The 1980 flood in the Tijuana River Valley was one of its worst. Rains filled nearby reservoirs so much that water had to be released into the already-raging Tijuana River. If a wall stood in the river then, like the one Customs and Border Protection is building right now, it would be met with water speeds and force equivalent to 175 fully-loaded shipping containers hitting the barrier every second, according to Jochen Schubert, [specialist, civil & environmental engineering], a flood risk expert at University of California, Irvine.

“Advanced electronics have been in development for several decades now, so there is a large repository of available circuit designs. The problem is that most of these transistor and amplifier technologies are not compatible with our physiology,” said co-author Dion Khodagholy, Henry Samueli Faculty Excellence Professor in UC Irvine’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.