Dandelion-Inspired Sensors Float on the Wind

As any gardener will tell you, dandelions are irritatingly effective at spreading their seeds far and wide. Researchers have now borrowed dandelions’ design principles to create wireless, battery-free sensors that can be dispersed on the wind for applications like smart agriculture and environmental monitoring.The ability of dandelions’ parachute-like seeds to travel long distances is well-known, but it wasn’t until a 2018 paper in Nature that scientists finally cracked the physics that keeps them afloat for so long.