Researchers at the USC Laboratory for Molecular Robots have come up with a plan that does for the oceans what Smart Dust does for the atmosphere: fill it with millions of nanobots. Smalltimes has the most complete story on the new nanobots. There was also a discussion of the story over at slashdot a few days ago. Even though the goal of dumping millions or billions of nanobots into the ocean is to monitor pollution, the researchers (like those working on smart dust) seem remarkably unconcerned that nanobots themselves may be pollution.