Smart Dust

Wired 11.06: START: "What Is Smart Dust, Anyway?

Facial-recognition cameras are so 2001 - at least when it comes to stirring up paranoia among privacy hand-wringers. The bogeyman of the moment is smart dust, a network of speck-sized machines that can suss out whether sarin is in the air, enemy troops are around the corner, or the mean temperature on Mars has dropped. Smart-dust particles are designed to float through the air as innocuously as dandelion seeds, gathering and transmitting data in real time."