless sensors are connected to the brain, how the brain processes and shares information requires more in-depth research.

Neural Dust's goal is to apply to the human body, but the University of California, Berkeley, which developed it, apparently has a more ambitious goal, the aforementioned "Smart Dust", because Smart Dust is Berkeley's related research. Initial motivation.

"Smart dust" is the ultimate form of Internet of Things?

Simply put, Smart Dust is composed of tiny sensors that can float in the air. It can feed the measured data back to the computer and measure the temperature, vibration, humidity, chemical composition, magnetic field and other parameters in millimeters.

Academic research on Smart Dust began in the early 1990s when Rand and the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) conducted joint research and hoped that they could be applied in the military field.

By 1997, the scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, had proposed to DARPA the Smart Dust study, which was funded in 1998 and has been studied until now, for a total of nearly 20 years.

In the report of Gartner's 2015 Emerging Technology Maturity Curve, it is predicted that Smart Dust will become a technology trend in 5-10 years.

More people believe that Smart Dust, which connects everything, will be the ultimate form of the "Internet of Things ." The core idea of ​​the Internet of Things is to place the sensor on anything and send it back to the database over the Internet. In this way, all information is monitored anytime, anywhere, and a smarter and more interactive system is built.

We have watched the imagination of science fiction and movies become reality: Elon Musk is step by step to create the outer space habitat in his favorite "base" novel, Palmer Luckey (Palmer Luckey) Turn the world of "Red Pills" that he saw from The Matrix Empire into Oculus Rift.... Neil Stephenson himself, now advisor to Blue Origin of Jeff Bezos, also Magic Leap Specialist futurist.

The "Smart Dust" in "Diamond Age" also came to us step by step.

Via The Daily Mail

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