By Peter Weiss
Peering down on future battlefields, U.S. military satellites may tell friends from foes by sensing residues of what friendly troops had for dinner. The spacecraft would detect on a soldier’s breath or skin biomolecules or even microorganisms deliberately mixed into the food to label U.S. troops.
Such identification from afar is just one of many fruits that the U.S. Army may reap by 2025 from biology-based technologies, according to a new study by a committee of the National Research Council (NRC) in Washington, D.C.