Interesting Snippets

West Oakland has only one air-monitoring station, so the idea behind the pollution sampling project is to create hundreds of “mobile air-monitoring stations” that could instantly capture air samples and measure pollution levels from block to block. The cell phones could work in two ways: People with the sensor loaded in their phone could either use it intentionally by going out and gathering data at certain locations or use it passively by letting the sensor collect the data whenever their phone is turned on.

But at the moment, the development of a cell phone that can capture particulate matter is still in its initial phases — Intel hasn’t yet developed a computer chip that can measure particulate matter and is small enough to fit inside a mobile phone.