If any of the houses that the Big Bad Wolf blew down could talk, I'm sure they would have said something along the lines of "You pigs should have built me better!" Thankfully, we don't make our houses out of straw and with the help of RFID tags that can be imbedded into concrete; we may actually be able to hear what this smart concrete has to say.

Sumitomo Osaka Cement and YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory have created this cyber-concrete by developing a durable coating for YRP's "ucode" tags, which have a larger storage capacity than ordinary IC tags. They've also created a special reader that retrieves this stored data when held close and can even convert it into spoken form. They're hoping to use this for a variety of purposes such as storing information regarding when it was built, and how it was manufactured. Having this sort of information redily available would be a great boon to inspectors, tenants, and Big Bad Wolves seeking to not waste their time getting to well protected little pigs. Sumitomo is testing out the concrete now and hopes to get it to major construction companies by spring 2007.

Perhaps now Godzilla will stop destroying buildings if he and the cyber-concrete could just sit down and talk things through. [via Pink Tentacle]