GE gets $6.3 million DARPA grant to develop bio-inspired sensors

GE has just lapped up a $6.3 million DARPA grant, where all that money will not be used to fund executives’ vacations in the Bahamas, but will instead be utilized to develop new bio-inspired sensors. This project kicked off after one discovered that nanostructures from the wing scales of butterflies are equipped with acute chemical sensing properties, and GE boffins have been hard at work, trying to replicate said properties within a sensing platform which will then be used to detect a wide variety of chemical threats in a jiffy. Apart from that, GE hopes that these sensors will come in super small form factors alongside low production costs – good news for any manufacturer who wants to integrate it into their hardware down the road. Among the practical uses of these bio-inspired sensors include emissions monitoring at power plants, food and beverage safety monitoring, water purification testing for home, environmental and industrial applications, breath analysis for disease detection and wound healing assessment. [Press Release]