Smart Dust

Sensors the size of pollen. DARPA funded it; the theory scattered it everywhere.

Smart dust — millimeter-scale wireless sensor motes — is a real UC Berkeley/DARPA research lineage (Pister's program, late 1990s). Current deployable motes are chip-scale, not dust-scale. The folklore extends the roadmap to ambient covert sensing everywhere. Links DARPA (its funder) and IoT listening (the consumer version that arrived instead, voluntarily installed).