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Phoenix666 writes:

All around us, hiding just outside our range of vision, are miniscule machines. Tiny accelerometers in our cars sense a collision and tell the airbags to inflate. A Nintendo Wii controller's tiny gyroscopes translate your tennis swing into movement on the screen. An iPhone's accelerometer, gyroscope, and proximity sensor sense its location in space.

All these little machines, known collectively as microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, have something in common: they are attached to, or very close to, a power source. For broader applications, like wireless brain implants, scientists and engineers need power from a distance. But while it's easy to send information through the air—think radio waves—sending power, especially to a miniscule machine, can be a bit trickier.

But now a team of researchers, led by Boston University College of Engineering (ENG) PhD candidate Farrukh Mateen (ENG'18) and Raj Mohanty, a professor of physics at BU's College of Arts & Sciences (CAS), are closing in on a solution. They have built a tiny micromechanical device and turned it on and off with one nanowatt of power—that's a billionth of a watt—from three feet away. The device, described in the August 15, 2016, issue of Nature: Microsystems and Nanoengineering, is a miniature sandwich of gold and aluminum nitride that vibrates, or resonates, at microwave frequencies. The tiny resonator is only 100 micrometers across—a little wider than the width of a human hair.

What if you're wearing braces?

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