Susan Montoya Bryan / AP file

Solar panels at a 2-megawatt photovoltaic array in Albuquerque, N.M. are shown. Charged quantum dots could increase the efficiency of solar cells by 45 percent, according to researchers.

Itsy bitsy particles with a built-in charge could provide a big boost to the efficiency of solar cells, according to researchers aiming to take their innovation to market.

The particles, called charged quantum dots, are embedded into conventional solar cells, and increase their efficiency by up to 45 percent, the team from the University at Buffalo reports.

The boost comes because the dots permit harvesting of infrared light, which is otherwise lost, and the charge on the dots prevent them from absorbing free-flowing electrons in the cell.

"These two special effects we can use to increase solar cell efficiency," Andrei Sergeev, an electrical engineer at the university, told me Monday. 

He and colleagues published their findings in May 2011 in Nano Letters and recently created a company, OPtoElctronic Nanodevices, to commercialize the technology.

The company aims to develop solar cells with the tiny particles and then license them to manufacturers.

"These cells will be at least 50 percent and up to 100 percent more efficient than current solar cells," according to a presentation given at an energy conference in October.

Such improved cells could be a boost to the U.S. military, which is on the lookout for light and powerful energy technologies for use on the battlefield. 

In fact, researchers with the U.S. Air Force and Army collaborated on the project.

Key to the team's success is doping their quantum dot, which is made of semiconductor materials, so that it has a charge. 

"This built-in charge is beneficial because it repels electrons, forcing them to travel around the quantum dots," the University of Buffalo explains in a news release.

"Otherwise, the quantum dots create a channel of recombination for electrons, in essence 'capturing' moving electrons and preventing them from contributing to electric current."

The team calls their quantum dot with a built-in charge Q-BICs. 

Working in the lab, the team has demonstrated a "substantial increase in photovoltaic efficiency," Sergeev said. They now hope to scale it up and make it a viable technology. 

"This is only the beginning," he added.

In other words, whether this solar breakthrough will be the one that succeeds in the marketplace remains unknown. To check out more ideas in the solar technology landscape, see the stories below.

More on solar technology:

• Sunflowers inspire improved solar power plant
• Himalayas: The future of solar?
• Ant frying tech could make solar cheap
• 'Greenhouse effect' used to generate electricity
• Artificial leaf makes real fuel

Paul Sakuma / AP

Stanford graduate student Mick Kritayakirana shows the computer system inside a driverless car on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, Calif.

The road to a future where we jump in our cars, enter a destination, and let them do the driving could be filled with rage, according to an expert on driverless car technology.

For starters, driverless cars will likely be programmed to obey all traffic laws. They won't speed and will always come to a complete stop at stop signs, for example.

Throw just a few of those law-abiding robots on roads clogged with 250 million human-controlled cars, and there's bound to be some shaken fists, or worse.

"Let's face it, … [we] don’t always follow exactly the traffic rules," Sven Beiker, the executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University in California, told me Friday. 

"An autonomous car would probably need to because there's a company putting code into a system and that obviously then becomes a legal action."

20-year vision?
The road rage-at-the-robot scenario came up as we discussed the evolution of driverless car technology and how we might eventually realize the dream of texting while the robot does the driving.

It'll likely remain a dream, Beiker said, for the foreseeable future.

Some experts in the field, he noted, call it a 20-year vision. "Quite frankly, if someone says 20 years, that's basically telling you we don't really know," he said.

But, driver-assisted technologies such as cars that can park themselves, maintain a safe distance from other cars on the road, and have other crash-avoidance technologies are increasingly available on cars today.

All of these technologies, Beiker said, still require drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road. But those aids are becoming more common, and not just in luxury models.

"These things are definitely happening, and basically you can expect something new every year in that regard," he noted.

Technological, legal, cultural hurdles
When the field will reach the point where we can relinquish control of the car will depend, in part, on further technological developments, a new set of laws — and a cultural shift.

From the technological standpoint, cars can and do drive themselves today (see the Google Street View cars, for example). So, in a sense, we are technologically there.

But a future of roads full of driverless cars would be enhanced by the development and deployment of a wireless communication system that lets the robots anywhere on the road talk to each other.

Such a system, for example, would let cars know if the car in front of it was planning to turn left or right, as well as provide points of traffic congestion that alert robot drivers to alternate routes.

Think of such a system as a radio traffic report on steroids.

Roads full of autonomous vehicles all talking to each other could be much safer than they are today, Beiker noted. After all, human error contributes to 95 percent of all accidents. 

But, "no technology is 100 percent safe," he said.

When a wreck happens, who gets the blame? That's unclear today. Stanford's automotive center has a legal fellow, Bryant Walker Smith, on staff precisely to help answer these types of questions.

It'll probably shake out one of two ways: Either the car owner and/or passenger will be legally responsible just as drivers are today for most accidents, or the manufacturer will be.

But until such laws are written — and there are some are in the works, such as in Nevada where a law has been passed to make driverless cars legal — it's unlikely that autonomous cars will rule the roads.

And then there's the question of how to deploy the robots once we're technologically and legally ready. Perhaps at first autonomous cars will be restricted to one lane of travel on certain roads, such HOV lanes.

"But mixing the conventional vehicle and the autonomous vehicles?" Beiker said. "That's quite a challenge."

More on driverless car technology:

• GM researching driverless cars
• With these autonomous cars, who needs to drive?
• Cars are approaching 'auto' pilot mode
• Audi to climb Pikes Peak without a driver
• Google tests cars that steer without drivers
• Google self-driving car crash caused by human

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Fish and Wildlife Service

Researchers are modeling how birds such as the northern goshawk, shown here, zip through the forest without crashing into trees. Such knowledge could lead to drones that fly fast through cluttered environments.

Next-generation drones may fly like Luke Skywalker zipping through the Endor forest on a speeder bike, suggests new research which focuses on how birds such as northern goshawks determine their maximum speed limit.

These birds race after prey through the forest canopy without smacking into tree trunks.

They avoid this fate by observing a theoretical speed limit, according to scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

If researchers can figure out how birds intuit this speed limit, they could use the logic to program drones that race through dense urban cores and other cluttered environments.

State of the art
Most drones today fly at speeds slow enough to stop within the field of view of their sensors. 

"If I can only see up to five meters, I can only go up to a speed that allows me to stop within five meters, which is not very fast," Emilio Frazzoli, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, said in a news release.

If the northern goshawks were limited by what they could see, they wouldn't fly nearly as fast as they do, he reckons.

Instead the birds likely gauge the density of trees and speed through the forest knowing that given a certain density they can always find an opening.

This is similar to skiers who dive into the trees to find powder. These daredevils maneuver through openings in the forest trusting that they'll keep appearing as they head down the slope. 

As long as the skiers obey their intuited speed limit, they should maintain enough control to avoid obstacles such as partially buried stumps.

Speed limit calculus
Frazzoli and his colleagues used a statistical model of a forest and some tricky math to determine the probability that a bird flying through it at a given speed would crash into a tree.

They found that for any given forest density, there's a critical speed above which there is no "infinite collision-free trajectory," MIT explains.

"If I fly slower than that critical speed, then there is a fair possibility that I will actually be able to fly forever, always avoiding the trees," Frazzoli said in the news release.

In a follow-up email, Frazzoli explained that this finding is non-trivial.

"While it is obvious that the faster one goes, the higher the probability of collision is, it is not obvious that there is a finite 'speed limit' that cannot be exceeded safely," he said.

The research established a theoretical speed limit for any given obstacle-filled environment. Going forward, Frazzoli and colleagues will compare their model results with real-world observations of birds.

They are also creating a video game in which people navigate through a simulated forest at high speeds in order to determine how close humans can come to the theoretical limit.

That sounds a lot like a group of researchers pushing to give real-world drones Luke Skywalker-like abilities.

Updated at 2:00 pm PT

More on drone technology:

• Navy flying drone to launch from submarine's trash chute
• Navy's twin stealth drone takes flight
• On the wings of technology: Hummingbird drones
• Spy plane maneuvers like a bird

A paper detailing the results has been accepted to the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

YouTune / Damen Shipyard Group

This is a screen shot from an video on how Dutch company Damen Shipyards Group has incorporated the concept of air lubrication to its ships.

Blowing a lot of bubbles under cargo ships turns out to be a good way to cut down on fuel costs, according to ongoing research on so-called air lubrication technology.

"The basic idea is that if you could somehow have air close to the hull, it would help the hull slip through the water better by reducing the skin friction," Steven Ceccio, a professor of naval architecture and mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, explained to me Wednesday.

That works, he added, because air is about 1,000 times less dense than water, which has a corresponding reduction in friction around the hull.

"So the potential is really good," he said.

The caveat is that the air has to be pumped beneath the hull and kept there. The pumping takes energy and keeping it beneath the hull is a combination of physics and architecture.

In research over the past decade largely funded by the U.S. Navy, Ceccio has found if just a little air is pumped down, the bubbles just flow away and do little good.

"But if you get to a critical amount, if you put enough in, the bubbles coalesce together and they form a film and then it works really well," he said.

"It was one of those circumstances where half measures would not do the trick. You have to persevere, put a bunch of air in, and then things get better."

At least, things get better if the ship has a flat-bottomed hull, like most cargo ships. On V-shaped hulls, like those found on most Navy destroyers, "the bubbles may not form these layers and therefore your ability to lubricate with air is reduced," Ceccio noted.

Most recently, he applied air lubrication modeling to the typical type of flat-bottomed cargo ships that ply the Great Lakes region and found the technology could increase fuel efficiency by 5 to 20 percent.

Since fuel costs are often more than half of a cargo ship's total operating expenses, these types of savings could be huge, notes an Economist story on the technology. 

What Ceccio's study for the Great Lakes Maritime Research Institute failed to consider is what it costs to install a bubble maker on existing ships and payback time.

"Of course," he noted, "that's what business people care about."

Businesses, especially in Europe and Asia, are making a go at the technology.

Dutch firm Damen Shipyards Group, for example, has patented an air lubrication ship design that results in about 15 percent fuel savings on an annual basis. (See this video to learn more.) 

In general, more savings are found with slower-moving ships, the company notes.

As for Ceccio, he and his colleagues have yet to be approached by any shipping companies, though he hopes "we could find some folks in the U.S. who might say that's something we would like to do."

More on shipping technology:

• Navy gets fix for speed need
• New stealth boat touted as ideal for special ops
• Solar truck to sail from soccer fields
• Shipping containers converted into homes

Birck Nanotechnology Center

Researchers have created a new type of microtweezer capable of manipulating objects to build tiny structures, print coatings to make advanced sensors, and grab and position live stem cell spheres for research.

Ever wish you had teeny tiny tweezers to pull a teeny tiny splinter from your pinky? 

You're in luck. 

Researchers have developed easy-to-use "microtweezers" that are up to the task, and much more, such as plucking a cluster of stem cells from a petri dish and building all sorts of little mechanical devices.

The tool consists of a thimble knob, a two-pronged tweezer made from silicon, and a system that converts the turning motion of the thimble knob into a pulling-and-pulling action to open and close the tweezer prongs.

"You just turn the thimble one way and it closes [the prongs] and the other way around it opens," Cagri Savran, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University, explained to me Tuesday.

That's simpler, he said, than other microtweezers that, for example, require an electrical power source to operate and intricate parts to enable magnetic or electro-static actuation to grip and move objects.

He and his colleagues described the tweezers online December 2011 in the Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, or JMEMS.

MEMS are a class of devices that range in size from about 1 to 100 microns, with some sort of mechanical and/or electrical properties, Savran explained. A human hair is about 75 microns wide.

The prong component of his microtweezer — "that part that can grab on to the particle," as he put it — is a MEMS, which is why its development was published in the journal.

What's it good for? 

Birck Nanotechnology Center

The new microtweezers might be used to assemble structures in microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, which contain tiny moving parts. The researchers have shown how the device can be used to assemble tiny polystyrene spheres, each with a diameter of 40 micrometers, at left, into three-dimensional shapes. The device also might be used to weigh tiny particles by placing them onto the tip of a structure called a microcantilever, at right.

According to Savran, the microtweezers allow you to do all kinds of things in the microworld that you already do in the macroworld, such as move around objects. Only now, you can move them to build all kinds of MEMS.

The tweezers can also be used to grip a tiny paint brush for really small paint jobs, such as coating chips with proteins used detect chemicals in the air or water.

What's more, they can be used to pluck out clusters of stem cells, called spheres, from a culture media for experiments. 

"You can target just one … pick that one up and keep the other ones in the culture so they keep living in there," Savran said.

All of these potential uses were demonstrated in the lab by moving around 40-micron-wide polystyrene spheres as well as painting tiny beads with a fluorescent coating.

The team hopes to start a company to manufacture and sell the microtweezers. While a price isn't set for the tool, Savran said they'll "be much cheaper than anything else" available.

So, next time you're in the market for some nifty tweezers, you might want to check out these.

More on manipulating at the microscale:

• 'Beam pen' may produce more powerful processors
• It's the world's smallest steam engine — just 3 micrometers
• Four-atom-wide wire may herald tiny computers

Mary Levin / UW Photography

The latest version of the Raven has mechanical wrists that hold tiny pincers. Coming soon is a piece that will allow research groups to attach the same tools used by commercial surgical robots.

Surgical robots named Ravens are flocking to university labs around the U.S. where researchers will be encouraged to hack their software.

This reprogramming could accelerate innovation in surgical robotics, which is stifled due in part to a lock on the market held by the only company with a FDA-approved robot, according to Blake Hannaford, the director of the Biorobotics Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle.

That robot, da Vinci from Intuitive Surgical, has successfully performed more than 200,000 procedures — mostly hysterectomies and the removal of prostate glands — in hospitals around the world.

In these types of procedures, surgeons use the robots to make small incisions and wield tiny instruments that are difficult to handle with their own hands. The result is shortened recovery times and less post-operative pain, which increases the demand for robot-assisted surgery.

Academic researchers would like to innovate in this space, but "da Vinci costs $1.8 million and it's a closed system, you're not allowed to program it," Hannaford told me Friday.

This makes sense given that the da Vinci has FDA approval and Intuitive Surgical owns the patents, he added, but until now researchers wanting to experiment had to build their own robots from scratch or come up with enough funds to buy a da Vinci for research purposes.

The Raven program overcomes these hurdles. The robots were purchased with a $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation. They are being shipped to five universities with an open-source software license. 

"The [researchers] will modify that software, invent their cool things, and then share them within this community so that we can build off of each other's advances," Hannaford said. 

Similar to da Vinci, each two-armed Raven has mechanical wrists with tiny pincers that can wield surgical tools. A person sitting at a screen can look through Raven's cameras and guide the instruments to do tasks such as suturing.

Unlike da Vinici, the Raven platform lacks FDA approval, which means that it will not be removing a human prostate gland any time soon. 

But innovations created using the platform could be licensed by an existing medical robotics company or used to start a new one, Hannaford noted.

And since some of Intuitive Surgical's key patents are soon to expire, many medical companies that have been sitting on the sidelines "waiting for the right time to jump in" may find the time is ripe to do so, he added.

To see Raven in action, check out the video below:

More stories on surgical robots:

• Robots invade the operating room
• Surgery goes social: Robotic operation to be webcast, tweeted
• Robot folds, throws paper plane
• Robot prostate surgery comes with trade-off

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Purdue University / Sunhee Lee, Hoon Ryu and Gerhard Klimeck

This image from a computational simulation run of the newly created wires shows electron density as electrons flow from left to right. The wires are 20 times smaller than the smallest wires now available and measure just four atoms wide by one phosphorus atom tall.

A wire that is just four atoms wide and one atom tall, yet works just as well as the ordinary copper wires running behind your wall, was recently created by an international team of scientists. 

The breakthrough brings closer to reality a future where computers smaller than a pinhead are faster and more powerful than some of today's supercomputers, according to the researchers.

Such so-called quantum computers will require wires to get information in and out of the quantum bits, or qubits, that perform calculations, explained Gerhard Klimeck, an electrical and chemical engineer at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

"These wires are our approach to how we might drive quantum computing bits," he told me Tuesday.

Dirt in silicon
The wires, which are 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, were made by placing chains of phosphorus atoms within a silicon crystal.

Phosphorus is essentially "dirt" that adds electrons to silicon, Klimeck explained.

"What's novel here is that we can put so many phosphor impurities together and close that they have an effect of making a metal-like conductor inside silicon … which is like an insulator around the wire," he said.

The research was led by Bent Weber, a graduate student in quantum computing at the University of New South Wales in Australia and described in the Jan. 5 issue of Science. Below is a video news release explaining the breakthrough.

Testing laws
The finding proves that Ohm's law, which demonstrates the relationship between electrical current, resistance, and voltage, applies all the way down to the atomic scale.

Some researchers believed the law would break down at the microscopic scale where quantum mechanics would drive the behavior of electron motion, David Ferry, a computer and electrical engineer at Arizona State University, explains in an accompany perspective article in Science.

The finding that "Ohm's law remains valid, even at very low temperatures [is] a surprising result that reveals classical behavior in the quantum regime," he writes.

While this may jigger how scientists sort quantum effects from classical ones, he adds, it comes as good news to the semiconductor industry which seeks to extend Moore's Law down to the atomic scale.

This is the law that says the number of transistors squeezed onto an integrated circuit at least doubles every two years.

"It has been thought that quantum effects would limit this in the near future," writes Ferry, "but the results presented by Weber et. al suggest that several generations are still possible."

Tiny computers
This atomic-scale wire, noted Klimeck, will allow computer chip manufacturers to connect traditional or novel transistors at the atomic scale. 

"Architecturally, it may not look very different than today's Intel chip, in terms of how that thing actually works," he said.

Different-looking chips will come with advances in quantum computing, where individual atoms inside a piece of silicon may perform computations in the way that linked transistors do in today's computers.

The atomic-scale wires will get information in and out of these quantum bits.

Both concepts of tiny computers, though, won't get any smaller than the atomic scale, Klimeck added. "You have to have atomic wires that get down to the atomic scale to get the information in and out."

The wire they created "is the end of Moore's Law," he said. "You are not going to make a wire smaller than that." 

Not yet for sale
Consumers eager to get their hands on these teeny tiny computers will have to wait awhile, noted Klimeck. 

The lab manufacturing process involves using a scanning tunneling microscope to carve a pattern into the surface of silicon one atom at a time, which is much too slow for industrial scale production.

"While we demonstrated that you can make these wires, and that they function, we have not demonstrated a scalable way of how to mass produce them," he said.

This will likely eventually be figured out by an innovator in the multi-billion computer technology industry racing to keep up with Moore's Law. 

In the meantime, people looking for small computers might want to check out the Ultrabooks unveiled this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

More on quantum computers and Moore's Law:

• Researchers rescue Moore's Law
• Happy 40th birthday Moore's Law
• Quantum computer simulates molecular reality
• Neuron-like computer hardware finally gets software

NZAHT.org

This file photo shows the crates of Mackinlay's Scotch whisky that were excavated from beneath British explorer Ernest Shackleton's hut in Antarctica.

Antarctica-bound explorers would be wise to bring a case or two of Scotch whisky to endure chilly nights. Ernest Shackleton was wise.

In fact, the Scotch he packed for the Nimrod's 1907 attempt to reach the South Pole was exceptional, according to distillers who sampled and re-created the drink.

Low on supplies and hungry, the expedition was forced to evacuate about 100 miles shy of its goal. When the crew departed Cape Royds, they left behind equipment and goods, including three cases of Mackinlay's "Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky" that was stashed in the ice beneath a hut.

And there it sat until the Antarctic Heritage Trust discovered it in 2006, nearly 100 years later.

In 2010, chemists and distillers with Whyte & MacLay, Ltd., which now owns Mackinlay's, got their hands on a few bottles and sampled a dram.

"The whisky had been in deep freeze ever since it was delivered to Antarctica," James Pryde, chief chemist at the distillery, recounted to me in an email. "We had no idea what we would find."

The hope was that given the cold storage coupled with a tight cork seal the whisky would be as good in 2010 as it was when it was blended more than a century earlier.

"This is what we found," Pryde said.

For aficionados of Scotch, that could be seen as backhanded compliment. Single malt whiskies from this period were generally regarded as "harsh and heavily peated," he noted - in other words, nothing to get excited about.

"Given we had no idea what we would find, it is not understatement that this dram turned out to be the 'nectar of the gods' — it was a revelation in its complexity, particularly the control of the peating level and the quality of the wood," Pryde said.

The  storage under the hut while wrapped in straw and packed in wooden crates prevented the whisky from turning to ice and thus messing with the flavor profile. The preservation prompted an extensive analysis of the liquid.

"This as far as we know was the first analysis of a pristine whisky sample from the late 1800s and gave us real insight to what our forefathers were capable of when it came to whisky production," said Pryde.

The team determined the freezing point (-34.3 degrees C), alcoholic strength (47.19 percent), origin of the peat used in malting (Isle of Eday), and the nature of the wood casks used to mature it (American oak), for example.

The relatively high alcohol likely contributed to the lack of haze formation. "To have your whisky go cloudy would have been a PR disaster," noted Pryde.

The distillery had access to American oak casks used to transport sherry and wine and given its location near a port where this trade was particularly active, the distillery likely had the pick of the bunch.

All these aspects made for the exceptional blend for Shackleton and crew to sip, the team concludes in a paper detailing their analysis in the Journal of the Institute of Brewing.

Want to know just how good this whisky tasted? No problem, a re-creation is available for you to try.

To make it, Richard Pearson, master blender at Whyte & McKay Ltd., "used the best modern stocks of whisky that were at his disposal," noted Pryde. The blend was then subjected to the same scientific analysis as the original, confirming an almost identical match.

The lesson from the research project?

"I don't expect that any major changes will result from this work to the actual production of whisky," noted Pryde. But their findings do offer some sage advice for craft distillers of the future: master the art of blending.

"That is the most important thing that has been passed down from the 1900s."

More on old Scotch and distilling tech:

• Century-old Scotch returned from Antarctic ship
• Century old whisky found in Antarctic
• Sip some New Year's Eve science
• Whisky hangover worse than vodka, study says

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his  website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below. 

Julie Larsen Maher

This cockroach may look harmless, but researchers are working on biofuel cell technology that can turn these bugs into spies.

The sugars in a cockroach's belly have been harnessed by a fuel cell and converted into electricity, a big step toward turning insects into cyborgs, scientists are reporting.

Once miniaturized to the point that the fuel cells are non-invasive to the cockroaches, they can be implanted to power sensors or recording devices, for example.

A rechargeable battery inserted along with the so-called biofuel cell would store the trickle of energy it generates, explained Daniel Scherson, a chemist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

"If you want to be futuristic, one may use the energy stored to try to control the neurological system of the cockroach and then you might be able to (control) the cockroach (with) a joystick," he told me.

Yes, in the future, that nasty cockroach scurrying across the kitchen floor might actually be a spy set loose by a nosy neighbor, or the CIA.

Sugar fuel
The power supply for this fuel cell is food the cockroaches eat, avoiding the need for devices that harness electricity from movement, such as shoes that turn mechanical energy into electricity.

The fuel cell devised by Scherson's team uses a cascade of reactions by enzymes to convert energy stored as sugars into electricity.

The first enzyme breaks down the sugar trehalose, which cockroaches constantly produce from their food, into two simpler sugars. 

A second enzyme oxidizes the simple sugars, releasing electrons that "can then be funneled together to electrodes where they are captured and delivered to oxygen," Scherson explained.

The team first tested the system on trehalose solutions, then inserted prototype electrodes into the belly of a female cockroach. It worked.

The biofuel cell produced a trickle of electricity — 0.2 volts. Full details on the system are published online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Intermittent tasks
Since the researchers don't want to load down a bug with a heavy fuel cell and impair its ability to move, they envision storing the energy up in a battery, then using that energy to perform tasks such as power sensors.

One potential application is to equip social insects such as bees or ants with sensors tuned to detect a dangerous chemical and send them out to the environment. 

Periodically, the sensor would turn on and broadcast its finding, shutting down between broadcasts to allow the battery time to recharge.

Operating at 0.2 volts is enough power to send a message a few inches, according to Scherson, far enough that a message could be sent down a line of ants spying on a top-secret meeting in a park.

To get there, the researchers need to shrink their fuel cells so they can be fully implanted, find long-lasting materials to make them with so they don't breakdown inside the bugs' bodies, and build the signal transmitters.

All of this is in the realm of possibility, noted Scherson.

"People do wonderful things with circuitry."

More on cyborg insects:

• Military developing robot-insect cyborgs
• Tiny cyborg beetles could recharge just by flying
• Ant-like robots poised to invade the marketplace
• Robotic insects take flight on wings made using printers