Motes is a new computing concept. This concept is also called smart dust and wireless sensing networks . It seems like just about every issue of Popular Science , Discover and Wired today contains a blurb about some new application of the mote idea. For example, the military plans to use them to gather information on battlefields, and engineers planto mix them into concrete and use them to internally monitor the health of buildings and bridges. There are thousands of different waysthat motes might be used, and as people get familiar with the concept they come up witheven more. It is a completely new paradigm for distributed sensing and it is opening up a fascinating new way to look at computers.