Wireless 'Neural Dust' Could Monitor Your Brain Sand-sized sensor implants give instant feedback from nerve cells

Chemtrails? Ventilation systems?

from 2016:

Wireless 'Neural Dust' Could Monitor Your Brain
Sand-sized sensor implants give instant feedback from nerve cells

[link to www.popsci.com (secure)]

Wireless powered implants, each smaller than a grain of rice, could serve as "neural dust" that can one day scan and stimulate brain cells. Such research could one day help lead to next-generation brain-machine interfaces for controlling prosthetics, exoskeletons and robots, as well as "electroceuticals" to treat disorders of the brain and body.

The new prototypes, made by scientists at the University of California at Berkeley, are each roughly 3 millimeters long, 1 millimeter high and 4/5 of a millimeter thick. Each neural dust mote possesses a piezoelectric crystal that can convert mechanical power from ultrasonic pulses broadcast from outside the body into electrical power. The energy from these 60 ultrasonic pulses broadcast each second drives sensors and other electronics on the motes.

The piezoelectric crystals reflect some of the incoming ultrasonic pulses. Electronics in the neural dust motes can alter the pulses that get scattered outward, and so can wirelessly transmit data they gathered. In experiments with rats, the researchers found that neural dust motes implanted in nerve and muscle fibers in the leg could record and transmit electrical data.

These sensors can currently be placed within the peripheral nervous system, the nerves that work throughout our arms and legs.

Ultimately, the researchers want to shrink neural dust motes down to just 50 microns wide, or roughly half the average width of a human hair. At that size, "the body should tolerate them much longer," Maharbiz says.