The finished product, if ever someone actually concocts one, could be applied across a variety of fields -- everything from pollution monitoring to medicine.
We saw a bevy of new gadgets and gizmos hitting the scene this week such as intelliPaper, which recently found a way to transform tiny scraps of paper into fully functional USB drives and programmable documents and CitiSense, a portable pollution monitoring system that allows you to check nearby air quality on your smartphone.
The data used came from a daily monitoring of pollution levels recorded from 2007 through 2009, as collected by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Marathon organisers are also monitoring the air pollution levels in London for any change caused by the volcanic eruption in Iceland.
Since 1993, USC researchers have been testing the lung function of 3, 000 children while monitoring levels of pollution in a dozen Southern California communities.
CNN: Research finds smog could deal a blow to children's health
Environmental health officers from Blaenau Gwent council told the meeting that monitoring suggested air pollution was not at a critical level, but this would continue.
It also says these same bioluminescence techniques could be used as a diagnostic indicator of pollution levels or even as a biosensor for monitoring diseases like diabetes.
Eight thousand people a day die from air pollution but some simple preventative steps and increased monitoring could lessen the toll, according to a recently released report by Australia's Commonwealth Science Council.
Besides tracking pollution, watching volcanoes and measuring icebergs, they are following fish around, monitoring changing temperatures in different layers of seawater and mapping the abundance of algae.
ECONOMIST: Fleets of robot submarines will change oceanography
"As our monitoring work progresses, Snowdon ECN will continue to track changes in the climate, in airborne pollution and land management, " said one of the report's authors Dylan Lloyd.
BBC: Snowdon getting 'warmer and wetter' says 15-year survey
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