The other day one of my colleagues sent me an article about a
tummy rocket that runs on stomach acid and jets about doing
sensor and/or chemical things. Then I got a pointer to this
article [Link] on a wirelessly powered 3mm x 4mm x thin chip
that goes into the human circulatory system (no teleporter,
sorry!) and putts about (maybe) and does mechanical things like
sensing or zapping. What makes this notable to me is not the
technology per se, but that the developer, a boffin at Stanford
U, got to this by questioning an old assumption. “scientists
were approaching the problem incorrectly. In their models, they
assumed that human muscle, fat, and bone were generally good
conductors of electricity, and therefore governed by a specific
subset—the “quasi-static approximation,” to be exact—of the
mathematical principles known as Maxwell’s equations. Poon (the
researcher) took a different tack, choosing instead to model
tissue as a dielectric—a type of insulator. As it turns out,
human tissue is a poor conductor of