[imagesource: Northwestern University]

As a child, I was fascinated by helicopter seeds and how they would spin down to the ground so elegantly and beautifully.

I still am, to be fair, as are a couple of scientists and engineers over at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

They’ve designed what they call a “microflier”, which is essentially an electronic, data-collecting microchip that can ride the breeze and leverage its spinning capabilities to fall in a slow and controlled manner, just like airborne seeds.

Except better (and far smaller), which is why the scientists believe they have outdone Mother Nature herself.

Here’s John Rogers, a co-author of the paper on these microfliers published in the scientific journal Nature this week, per CNET:

“We think that we beat nature,” Rogers said.

“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.”

The team borrowed quite heavily from the natural world, going for the old adage of not wasting time by trying to reinvent the wheel.

Roger thus led his team to study various plants and trees to better understand how, after millions of years of evolution, nature had found excellent solutions to maximise seed distribution.

They found that out of all the seed types – helicopters, flutterers (or spinners), gliders, and parachuters – helicopter and spinner seeds worked most effectively, especially those from the tristellateia plant:

Image: Northwestern University

Here’s Roger again via Gizmodo:

…”Our goal was to add winged flight to small-scale electronic systems, with the idea that these capabilities would allow us to distribute highly functional, miniaturised electronic devices to sense the environment for contamination monitoring, population surveillance or disease tracking.”

Basically, dropping thousands of microfliers from planes or tall buildings could provide unique ways of analysing the environment for things like pollution, toxic spills, and the spread of diseases.

These tiny little microfliers come equipped with miniaturised sensors, batteries, antennas, and even data storage, essentially providing them with brains, power, and wireless communications.

How all of that fits onto something so tiny is absolutely mind-boggling.

The future versions of these microfliers will be able to monitor water quality with pH sensors and sun exposure with photodetectors.

There is also talk of them being used for tracking the movement of humans. But, as ominous as that sounds, it will come with a whole lot of ethical and legal ramifications that need to be sorted out first.

Otherwise, they’re working on ways to make the microfliers capable of active flight, as well as making them dissolvable in water so that they can naturally degrade over time instead of becoming a pollutant themselves.

Anyway, the team released a video to show you how teensy the microchips are, as well as to show how they’re constructed and what they look like when they’re flying:

[sources:cnet&gizmodo]