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ENVIRONMENTAL NERVOUS SYSTEM: Rigging the world with chemical sensors is a technical challenge with big potential payoffs

THE INTERNET IS BRIMMING with what sensor scientist Dermot Diamond of Dublin City University, in Ireland, refers to as human-generated information. By that, he means primarily texts, pictures, and videos. There's a smattering of input from physical sensors such as thermometers and even strain sensors in bridges, but that still leaves a yawning gap. "What is missing is the inclusion of chemical sensing," Diamond said last month before the Division of Analytical Chemistry at the American Chemical Society's national meeting in San Francisco. "Linking the molecular world to the Internet will be the next big thing." Diamond envisions a vast distribution of sensors that would relentlessly sniff the environs for molecular signs of weapons, disease, pathogens, contaminants, illegal drugs, even the chemical fingerprints of individual people. He noted that such a system would require many millions of mass-produced chemical sensors to be built into cell phones, shirts, vehicles of all ...