JUNKies

Top 10 Accidental Inventions
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No. 9 - Smart Dust

Most people would be pretty upset if their homework blew up in their faces and crumbled into a bunch of tiny pieces.

Not so student Jamie Link. When Link was doing her doctoral work in chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, one of the silicon chips she was working on burst. She discovered afterward, however, that the tiny pieces still functioned as sensors.

The resulting "smart dust" won her the top prize at the Collegiate Inventors Competition in 2003. These teensy sensors can also be used to monitor the purity of drinking or seawater, to detect hazardous chemical or biological agents in the air, or even to locate and destroy tumor cells in the body.

Want to know more about smart dust? Our friends at How Stuff Works explain it all for you.