US Army to Deploy RFID "Listening Rocks"

The Financial Times reports that "the US military is developing miniature electronic sensors disguised as rocks that can be dropped from an aircraft and used to help detect the sound of approaching enemy combatants."

The report continues: "The devices, which would be no larger than a golf ball, could be ready for use in about 18 months. They use tiny silicon chips and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology that is so sensitive that it can detect the sound of a human footfall at 20ft to 30ft. The project is being carried out by scientists at North Dakota State University, which has licensed nano-technology processes from Alien Technology, a California-based commercial manufacturer of RFID tags for supermarkets."

Interesting side note on information transmission: This article came to me via O'Reilly editor Brian Jepson, who picked it up from Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs blog, which had in turn picked it up from Mike's List. I had to follow a chain of links to get back to the original source.

But meanwhile, I'd heard about this same proposed application several years ago from Kris Pister, when I went to talk to him about UC Berkeley's "smart dust" program. Kris had mentioned such sensors as one possible application.

It really is like "radar" -- faint signals that get stronger as the future approaches.

(Speaking of faint signals, who do I find on the board of directors of Alien Technologies but Arno Penzias, who won a Nobel prize for his discovery of the background noise of the "big bang.")