An insect species that evolved 130 million years ago is the inspiration for a new research study to improve navigation systems in drones, robots, and orbiting satellites. The dung beetle is the first known species to use the Milky Way at night to navigate, focusing on the constellation of stars as a reference point to roll balls of dung in a straight line away from their competitors.

Related: how dung beetles navigate by the stars

Swedish researchers made this discovery in 2013 and a decade later, Australian engineers are modelling the same technique used by the dung beetle to develop an AI sensor that can accurately measure the orientation of the Milky Way in low light. This advance could be used to create better navigational technology for drones.

University of South Australia remote sensing engineer Professor Javaan Chahl and his team of PhD students have used computer vision to demonstrate that the  large stripe of light that forms the Milky Way is not affected by motion blur, unlike individual stars.

“Nocturnal dung beetles move their head and body extensively when rolling balls of manure across a field, needing a fixed orientation point in the night sky to help them steer in a straight line,” Prof Chahl says. “Their tiny compound eyes make it difficult to distinguish individual stars, particularly while in motion, whereas the Milky Way is highly visible.”

In a series of experiments using a camera mounted to the roof of a vehicle, the UniSA researchers captured images of the Milky Way while the vehicle was both stationery and moving. Using information from those images they have developed a computer vision system that reliably measures the orientation of the Milky Way, which is the first step towards building a navigation system.

Their findings have been published in the journal Biomimetics.

Lead author UniSA PhD candidate Yiting Tao says the orientation sensor could be a backup method to stabilise satellites and help drones and robots to navigate in low light, even when there is a lot of blur caused by movement and vibration: “For the next step I want to put the algorithm on a drone and allow it to control the aircraft in flight during the night,” Tao says.

Related: how artificial lights at night harm dung beetles and insects

The sun helps many insects to navigate during the day, including wasps, dragonflies, honeybees, and desert ants. At night, the moon also provides a reference point for nocturnal insects, but it is not always visible, hence why dung beetles and some moths use the Milky Way for orientation.

Prof Chahl says insect vision has long inspired engineers where navigation systems are concerned.

“Insects have been solving navigational problems for millions of years, including those that even the most advanced machines struggle with. And they’ve done it in a tiny little package. Their brains consist of tens of thousands of neurons compared to billions of neurons in humans, yet they still manage to find solutions from the natural world.”

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Five..four..three..two..one… a glittered ball drops over Time’s Square in New York City and millions celebrated with kisses, hugs and cheers of Happy New Year! The western 2023 new year was seven hours earlier in Jerusalem, nine hours earlier in Dubai and the last seconds of December 31st 2022 visited Baker and Howland islands in the South Pacific. But even if you missed all of these celebrations you could celebrate according to another calendar. Russian Old New Year (Novy God) begins on January 14th.[/caption]

Chinese year of the water rabbit begins on January 22nd, Islamic Hijri New Year begins at nightfall on July 19th (read this guide on Muslim time), the Mayan New year is on July 26th and Hebrew New Year (Rosh Hashana) 5784 begins at sundown September 15th.  With all of these new years to choose from you might ask yourself, what is so special about December 31st? It’s not the shortest day in the year. It’s not when Sirius rises above the great pyramids of Giza or when the Nile floods. It’s not a good time to plant crops. Sunrise and Sunsets are not aligned with Stonehenge. Some years it’s a new moon, other years it’s full or somewhere in between.

One of the first philosophical questions my child asked was, “How did everything get created in only seven days?” Remembering more about physics than religion I fell back on an answer that happened to be among the few where people of science and and people of faith agree. I said, “Time is weird,” but I might just as well have quoted the Book of Kohelet

(Ecclesiastes) 3:11 “He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.” 

Nature Time

The ancients measured time by observing nature. It made sense to separate the day from the night and further divide these days into times of dawn, sunrise, sunset, dusk and night. Knowing the phases of the moon helped people know the tides and the best times to fish and hunt and knowing the seasons tells us when is a good time to plant and harvest. This is from the first part of the same chapter of Ecclesiastes. Pete Seeger used these words in a folk song made popular by The Byrds:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
 Enter mathematics

About 6000 years ago the Sumerians of southern Iraq invented a sexagesimal (base 60) counting system. Twelve times the number of finger on one hand became the basis for our 24 hour clock, our 60 minute hour and our 60 second minute. Sometime around 3500 B.C.E. the neolithic people of Ireland created mound and stone structures aligned with celestial events but in what may be the world’s oldest sundial, they divided daylight hours into eight sectors and appear to have divided the year into 16 months.

The French attempted to decimalize time in the late 1700s but that went about as well as the U.S attempt to go metric in the 1970s. If the number of heartbeats in a day (86,400+/-), number of days in a lunar month (29.53) and number of lunar months in a year (12.3601) and number of days in a year (365.2425) had been nice round numbers divisible by the number of our fingers and toes, it would have been simple. But it doesn’t and it isn’t. Arguments over how to align human time with natural time have gone on for centuries, dividing religions and inciting wars.

Let’s all agree to disagree

Saint Nicholas of Myra Turkey was among the members of the council of Nicea when it voted to break from the Jewish calendar so that Easter no longer aligned with the passover full moon. The calendar they adopted inherited flaws introduced by Roman emperor Julias Ceasar whose calendar assumed that a year is 365.25 days long. The actual length is about 365.2425 days. The calendar lost about 11 minutes each year until Pope Gregory XIII consulted the Vatican astronomer and left us a simple equation to compensate for the drift and removed 10 days from the calendar of October 1582.

Computer programmers would mistakenly use Julias Ceasar’s flawed leap-year equations for at least 441 years. The colonial United States and majority protestant parts of Europe didn’t accept the new calendar until September 1752 when the “stolen days” triggered riots over lost wages. 

The Eastern Orthodox church remained with the Julian calendar. So by 2023 the Orthodox Christmas and New Year arrive about two weeks after the western equivalent.

As the pace of life changed and people journeyed farther into the world they needed to find a way to mimic and improve on natural timekeepers. At the equator, the earth turns at roughly 1000mph (16 miles/second.) So even if a navigator gets a perfect fix on the angle of the sun or star, a 1 second time error could put them 16 miles east or west of where they think they are. In 1714 after the British Navy ran aground on the long Plymouth peninsula one too many times, the British parliament voted to create a reward for anyone who can invent a clock which stayed synchronized with celestial time even in rough seas far from home.

The book Longitude by David Sobel explains this struggle and how the strange custom of dropping a ball helped ships synchronize their clocks with shore time without going ashore. Ships weren’t the only means of transportation which required accurate clocks. Several train accidents and near misses drove people to create a standard railroad time. 

Pope Gregory’s calendar bugs

With telescopes made out of stone, it may have taken neolithic builders 500 years to notice errors caused by the slow precession of the earth’s axis but better tools revealed that there are more things in heaven and earth never dreamt of by Pope Gregory XIII. His calendar is also out of step with the heavens. The Earth is not a perfect sphere, its orbit isn’t round, its axis is tilted and wobbles like a top. Our supersize moon moves north and south, nearer and farther in its elliptical orbit. As the moon and sun drag tides across irregular bays and estuaries the friction slows and speeds up the earth’s rotation as the moon, earth and sun orbit moving centers of gravity in a dance with average days growing longer until one day only one hemisphere of the earth will face the moon and life can no longer rely on our familiar patterns of tides. 

Atomic time replaces astronomical time

Highly accurate atomic clocks eventually replaced astronomical measurements as a basis for universal standard time. Computers, phones, airline and train schedules take their time from an atomic clock. Since 1972 leap seconds have been occasionally added to keep our standard time aligned with the heavens. Many of us were too distracted with selfies, celebrations and streaming video to notice that the last minute of December 31, 2016 was 61 seconds long.

Unfortunately the software in our devices was designed around 60 second minutes and leap seconds can cause havoc with our technology. To avoid vexing equivalents of Y2K bugs at random intervals, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) voted on November 18, 2022 to allow more than 1 second error between universal time (UTC) and astronomical time (UT1.)

What would we do with a better atomic clock?

In May of 2022 Frequency Electronics, Inc (NASDAQ: FEIM) announced its next generation of portable Digital Rubidium Atomic Clock (DRAC) suitable for airborn and satellite applications. (Remember, the UAE also plans to build a colony on Mars). Such super accurate clocks can improve existing applications such as drones, self-driving cars and satellite navigation.

It can also be used to make radio communications more immune to interference, for better detection of gravitational waves and possibly in phased array radio telescopes.

Existing global Positioning System (GPS) and Galileo satellite navigation systems rely on cesium atomic clocks which are already precise enough to measure gravitational and velocity time dilation as predicted by Albert Einstein.

The clock on board one of these satellites is slightly slower because it is moving relative to us but slightly faster because gravity makes time run just a little bit slower down here on earth. As Inside Science explains, these relativistic factors balance out to a net gain of 38 microseconds per day. There is nothing wrong with the clock and these errors aren’t caused by complicated astronomical movements.

For these satellites time is actually running 38 microseconds slower per day. You might think we could 38 microseconds of relativistic time dilation but during that 0.000038 seconds, light travels about 7 miles. Time is weird.

The post Frequency Electronics reveals a better clock appeared first on Green Prophet.

GoPro is a very young company, founded in the early 2000s, which in just a few short years has enjoyed incredible and unparalleled success. This new device has quickly become the best friend of adventurers, travellers, photographers and film-makers. The GoPro has completely revolutionized the way people make videos and fulfilled their desire to create memories of their lives. It is also widely used by many youtubers and vloggers, who have contributed to spreading the word about this innovative and cutting-edge new type of camera. In just five years, the name ‘GoPro’ was already on everyone’s mind, and many people decided to buy one for their own personal use. Thanks to numerous model upgrades, the GoPro now allows owners to create truly high-quality content, even when they can’t hold it in their hands. In fact, it is possible to easily retrieve videos on the web of people attaching their GoPro to their helmet, to show the route they take while doing sports, for example. 

As it is such a valuable tool, however, it is impossible not to acknowledge how expensive it can actually be. Especially for the enthusiasts, who certainly prefer the latest models, buying a GoPro can be very expensive. What many people don’t know, however, is that there are a few little techniques that can be implemented which help GoPro customers save money on their purchases. Keep reading to find out what they are!

1. DON’T STOP AT THE FIRST WEBSITE YOU COME ACROSS

This paragraph focuses particularly on buying a GoPro online, which is actually the best way for users to save money, and here’s how. Many people make the mistake of looking for the best deal on the first website they visit. This is a bad first step that should not be made! Even if it’s the official GoPro website, do not limit yourself to a single offer you quickly find. Instead, the best thing you can do is to compare several websites, to see which one offers the best price for the model you are interested in. For example, you might happen to discover that the type of GoPro you are looking for is on offer in a certain shop, while in another one you would have to pay full price for it. Also, to make sure that you have checked everything, you can search for your GoPro on one of those sites that already allow users to compare different prices at the same time, such as Amazon for example. In order to make the right choice when buying your GoPro, you need to do some real research and not settle for the first proposal you find on the web.

2. MAKE GOOD USE OF DISCOUNT CODES

Many people forget about GoPro discount codes when they are shopping online. However, they are easy to find on the web, as GoPro has partnered with websites to offer their customers discount percentages, which can often be very high. As a matter of fact, there are some websites that offer the service of providing discount codes and coupons to customers, which can be helpful when making an online purchase. Moreover, discount codes are always a winning asset when it comes to price savings.

3.NEVER FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE

If you are a true GoPro fan, you really should register on the official website. Once you become a member of the GoPro club, you will receive all the updates about the brand by email, but not just that. The company offers its loyal customers exclusive discounts and offers that normal customers cannot access. So, what are you waiting for? Sign up immediately!

4. THE LUCK OF THOSE WHO SEARCH THROUGH THE SECOND-HAND PRODUCTS

GoPro cameras are very often used by people who work in the video business, or who use the camera to document their business in the best possible way. Therefore, it is very common that they decide to discard an old model as soon as a new one comes out, because it is really important for them to be able to display their content in the best possible way. So, if you are a private consumer and don’t need to buy the latest version of the GoPro, always look for second-hand products. Indeed, you will find plenty of people who decide to sell their GoPro, even if it is fully functional and in excellent condition. You might be really lucky and find a great deal!

The post 4 Simple Ways to Save Money on Your GoPro appeared first on Green Prophet.

Low impact fishing using a drone

Local men love to fish but most can’t afford to own a boat. Before work or after they jump down to the sea and cast out there line. But fishing in shallow waters will own bring you home teeny tiny fish called ‘barbunia’ or red mullet and they are really an acquired taste. 

But Avram here who we caught on film uses a very clever approach. He has rigged out his drone with a catch and release apparatus. He ties the baited line of his rod to the drone and then steers his drone out 400 yards, deep enough to where the fishing boats can go. He drops the line and brings the drone back to home base. 

He turns the drone off and then tightens the line manually, and waits. It can take  1 or 2 hours until he catches the big one. And it is worth the wait, he tells me. 

Reeling in the drone

“I catch all kinds of fish,” he says. “Grouper, and even red snapper. I caught a 2.5 red snapper last Friday and we ate it at our Shabbat dinner.”

This is out of the box thinking and definately an innovative Israeli approach to fishing. Using hightech for low-tech ideas and pleasures.  Another way to use drones? Dropping cannabis packets on people of Tel Aviv, of course. 

Have a story like this to share? Drop me a line karin@greenprophet.com

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The 2016 United Arab Emirates Drones for Good Competition is now open. The UAE Drones for Good Award is “dedicated to transforming the innovative technologies behind civilian drones into practical, realizable solutions for improving people’s lives today.”

In 1888 a French newspaper published this in Alfred Nobel’s obituary: “Le marchand de la mort est mort. (The merchant of death is dead.)” It explained that Alfred Nobel had become rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before. But the newspaper was mistaken. It was Alfred’s brother Ludvig who had died.

Alfred Nobel was horrified by his premature obituary. Despite having established 90 arms factories, he believed in pacifism. When his younger brother Emil died in a nitroglycerin explosion, Alfred worked to invent safer explosives such as dynamite. He did not want to be remembered as a merchant of death.

So Alfred Nobel revised his last will and testament to leave his entire remaining estate to establish Nobel Prizes which were to be given “…to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.”

The UAE drones for good competition has a similar goal of rewarding those who can imagine drones being used as plowshares instead of as swords. As of this writing the UAE drones for good competition has received 800 individual entries from 57 countries. The prize for the national competition is 1 million AED and the prize for the international competition is 1 million US dollars.

Greenprophet previously reported on some positive uses for drones in nature conservation, watching flamingos and delivering the mail. Watch this video for another example of drones being used for good.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCCODBs3F8g[/youtube]

How would you use drones to make the world a better place?

Photos of Mishaal Almarzouqi’s team and other photos are from https://www.dronesforgood.ae

The post UAE Drones for Good Competition Open! appeared first on Green Prophet.

Falcons hunt by scanning the ground below them using a cone-like field of vision; imagine a spotlight scanning the earth – the bird’s-eye-view is limited to what’s moving within that beam. The area within the cone expands when the bird soars higher above ground, but falcons don’t always fly high while scanning terrain, so falconers train them to fly higher, which increases the potential hunting area.

For centuries, falcon trainers have used kites and balloons. They tie a lure to a line, which is attached to the kite or balloon. The falcon chases the device as it flies upwards, then snatches the bait and returns it to its trainer for a reward. Over time, the bird learns to fly higher and hunt prey over a larger area. Replacing kites with small unmanned aerial vehicles, or quadcopters, puts a modern twist on an ancient technique.

The machines act as tiny helicopters, operated by remote control.  They can travel in pre-determined paths, further and higher than ground-tethered balloons and kites.

Watch a video of drone training a falcon below. (The bird makes his appearance at around 0:40.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT5Ak63rR1U

A drone is also being used – today – to carry a falcon to the top of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It will carry the bird inside a special cage to the top of the 2,722 feet high tower.

The cage will open, and Victor the falcon will soar free, filming his journey using a special camera strapped to his chest. Live images of the world-record-breaking flight (this is Dubai, after all) will be shown on an enormous screen set along the shore between the Dubai Mall and Burj Khalifa.

Drones are deployed in many new ways, but our favorites remain those with environmental benefits, whether raising awareness to abominable practices of Big Food, helping to clear plastic from our oceans,  or replacing delivery vehicles that run on fossil fuels.

The post Abu Dhabi falconers think drones are for the birds appeared first on Green Prophet.

It flies over mountains and through valleys, taking in the vast landscapes and diverse wildlife beneath it. Only this isn’t a bird, it’s a drone.

They’ve had some bad press and the public has been slow to embrace them but after the final of what’s been dubbed “The World Cup of Drones,” things might be about to change. The aim of the year-long Drones for Good contest was to find positive technological solutions to fight modern day issues.

A group of UAE students won the national category for coming up with a practical idea for a drone to improve government services in the Emirates. Their entry, the Wadi Drone, was designed to help local authorities track the country’s diverse flora and fauna in remote desert and mountain areas, where sending a person to do it could harm the natural environment or even be a risk to the person’s safety. Wadi means ‘valley’ in Arabic.

Already – the Wadi Drone is making the work of conservationists easier. It’s being used in the UAE’s Fujairah’s Wadi Wurayah National Park and there are plans to expand it to other areas throughout the country.

Catching wild animals on film

Using commercial drone technology and proprietary software, it flies for up 40 km at a time over the UAE’s mountainous park, wirelessly downloading photographs from 120 camera traps on the ground that capture images of wild animals at the park as they pass in front of a motion sensor. It’s already snapped images of Blandford fox, Gordon’s wildcat, hedgehogs, Caracal lynx and goats.

Related: drones that catch the flamboyances of flamingos

Previously the data was collected twice a year, but with the introduction of the Wadi drone, data can be collected once a month. The drone will also make monitoring easier in summer months, as previously a helicopter had to be deployed when it was too hot to trek.

The Wadi Drone winning team is comprised of four NYU Abu Dhabi students: Martin Slosarik, Ting-Che Lin, Vasily Rudchenko, Kai-erik Jensen, advised by visiting instructor and research associate, Matt Karau. In developing the drone, the team joined forces with the Emirates Wildlife Society and the Wadi Wurayah National Park.

Related: The mailman is a drone in this Arab country

Martin Slosarik, studying electrical engineering at NYUAD, told Green Prophet: “We developed the idea for this project in careful consideration of where drones can and should exist to do good for the benefit of society. It is a great honor to win the national UAE Drones for Good Award,” he said.

The team plan to use the AED 1million ($273,000) prize to fully implement the Wadi Drone project in Wadi Wurayah National Park and they hope to expand it regionally and internationally.

Martin added that the greatest outcome of the competition was not the handful of winning ideas but “the fact that dozens of individuals committed months to develop innovative solutions that envision a world in which drones and humans harmoniously co-exist.”

The post Wadi Drone for conservation flies through Emirati national park and scoops top prize appeared first on Green Prophet.

Video of drone mailman in pilot run

According to Reuters the Emirates will upgrade its government services by using drones, unmanned flying vehicles to deliver official packages and papers. The oil-rich Gulf state is home to about 8 million people and plans on test running the drone delivery system over the next six months. The hot climate and heavy sandstorms will be a major obstacle for the drone delivery.

“This is the first project of its kind in the world,” said Mohammed al-Gergawi, minister of cabinet affairs.

What will they be used for? Probably for delivering identity cards, driving licenses and other documents.

Measuring about 1-1/2 feet across, the drones will use will use fingerprint and eye-recognition technology for security purposes.

Amazon announced that they would be delivering goods by drones this last Christmas season.

I personally like the old fashion way of slow mail – a system that employs people and keeps the old ways of connecting us through hand-delivered goods.

Showmanship is very much part of the Emirati culture, where bling and mega-buildings and artificial islands are meant to outshine and outsize. This is where you’ll  find white-gold Mercedes and the world’s tallest tower; it’s a place where princes keep wild animals as pets (see this video on the prince who keeps a white tiger cub).

Drones are just another way for the UAE to keep up with the “droneses” from America, I suspect.

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