As a comparison any given American has about a. 01%chance of dying in a plane crash.
#Even Hobby Drones Could Be made Illegal In Texason a hazy day last January an unmanned aircraft enthusiast piloted his camera-equipped drone in the vicinity of a Dallas meatpacking plant cruising around 400 feet in the air.
When he retrieved the remote-controlled aircraft he noticed something odd in the photos: A crimson stream which appeared to be blood leaking into a river tributary.
The pilot whose name has not been released notified Texas environmental authorities who launched an investigation.
The Federal Aviation Administration is in the process of drafting new rules governing unmanned aircraft in civilian airspace including military-style aircraft.
But in the meantime plenty of cheap easy-to-use aircraft are already popular among hobbyists and increasingly activists and law enforcement.
which would make it a misdemeanor to take photos with an unmanned aircraft. It's unique
because it criminalizes taking any data--photos sound temperature even odor--of private property using an unmanned aircraft without the permission of the property owner.
Ben Gielow general counsel and government relations manager for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International countered that limiting privacy concerns to unmanned aircraft makes little sense.
what about aircraft doing the same type of mission taking the same pictures? What about satellites and Google earth?
if you have a picture from a manned aircraft or an unmanned aircraft? This is really a data issue;
and underscores why hobbyists and aircraft makers should be taking a more active role in explaining the technology's potential benefits.
Gielow and others described unmanned aircraft as simply another tool easily cheaply and legally used by law enforcement and civilians for a host of reasons.
The U s. Geological Survey which has a vibrant drone program uses unmanned aircraft to look at fault zones woodlands wildfires invasive species and more.
Because of this there's no reason why a privately owned human-occupied aircraft can't fly over private property.
Gooden countered that drones expand access--you'd hear a manned airplane or helicopter--and they glimpse areas
and activities that would otherwise be invisible from a public vantage point. If you have a ranch you can pretty much expect that there are areas of your property that are not going to be visible to anyone.
when the Vikings were farming on Greenland. It was named Greenland for a reason. See interglacial.
When we translate material things from genes to jet planes into numbers we can analyze and manipulate them far more easily.
Tornadoes ice storms wildfires and drought now routinely overwhelm the nation's aging electrical infrastructure inflicting sweeping blackouts.
I'm a pilot; I see how thin the atmosphere is on a frequent basis
A nearby supernova would have sent gamma rays flying in all directions. Those rays would have created high-energy particles in our atmosphere
Otherwise you may be horrified at how your car the airplane you may have flown in or the building you work in were designed.
I really hope they launch a steward's inquiry into the Tesco horsemeat scandal. We must find out hoof to blame.
which you can think of basically like an airplane wing. These curved shapes create the force known as lift.
--I booked a flight from New york without a second thought. The spiders live near the Tambopata Research center in Peru's wild Madre de dios region.
and the world expert on helicopter damselflies as Reeves puts it. Over the course of my trip and Reeves's month in the jungle he goes about laying the groundwork to test this hypothesis
From time to time Pomerantz gently corrals the spider with the tip of a small paintbrush to prevent it from running off this white plane
According to Stuart Sumida a biologist at California State university at San bernardino who served as a consultant on Guardians of the Galaxy an alien advanced enough to master space travel would need to have a large brain.
Because unlike the monsters mutants and other VFX-enhanced flights of fancy populating sci-fi flicks apes (even smart ones) aren t imaginary.
Rather the sequence features stunt doubles suspended from a helicopter as it banks through Chicago s urban canyons.
Mounted to the nose of a helicopter the six-camera rig (called the Panocam) could capture nearly 180 degrees of footage.
and swing through the action in postproduction regardless of the helicopter s actual flight path. Not surprisingly the innovation quickly attracted the attention of other directors.
General Hap Arnold once remarked that without war we would probably never have developed the airplane
In a small pilot study the scientists found that the starches inside barley grains grown with too little water are different from starches found inside nicely-watered barley grains.
In a world where people use 240000 plastic bags every 10 seconds where passengers on U s. airlines consume one million plastic cups every six hours where consumers in total discard
We walk out of the intake bay and up two flights of stairs to a catwalk from
He then moved to the Bay Area to work for Dow chemical on plastic composites including ones for the new stealth bomber.
They found investors and built a small pilot plant in Berkeley then a larger one in Richmond.
When most people think of wood architecture they imagine a balloon r rather a balloon frame the lightweight
and concrete to build high-rise structures that could climb far above the tallest balloon frames.
Clients believed that any wood structure would behave like a balloon frame with its structural weaknesses and vulnerability to fire.
when it comes to flight. The Ancient greeks dreamed up Daedalus who fashioned wings for his son (which unfortunately worked a little too well.
And engineers have developed the first flying insect-inspired vehicles opening the door to an entirely new class of machine:
Although insects and their relatives represent roughly 80 percent of the world s animal species ome 900000 known types he mechanics of their flight had long been an enigma.
Traditional fixed-wing aircraft rely on a steady flow of air over the wings. The same is true of helicopters and rotors.
But as the wings of insects flap back and forth the air around them is constantly changing.
From this he formulated a general theory of insect flight which included what he called the clap-and-fling effect.
Working independently the researchers characterized the aerodynamics of flight with unprecedented specificity. Dickinson and electrical engineer Ron Fearing won a $2. 5-million DARPA grant in 1998 to apply these principles to a fly-size robot.
sustained flight along a preprogrammed path. An e-mail with proof of that milestone arrived in his inbox at 3 a m. in the summer of 2012.
and demonstrating for the first time stable hovering and controlled flight maneuvers in an insect-scale vehicle. I didn t end up sleeping the rest of that night Wood says.
Wood has pioneered microscale robotic flight; other researchers have used flapping-wing dynamics to reduce the size of aerial vehicles capable of carrying payloads.
The aircraft has a 16.5-centimeter wingspan; it can fly vertically and horizontally and hover in place against gusting wind.
After observing the fly at the bar the two engineers searched for someone with experience replicating insect flight.
and its programmed flight path and an autopilot reflexively kicks in to recover stability. Last February the engineers sent their drone called the Instanteye to Fort Benning near Columbus Georgia for its annual Army Expeditionary Warrior experiments where an infantry platoon used it to help complete a set of assigned missions.
Guiler and Vaneck aim to replace the propellers on their quadrotor with flapping wings. The Instanteye is far better at recovering from wind gusts
but its propellers can still get tangled in branches or power lines. We wanted to bring something to the field fast Guiler says.
Today he runs a lab at the University of Washington and works with advanced imaging systems to study insect flight.
Dickinson has gone also beyond analyzing flight; he s using electrodes to record the activity of neurons in insects brains.
He links them to a flight-simulation system and presents them with visual stimuli picture of a predator for instance hat cause them to react.
The british Forces have begun recently using a microdrone a hand-launched helicopter called the Black Hornet to scout for insurgents in Afghanistan.
and signal the direction of their flight by using information that is based purely on the polarized-light pattern of the sky the study reads.
and expand its forests even as its cities and population balloon. Because China's supersized global role makes each domestic decision a world event Liu shows how China's efforts to sustain forests influences other countries
our scientists undertake in fulfilling our commitment to being responsible stewards of the land and the Island's resources said Ann Muscat Catalina Island Conservancy president and chief executive officer.
These discoveries are very important to better understand the birthplace of The buddha said Ram Kumar Shrestha Nepal's minister of culture tourism and civil aviation.
Researchers received funding from the National Science Foundation and Wake Forest's Center for Energy Environment and Sustainabilitydrones Deliver a Bird's eye Viewone of the researchers'robots a copter drone relies on eight small propeller units
and is capable of flying at 15 mph for up to 20 minutes at a time. It can be equipped with either a conventional visible light
Their second robot resembles a small airplane. Launched like a javelin it uses a single electric motor
and propeller to fly up to 50 mph for over an hour. We can map much more territory with the plane
because it can fly three times farther Messinger said. The drawback is that it can't carry the fancier sensors we use on the copter.
Rather than relying on a human operator the drones fly autonomously using global positioning data compass coordinates and onboard stabilization systems.
which generates the flight plan and sends it to the aircraft Messinger said. It is then as simple as launching it flipping a switch
and waiting for it to finish. Drone Data Provides New Insightto date data about the forest canopy composed of 390 billion trees is hard to come by.
The only other alternative is to rent out a helicopter which is far too expensive for any kind of continuous observation.
The Southeast already experiences extreme weather events including floods droughts heat waves cold outbreaks winter storms severe thunderstorms tornadoes and tropical cyclones.
Producers view themselves as stewards who care for the land but they need to make a living from it said rural sociologist Courtney Flint.
#Galaxy growth examined like rings of a treewatching a tree grow might be more frustrating than waiting for a pot to boil
Galaxies outlive trees by billions of years making their growth impossible to see. But like biologists reading tree rings astronomers can read the rings in a galaxy's disk to unravel its past.
Using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) scientists have acquired more evidence for the inside-out theory of galaxy growth showing that bursts of star formation in central regions were followed one to two billion years later
by star birth in the outer fringes. Initially a rapid star-forming period formed the mass at the center of these galaxies followed later by a star-forming phase in the outer regions.
Eventually the galaxies stop making stars and become quiescent said Sara Petty of Virginia Tech Blacksburg Va. lead author of a paper appearing in the October 2013 issue of the Astronomical Journal.
This later star-forming phase could have been caused by minor mergers with gas-rich neighbors which provide the fuel for new stars.
The discovery may also solve a mystery of elderly galaxies. The galaxies in the study known as red and dead for their red color and lack of new star births have a surprising amount of ultraviolet light emanating from the outer regions.
Often ultraviolet light is generated by hot young stars but these galaxies were considered too old to host such a young population.
The solution to the puzzle is likely hot old stars. Petty and colleagues used a new multi-wavelength approach to show that the unexplained ultraviolet light appears to be coming from a late phase in the lives of older stars
Both telescopes have large fields of view allowing them to easily capture images of entire galaxies.
The synergy between GALEX and WISE produces a very sensitive measurement of where the hot older stars reside in these red-and-dead galaxies said Don Neill co-author of the paper from the California Institute of technology Pasadena.
This allows us to map the progress of star formation within each galaxy. Ned Wright of UCLA a co-author of the study
The WISE mission was selected competitively under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Md.
Caltech led the Galaxy Evolution Explorer mission and was responsible for science operations and data analysis. JPL managed the mission
The mission was developed under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt Md.
Graphics and additional information about the Galaxy Evolution Explorer are online at http://www. nasa. gov/galex and http://www. galex. caltech. edu. Story Source:
Pig bones have been found in abundance at Philistine archaeological sites along Israel's southern coastal plane dating from the beginning of the Iron age around 1150 to 950 BCE.
Remember when you were a kid you'd get a balloon and it would be wilted the next day?
Such failures can be life-limiting situations for a lot of materials Demkowicz says including materials used in aircraft oil wells and other critical industrial applications.
and realise a pilot plant that features a controlled enzymatic release of organically bound phosphate enabling up to 90 per cent recovery of total phosphorus. This novel strategy is to be carried out using phosphate hydrolysing enzymes immobilised onto suited carriers.
Other work has suggested that the evolution of flight may have triggered parallel strengthening of the immune system of bats
She presented her work at this year's TWAS General Meeting. Egamberdieva group leader at the National University of Uzbekistan at Tashkent has isolated salt-tolerant bacterial strains that live in salt-degraded soils where they help the rooting process in plants.
Egamberdieva has been invited to present her results at the TWAS's 24th General Meeting in Buenos aires where she has been awarded one of the TWAS Prizes.
TWAS The World Academy of Sciences for the advancement of science in developing countries headquartered in Trieste Italy was founded by Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam.
The above story is provided based on materials by TWAS the academy of sciences for the developing world.
#Fear of predators drives honey bees away from good food sourcesmost of us think of honey bees as having a bucolic pastoral existence--flying from flower to flower to collect the nectar they then turn into honey.
Under the theory grains are spun propeller-like by photons. Their alignment is modified by magnetic fields which orients them with respect to the field telling an observer its direction.
into the interstellar medium of our galaxy. Most surprising to the scientists is why a dramatic shift in the magnetic field that they had modeled
In the case of the Voyager 1 crossing the heliopause separates material created by the sun from material that surrounds the stars throughout the galaxy.
and the Adirondacks of New york. For the Hubbard Brook study a helicopter spread 40 tons of dry calcium pellets over a 29-acre watershed over several days in October 1999.
The experiment setup involved gluing a moth by its thorax to a support structure attaching a series of electrodes to its flight muscles to trigger its wings to beat at a rapid pace
The results shed light on more than the mechanics of moth flight--it may redefine our understanding of how our own muscles function.
and decelerating wings during flight is enormous and no insect would be able to maintain that kind of energy output.
These will help keep your hands clean and allergens from entering your airways. Wearing large sunglasses will keep pollen
We need to be better stewards of herbicides to reduce the impact of herbicide-resistant weed species. Story Source:
and where we're going in our journey through the galaxy. Additionally scientists now gain deeper insight into the dynamic nature of the interstellar winds
Her pilot study in collaboration with Johns hopkins university will test a topical broccoli sprout solution on the skin a group of patients to see
Those findings are part of a recently published study by David Steward professor of civil engineering and colleagues at Kansas State university.
and that at some point in the future groundwater pumping rates are going to have to decrease Steward said.
Steward conducted the study with Kansas State university's Michael Apley professor of clinical sciences and an expert in cattle production;
and present day in those regions Steward and colleagues developed a statistical model that projected groundwater declines in western Kansas for the next 100 years
Once depleted the aquifer could take an average of 500-1300 years to completely refill given current recharge rates Steward said.
and it shows Steward said. Water use efficiencies have increased by about 2 percent a year in Kansas
what decisions are made about reducing the use of the aquifer's water in the near future Steward said.
Steward said the researchers went as high as 80 percent because that closely aligned with the aquifer's natural groundwater recharge rate of about 15 percent of current pumping.
if we're able to save water today it will result in a substantial increase in the number of years that we will have irrigated agriculture in Kansas Steward said.
Steward said he hoped the study helps support the current dialogue about decisions affecting how water can help build resiliency for agriculture in the future.
We really wrote the paper for the family farmer who wants to pass his land on to his grandchildren knowing that they will have the same opportunities that farmers do said today Steward.
and so sends back a strong signal to the Landsat detector that isn't present over burned areas explained Jeff Masek Landsat program scientist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Md.
or by helicopter Albury said noting that doing so is often infeasible for large fires on remote terrain.
Observations of atmospheric carbon dioxide made by aircraft at altitudes between 3 and 6 kilometers (10000-20000 feet) show that seasonal carbon dioxide variations have changed substantially during the last 50 years.
The amplitude increased by roughly 50 percent across high latitude regions north of 45°N compared with previous aircraft observations from the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Taking advantage of the long-duration and high-altitude-profiling capabilities of the NSF Gulfstream V aircraft also known as HIAPER the HIPPO project was designed to take a'snapshot'of the global troposphere Earth's lowest atmospheric
In the study the scientists compared the recent aircraft data with aircraft data gathered from 1958 to 1961 using U s. Air force weather reconnaissance flights.
These aircraft measurements were done at the time Charles Keeling was beginning continuous carbon dioxide measurements at Mauna loa Hawaii.
While the Mauna loa measurements are recognized now widely as the Keeling Curve the early aircraft data were forgotten all but.
Recent observations aboard the Gulfstream V were made during regular flights conducted during the HIPPO campaign from 2009 to 2011.
The aircraft repeatedly ascended and descended from a few hundred meters to roughly 12 kilometers (40000 feet) in the skies between the North pole and Antarctica.
Additional recent data comes from regular flights conducted by NOAA at a network of locations.
The aircraft-based observations uniquely show the large area in northern high latitudes where carbon dioxide amplitude increased strongly since 1960.
Over the last 30 years we have seen an increase in hot and dry conditions that promote fire activity said Doug Morton a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt Md.
The original article was written by Lisa-Natalie Anjozian NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Note:
The strength of the study lies in the use of multiple lines of evidence--population modeling molecular genetics ecological trapping border control/airport detections
#Climate forecasts shown to warn of crop failuresclimate data can help predict some crop failures several months before harvest according to a new study from an international team including a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Md.
Examples include the major media companies airlines government universities and others supplying the vast data that feed the Googles and Expedias of the world.
At sublethal doses the pesticides modulated key enzymes that regulate physiological processes cognitive capacities and immune responses such as homing flight associative learning foraging behavior and brood development.
Farmers can be the stewards of our landscapes so that we as a society we can pass them in a healthy state to the next generations.
#3-D-printed splint saves infants lifehalf a millennium after Johannes Gutenberg printed the bible researchers printed a 3d splint that saved the life of an infant born with severe tracheobronchomalacia a birth defect that causes the airway
researchers to test 3d printed bioresorbable airway splints in porcine or pig animal models with severe life-threatening tracheobronchomalacia.
April and Bryan Gionfriddo believed their son's chance of survival was slim until Marc Nelson a doctor at Akron Children's Hospital in Ohio mentioned researchers from the University of Michigan were testing airway splints similar to those used in Wheeler's study.
The splint was sewn around Kaiba's airway to expand his collapsed bronchus and provide support for tissue growth.
A slit in the side of the splint allows it to expand as Kaiba's airway grows.
and appeared to be offset from the downwind direction possibly because of interactions from the galaxy's external magnetic field.
and starboard to distinguish the lobes as the heliosphere is the vessel that transports our solar system throughout the galaxy.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Md. manages the Explorers Program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
The stronger the chick moved the more complicated it became to keep the scan plane
The material could be used to increase the strength of many products that use carbon fiber like composites for strong light aircraft or fabrics for bulletproof apparel according to the researchers.
Tour said industrial carbon fibers--a source of steel-like strength in ultralight materials ranging from baseball bats to bicycles to bombers--haven't improved much in decades
This nerve cell is crucial in triggering a flight response in hungry but not in fed animals.
which carries the carbon dioxide information there is essential for the flight response. If mushroom body or projection neuron activity is blocked only hungry flies are concerned no longer about the carbon dioxide explains Ilona Grunwald-Kadow who headed the study.
The results show that the innate flight response to carbon dioxide in fruit flies is controlled by two parallel neural circuits depending on how satiated the animals are.
#Dusty surprise around giant black holeeso's Very Large Telescope Interferometer has gathered the most detailed observations ever of the dust around the huge black hole at the centre of an active galaxy.
Over the last twenty years astronomers have found that almost all galaxies have a huge black hole at their centre.
But new observations of a nearby active galaxy called NGC 3783 harnessing the power of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile 2 have given a team of astronomers a surprise.
and evolve within galaxies but the presence of a dusty wind adds a new piece to this picture.
to collect enough light to observe faint objects This lets us study a region as small as the distance from our Sun to its closest neighbouring star in a galaxy tens of millions of light-years away.
Aboard the NASA C-23 Sherpa aircraft from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility Wallops Island Va. Miller CARVE Project Manager Steve Dinardo of JPL
Permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures--as much as 2. 7 to 4. 5 degrees Fahrenheit (1. 5 to 2. 5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30 years
The CARVE team flew test flights in 2011 and science flights in 2012. This April and May they completed the first two of seven planned monthly campaigns in 2013
The C-23 won't win any beauty contests--its pilots refer to it as a UPS truck with a bad nose job.
Inside it's extremely noisy--the pilots and crew wear noise-cancelling headphones to communicate.
Onboard the plane sophisticated instruments sniff the atmosphere for greenhouse gases. They include a very sensitive spectrometer that analyzes sunlight reflected from Earth's surface to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide methane and carbon monoxide.
Other instruments analyze air samples from outside the plane for the same chemicals. Aircraft navigation data and basic weather data are collected also.
Initial data are delivered to scientists within 12 hours. Air samples are shipped to the University of Colorado's Institute for Arctic
Much of CARVE's science will come from flying at least three years Miller says. We are showing the power of using dependable low-cost prop planes to make frequent repeat measurements over time to look for changes from month to month and year to year.
Ground observations complement the aircraft data and are used to calibrate and validate them. The ground sites serve as anchor points for CARVE's flight tracks.
Ground data include air samples from tall towers and measurements of soil moisture and temperature to determine
whether soil is frozen thawed or flooded. A Tale of Two Greenhouse Gasesit's important to accurately characterize the soils and state of the land surfaces.
Early Resultsthe CARVE science team is busy analyzing data from its first full year of science flights.
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