Engineers at North Carolina State University have devised a new form of tiny, liquid-metal antenna that’s capable of tuning into a wide range of radio frequencies, offering a timely solution to a looming and potentially damning problem in networked electronics—namely, the limits of the radio spectrum itself. If this whole Internet of Things project is going to work, we’ll need better and, crucially, more ways to communicate with it. Simply, the IoT means a whole lot of new devices and sensors begging for bandwidth that’s already in increasingly short supply with smart-phones alone communicating via wi-fi, GPS, bluetooth, and 4G, each one of those requiring antennas of different shapes and wavelengths. This situation will only get worse.

Read More at  www.motherboard.vice.com