New Scientist (February 4, 2006) reports that, continuing a tradition that goes back to ancient Egypt, pigeons may soon be used to transmit messages—specifically, SMS messages. UC Irvine researcher Beatrice da Costa is developing a miniature backpack with cell phone circuitry and sensors that detect carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. For good measure, there's a GPS receiver as well. Once kitted out, the pigeons will periodically report levels of these compounds to a map-based blog. There are even plans to put aerial cameras around the birds' necks. The pigeons will be released at a symposium in San Jose, California, on August 5, 2006. Professor da Costa says that she hopes her experiment will inspire ideas for new ways to monitor the environment.

So What?
I love this. The interesting thing about it is that, unlike their predecessors, Professor da Costa's pigeons (aka "flying rats") needn't be trained and aren't expected to change their behavior: They can go about their usual important business of liberally resurfacing statues, bridges, sidewalks and the occasional passer-by without being distracted by additional responsibilities. Related ideas: Migratory birds (geese, for example, which could carry a lot more equipment than pigeons) might report air quality data over much larger swathes of territory, while country-dwelling birds could (perhaps using audio sensors and really good digital signal processor algorithms) track the number of frog croaks in the vicinity. (Frogs are dying left and right all over the world and nobody knows why. Pesticides? Global warming? Rap? They may be a sort of amphibious "canary in the coal mine" for the earth—it's probably better not to think about it.)

According to New Scientist (Jan 28th to Feb 3rd, 2006), a South African inventor has developed a watch that automatically sticks you every six hours (with an 0.5mm needle that emerges from the watch's underside) and searches the resulting blood sample for the malaria parasite. Its alarm goes off when the search is successful.

So What?
Except for the part about the needle, this technology sounds pretty attractive. Unobtrusive, lightweight, only marginally invasive. And it's certainly easy to imagine where it's going: higher sampling rates and detection of a wide range of bacteria, viruses, sugars, cholesterols, fats, hormones, vitamins, fatigue poisons, and so on. At the limit, you'll be carrying a complete hematology lab around on your wrist (my sympathy to complete hematology lab workers everywhere), and its wireless connectivity will hook it up to your doctor's or hospital's or, perhaps, insurer's servers.

Some of this material comes from a fascinating article in New Scientist (Sept. 17-23, 2005) entitled "Privacy & Prejudice: Whose ID Is It, Anyway?" (However, any uproarious one-liners (assuming you notice them) are mine).

Biometrics (in one form or another) is often considered a cure for identity theft, terrorism, illegal immigration, lost laundry tickets and so forth. There are, however, significant practical problems with its deployment. For example, people with worn finger pads (which often characterize certain kinds of manual workers) can't be enrolled in fingerprint recognition systems (nor—obviously—can people with lost limbs) and the total for worn pads is estimated at about 2 percent of the population. Further, we leave fingerprints wherever we go, so getting copies of other people's biometric identifiers would be straightforward. (DNA scanners [still in the lab] suffer from a similar vulnerability.)