That Fly on the Wall, That Bee in Your Garden

The top brass at the Pentagon has added yet another item to their technological wish list, and this time it’s a request for an atomic clock which is small enough to build into a microchip. You might wonder what possible purpose such a small clock would serve; until you realize that insects like the cyborg beetle are easily lost as they fly about, and require an extremely accurate GPS system for their precise positioning and location needs. For some years DARPA’s HI-MEMS program (Hybrid Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems) has been placing micro-mechanical devices into various insects while in their larvae and pupae stages in order to facilitate a stable tissue-to-machine interface as the insects develop into adults. The main purpose for these mini cyborgs, as we can well guess, is for spying and reconnaissance, but they also have merit for any application requiring the retrieval of information from small or hard to access places. Location tracking via GPS requires extremely accurate clocks in order to obtain the precise positioning needed for what I can only deem as a science fiction scenario coming to life.