Nothing quite like it had ever been attempted. Deep in the California desert last March, as a few fatigues-clad U.S. MARINES stood nearby, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, fiddled with a 1.5-meter airplane with six walnut-sized bundles of electronics ATTACHED to the undersides of its wings. Each bundle, swaddled in pink plastic, held a magnetic-field sensor, short-range radio transmitter, antenna and microprocessor run by a custom low-powered operating system dubbed "Tiny OS."

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