Technology Review’s 10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World are all worth reading, but it’s Wireless Sensor Networks that should particularly interest SmartMobbers. TinyOS is available for the tweaking.

And if it’s the eco side of this that interests you, check out the Wired story about schoolkids in Maine using PDAs to gather data on clams…

Thanks, Carol and Bryan.

Great Duck Island, a 90-hectare expanse of rock and grass off the coast of Maine, is home to one of the world’s largest breeding colonies of Leach’s storm petrels‚–and to one of the world’s most advanced experiments in wireless networking. Last summer, researchers bugged dozens of the petrels’ nesting burrows with small monitoring devices called motes. Each is about the size of its power source‚–a pair of AA batteries‚–and is equipped with a processor, a tiny amount of computer memory, and sensors that monitor light, humidity, pressure, and heat. There’s also a radio transceiver just powerful enough to broadcast snippets of data to nearby motes and pass on information received from other neighbors, bucket brigade‚àö¬±style.

This is more than the latest in avian intelligence gathering. The motes preview a future pervaded by networks of wireless battery-powered sensors that monitor our environment, our machines, and even us. It’s a future that David Culler, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working toward for the last four years. “It’s one of the big opportunities” in information technology, says Culler. “Low-power wireless sensor networks are spearheading what the future of computing is going to look like.”

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Until Culler’s group attacked the problem, wireless networking had lacked an equivalent to the data-handling protocols that make the Internet work. The lablet’s solution: TinyOS, a compact operating system only a few kilobytes in size, that handles such administrative tasks as encoding data packets for relay and turning on radios only when they’re needed. The motes that run TinyOS should cost a few dollars apiece when mass produced and are being field-tested in several locations from Maine to California, where Berkeley seismologists are using them to monitor earthquakes.