Smaller than the tip of a pencil, practically the size of a grain of sand, this is what the flying chips that a group of researchers have created and that they want to use for tasks such as monitoring the state of the air. In this way, they could obtain information about its quality and even possible diseases that spread through the air.
The smallest flying chips that exist
If you have an acquaintance, be it a family member or a friend, who is a denier or mounts their own crazy theories about chips that governments would introduce into the population through vaccines, etc., it's better that you don't tell them any of this. However, if you like technological advances, challenges and improvement in all this field of science and research, go ahead.
these chips what are you seeing are the smallest with the ability to fly that have been created so far. Yes, they are designed to be launched and keep them in the air for as long as possible to carry out different measurement and information capture tasks. That information would then be analyzed by scientists to measure air pollution, existence of possible diseases transmitted by aerosols, etc.
A design based on nature
The design of these little flying chips is inspired by nature itself. To be more exact, in the case of some seeds that, in the form of small propellers, are able to stay in the air for longer by turning them.
Thus, between the tiny size, the negligible weight and that design that would take advantage of air currents as well as its own aerodynamics to spend more time "flying" is how these chips were created that later saw your size miniaturized to the maximum that technology allows in the present.
How they transmit the information
Here comes the most surprising thing considering the size of these small chips. For the transmission of all the information that they are capable of capturing, there is the operation as a swarm.
That is to say, each chip has its own power source with which to feed the other components that will allow it to capture and transmit the information from one to another until it reaches the main node where it would be collected.
In other words, when thousands of these flying microchips are released, the captured information will go from one to the other until it reaches the point where the researchers would be. They would save it and so they could work later on their analysis.
A solution against pollution or more pollution?
Throwing thousands or millions of flying microchips like these into the air might be a bit counterintuitive. Because if it is done in order to see air pollution, wouldn't it be contaminating more by spreading electronic devices like these?
The answer is no, because they have been created and would be created with elements that would be easily biodegradable. That is to say, with the passage of time and contact with the environment itself, it would end up breaking them down and ceasing to be a problem.
The terror of denialists and paranoids
At the moment these flying chips are just a research project that is being worked on. Its managers hope to be able to add improvements and specific functions to them, but always making good use of their capabilities.
However, like any other technology, how it ends up being used is something that will depend more on the human being himself than on anything else. It is true that the idea is to always put them to good use and for many theories that some denier or paranoid users could create would not be valid. But that does not mean that they are the terror of these and what they needed to give free rein to their imagination.