Flying Microchips the Size of a Sand Grain Could Be Used for Population Surveillance

 

Kiran Madhavan                                                                                                                10/3/21

Chemistry                                                                                                Current events review

Citations: 

Neuman, Scott. “Flying Microchips the Size of a Sand Grain Could Be Used for Population Surveillance.” NPR, NPR, 23 Sept. 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/09/23/1040035430/flying-microchip-sand-grain-northwestern-winged.

            I reviewed the article titled, “Flying Microchips the Size of a Sand Grain Could Be Used for Population Surveillance” by Scott Neuman, which explains how scientists have developed tiny microchips that can sense the environment around them and gather data. This device’s design was inspired by the samara fruit, better recognized as the seeds that propel down from maple trees. John A. Rogers, who was the leader of development on these microchips says that they are designed so that “as these structures fall through the air, the interaction between the air and those wings cause a rotational motion that creates a very stable, slow-falling velocity,” (Rogers). However, these devices may be even more impressive than these free-falling seeds. The fall time needed to be lengthened in order for the microchips to collect the needed data. Computer models were made by team member Yonggang Huang in order to find a way to make the chips fall at a slow enough rate. Rogers claims that, “We think that we beat nature… At least in the narrow sense that we have been able to build structures that fall with more stable trajectories and at slower terminal velocities than equivalent seeds that you would see from plants or trees” (Rogers). On top of this achievement, the microchips are already being dubbed the smallest ever man-made flying structure. The size and slow fall of the microchips alone can lead to many other tiny devices being created and helping out with monitoring other issues in the world. As for the actual purpose, scientists expect that these machines can be used to monitor contamination, pollution levels, survey populations, and possibly even track diseases.

            The microchips discussed in this article could have a direct impact on society, as the issues they can monitor are all very prominent in our world today. Tracking Covid could play an important role in slowing the spread, and monitoring communities more prone to this virus. Rising levels of pollution could also be monitored by these microchips. The size of them is also very impressive, and I think we will see many more microsized devices implemented as time goes on.

  This article was very well written and straight to the point, which I liked while reading and trying to understand it. Neuman did a great job at hooking the reader in, even in the first sentence, by saying, “It's neither a bird nor a plane, but a winged microchip as small as a grain of sand that can be carried by the wind as it monitors such things as pollution levels or the spread of airborne diseases” (Neuman). This not only interested me, but also quickly told the reader what the microchips did. However, a weakness of this was how the purpose of the microchips was only really mentioned in that first sentence and a little further down, hidden between talking about the design process. While the size and method of creating these chips was intriguing, I feel that if this was the main purpose of the article, it could have been clearly stated so. Instead the first subheading is labeled, “Tiny fliers that can gather information about their surroundings” and only really talks about how they will fly and be spread about. This could have been simply improved if Neuman had maybe labeled the section in a way that showed it was mainly about the flight course. This would have cleared some things up for the reader, and I instead had to search around a bit to find the reasoning behind creating the microchips.