Tiny sensors monitor health from the inside Top cop quits after secret property empire revealed
Sensors the size of a grain of sand could one day explain what’s happening in your body from the inside out.
Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley implanted wireless sensors measuring just one cubic millimetre in the muscles and nerves of laboratory rats, then used ultrasound waves to extract information from them about how well those parts of the body are functioning.
The benefits of the technology for humans, while still largely hypothetical, are promising. The sensors could allow physicians to monitor the health of organs, create new therapies for neurological disorders, and help the physically impaired to control prosthetics.
While chips have been implanted in humans and other animals before, the new sensors mark a significant improvement because they are small, wireless, batteryless, and could last in the body for years without degrading, says Michel Maharbiz, the associate professor who devised and studied the sensors alongside neuroscientist Jose Carmena.
How long until the chips are installed in humans? ‘‘Years and years,’’ Maharbiz said.
The sensor required further development and rigorous safety testing before people could take part in a clinical trial, he said. That all requires ample time and money.
The research was funded in part by the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency, which heralded the technology as having significant scientific and healthcare implications if researchers can eventually use it to communicate with the central nervous system and the elaborate network of nerves that controls the human body.
The sensors could also act as a nextlevel health monitor for fitness enthusiasts. This, Maharbiz emphasised again, is years away.
Whether people want the technology may be a different story. New data from the Pew Research Centre has found that people are generally wary of biomedical technology and implants that aim to enhance the human body.
‘‘It’s pretty clear that thinking about these ideas in connection with helping people with medical issues is different than taking people who are otherwise healthy and enhancing their abilities,’’ said Cary Funk, Pew’s associate director of research on science and society. A senior Mexican police official has been forced to resign after investigative journalists revealed that he and his wife had built up a property empire incompatible with his humble public sector salary.
Arturo Bermudez Zurita, the public security secretary of the violencewracked state of Veracruz, stood down after reports emerged that he and his wife had purchased properties in Texas worth millions of dollars.
His resignation is a rarity in a country where public officials often accumulate fabulous personal wealth, yet accusations of wrongdoing rarely bring serious consequences.
But analysts say Bermudez’s fate may have less to do with serious attempts to tackle Mexico’s entrenched corruption than with shifting political winds following regional elections in which the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost power in Veracruz and six other states.
Bermudez resigned after online news outlet Aristegui Noticias revealed that he and his wife had purchased five properties in suburban Houston with a combined value of US$2.4 million – even though he earns a mere 59,500 pesos (US$3200) a month.
Announcing his resignation on Twitter, Bermudez denied any wrongdoing, saying he had always acted within the law.
The revelations mark yet another scandal for the outgoing PRI state governor Javier Duarte, who will leave office in December after a six-year term tarnished by spiralling violence, financial mismanagement and the murders of 19 journalists.
Under Duarte, Veracruz became one of the country’s most violent states, and state police officials were often implicated in murders and forced disappearances.
Incoming governor Miguel Angel Yunes won office on a platform of cleaning up Veracruz. But he was embarrassed earlier this year by a leaked recording in which he can be heard hashing out details of the bidding for a US$58m New York apartment. Yunes says he did not purchase the property.