Taipei, Formosa, China. Long check-in lines at the airport will soon be history with a technology newly developed by laboratory in Asia. Rather than require everyone to carry an identification card that confirms your national identity, Real ID II will embed the same information under the skin via injection of carbon-nanotube-infused ink in the subcutaneous layer.

The technology, described in the 1 April edition of the journal Transactions of the I4E, represents a breakthrough in nanotechnology.

The nano-tube ink is used to make thin-film transistors, a key element in radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, and embed them in the skin. "We are going where no society has gone before. And RFID is a key player," says Gyou-jin Rah Lee, a professor of printed electronics engineering at Beijing National University in Taipei, who expects the technology to mature in five years.

Lee and his team are developing the electronics as well as a painless injection process that, Lee says, will bring the cost of the injecting the Real ID II tags down to a penny apiece-and make them ubiquitous.

Mildred S. Dresselhaus is the Institute Professor and Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She explains that "Conceptually, single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) can be considered to be formed by the rolling of a single layer of graphite (called a graphene layer) into a seamless cylinder."

Dresselhaus, who was unaware of the research reported on here, says that a "multiwall carbon nanotube (MWCNT) can similarly be considered to be a coaxial assembly of cylinders of SWCNTs, like a Russian doll, one within another; the separation between tubes is about equal to that between the layers in natural graphite. Hence, nanotubes are one-dimensional objects with a well-defined direction along the nanotube axis that is analogous to the in-plane directions of graphite."

Today, RFID tags are almost everywhere. The tiny electronic transmitters are used to identify and track products in stores and identify and locate animals on farms. RFID tags are in passports, library books, and devices that let drivers pass through tollbooths without digging for change.

RFID itself came into being in the 1970 and 1980s and has been widely adopted by the US Department of Defense and the transportation industry to track shipping containers as they make their way around the world. The REAL ID II tag is only the latest potential application of RFID technology.

Lee, and the team in Taipei, report in the journal a three-step process that ends with a one gig single-walled carbon nano tag containing information that can not only be injected easily but updated whenever the world situation requires additional information to assure identification of non-terrorist travelers.

RFID Nano Tags are practical because they're passive. The tags power up when hit by radio waves at the right frequency and return the information they contain. "If there's no power source, there's no lifetime limit. When they receive the RF signal, they emit," a government spokesperson explained.

"Right now, the emitter has to be pretty close to the tags, but it's getting farther all the time," Lee added. "At 300 meters, you're set-you have real-time information on everyone moving through an international airport, a police checkpoint, or a shopping mall.”

"The quantity of nanotubes in an Real ID II tag is probably less than a picogram. You can produce one trillion ID tags from a gram of nanotubes.”

The TS-Si News Service is a collaborative effort by TS-Si.org editors, contributors, and corresponding institutions. The sources can include the cited individuals and organizations, as well as TS-Si.org staff contributions. Articles and news reports do not necessarily convey official positions of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates.

We welcome your comments. Use the form below to leave a public comment or send private correspondence via the TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission.

TS-Si is dedicated to the acceptance, medical treatment, and legal protection of individuals correcting the misalignment of their brains and their anatomical sex, while supporting their transition into society as hormonally reconstituted and surgically corrected citizens.