IN THE wilds of Canada and Skandanavia, thousands of motorists have serious life-threatening collisions involving moose and large mammals.
Collisions with large mammals weighing in at 1,000 Kg will cause serious damage to vehicles and inevitable human fatalities.
A new roadside radar system could prevent collisions by detecting and keeping track of large animals, whilst at the same time, warning drivers when it would be wise to slow down and be alert to potential collisions.
Abir Mukherjee of AUG Signals in Toronto says existing set-ups, which use light beam tripwires, are not reliable.
"With a tripwire system, when an animal crosses it into the road, it will alert," he says. "But after a fixed time, the system goes off. Then the system doesn't know where the animal is."
The Large Animal Detection System (LADS) sends out a 360-degree radar signal every second, then monitors the reflections to work out what animals are there. Its software allows it to ignore small animals and vegetation in the radar's path.
The detector has been running as a pilot project on Canada's Highway 416 near Kemptville, Ontario, since last year. LADS has an effective radius of 700 metres and works in harsh weather and heavy snow.
When it detects an animal, lights flash on street signs to alert drivers. It also records data on the number and speed of vehicles.
The GAmma-ray burst Polarized light detector on the backside of Japan's Ikaros solar sail is shown here. The instrument spotted its first gamma-ray burst on July 7, 2010. Credit: JAXA.
A camera riding on the world's first deep space solar sail has caught managed to observe a violent gamma-ray burst — one of the most powerful explosions in the universe, Japanese space officials have announced.
The Ikaros solar sail detected the first gamma-ray burst with its onboard GAmma-ray burst Polarized light detector (GAP) on July 7, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in an announcement. Gamma-ray bursts are the dying explosion of large stars that have run out of fuel. The collapsing star cores can form either black holes or neutron stars, and emit an intense burst of high-energy gamma-rays.
These gamma-ray bursts, as they're called, are some of the brightest explosions in space. One gamma-ray burst, which was observed by NASA's Swift satellite June 21, was so powerful and bright that it temporarily blinded the space observatory, NASA officials said.
Satellites in space routinely keep watch for powerful gamma-ray bursts, but the GAP instrument on Ikaros is designed to make the first-ever detection of polarized light from the cosmic explosions.
"Polarized light observations will contribute to elucidate the magnetic structure and the radiation mechanism of gamma-ray bursts, thus they are expected to greatly help solve the mystery of the death of massive stars and the birth of black holes," JAXA officials said.
The GAP can detect gamma-rays coming toward Ikaros from all directions, but can only carry out its polarized light analysis when the gamma-rays come in from the backside of the solar sail. The first gamma-ray burst detected did not allow for such an analysis.
Japan's Ikaros solar sail has months of sailing ahead, and scientists calculate that about 20 percent of gamma-ray bursts observed by GAP should allow for polarized light observations.
WHAT'S the difference between a suicide bomber and a cleaner? It sounds like the opening line of a sick joke, but for computer scientists working on intelligent video-surveillance software, being able to make that distinction is a key goal.
Current CCTV systems can collect masses of data, but little of it is used, says Shaogang Gong, a computer-vision computation researcher at Queen Mary, University of London. "What we really need are better ways to mine that data," he says.
Gong is leading an international team of researchers to develop a next-generation CCTV system, called Samurai, which is capable of identifying and tracking individuals that act suspiciously in crowded public spaces. It uses algorithms to profile people's behaviour, learning about how people usually behave in the environments where it is deployed. It can also take changes in lighting conditions into account, enabling it to track people as they move from one camera's viewing field to another.
To improve the tracking of an individual at an airport, the system can also learn the routes people are likely to take - straight from the entrance to check-in, say. It can even follow a target as they move in a crowd, using the characteristic shape of the person, their luggage and the people they are walking with, to follow them as they walk between different camera views.
Samurai is designed to issue alerts when it detects behaviour that differs from the norm, and adjusts its reasoning based on feedback. So an operator might reassure the system that the person with a mop appearing to loiter in a busy thoroughfare is no threat. When another person with a mop exhibits similar behaviour, it will remember that this is not a situation that needs flagging up.
While video analysis tools already exist, they tend to operate according to rigid, predefined rules, says Gong, and cannot follow a large number of people across multiple cameras situated in busy public spaces.
The Samurai team last month demonstrated the system to commercial partners including BAA Airports in the UK. The researchers claim the prototype system successfully identified potential threats which may have been missed by human operators, using footage collected at Heathrow airport. The Samurai team has funding to continue refining their software until the end of 2011.
"The use of relevant feedback from human operators will be a very important part of these technologies," says Paul Miller, of Queen's University's Centre for Secure Information Technologies in Belfast, UK, who is leading a project to develop a video-analysis system capable of predicting assaults on buses. "The key is developing learning algorithms that work not only in the lab but that are robust in real-world applications."
MODIS satellite images covered the Arabian Gulf (yearly average for 2006). This image show that the temperature increases generally towards the coastline. This is perhaps due to the heating effect of the local human activities which take place near the shoreline. The heating is about 2-3 degrees C within 20 to 30 km from the shoreline. Credit: NASA
Since 1985, seawater temperature in Kuwait Bay, northern Arabian Gulf, has increased on average 0.6 degrees C per decade. This is about three times faster than the global average rate reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Differences are due to regional and local effects.
Increased temperatures are having profound effects on key habitats and on power generation the Arabian Gulf.
Researcher Dr Thamer Al-Rashidi of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, said: "Because the waters of Kuwait Bay are well mixed by the tides, measurements of sea surface temperature can be used to assess temperature trends over time in the bay as a whole."
He and his colleagues used data on sea surface temperature (1985-2007) remotely sensed by a number of polar orbiting satellites to assess warming in Kuwait Bay and the Gulf region.
The data were 'ground truthed' by direct measurements of sea surface temperature in the region, and are in accord with air temperature trends recorded at Kuwait airport, and verify trends found in satellite data.
They found that the sea surface temperature of Kuwait Bay increased over the period at an average rate of around 0.62 degrees C per decade, with an uncertainty of plus or minus 0.01 degrees C. This is about three times the rate of average global increase estimated by the IPCC.
The increase was greatest in the early summer and least during winter months. The length of summertime increased almost twice as fast as peak summertime temperature. In 1998 and 2003, the monthly measurements of sea surface temperature showed unusually high peaks in summer temperature coincident with El Nino events - periodic warming of the atmosphere and ocean affecting weather in many parts of the world.
Temperature dipped in 1991, in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. "Dense smoke from the burning of oil fields hung over the region blocking out the sun, and we believe that this atmospheric dimming caused the relatively low summertime temperature peak recorded that year," said Dr Al-Rashidi, himself an officer in the Kuwaiti Navy. However, temperature then increased fairly steadily between 1992 and 2004.
"What all of this tells us," says Dr Al-Rashidi, "is that the global trends reported by the IPCC may not be representative locally."
The researchers estimate that about a third (0.2 degrees C) of the observed decadal increase in seawater temperature in Kuwait Bay can be attributed to global climate change, while around 13 per cent of the increase (0.08 degrees C) is due to human activity along the coast of the bay, especially the direct impacts of power and desalination plants.
The remaining 0.3 degrees C (50 per cent) of decadal warming appears to be due to changes in regional drivers, including circulation and mixing of seawater in the Arabian Gulf, the influence of the dominant north-westerly wind (Shamal), freshwater discharge from the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and sand storms.
Increased seawater temperatures are likely responsible, at least in part, for the reduction in dissolved oxygen causing summertime fish kills, and also for coral bleaching in the region. In general, the researchers warn that increased temperatures may lead to serious environmental degradation in the sensitive marine ecosystems of the Arabian Gulf.
Dr Al-Rashidi argues that regional warming could also have strategic implications: "Kuwait is dependent on desalination plants for its fresh water, and at temperatures over 37-38 degrees C the turbines generating the electricity driving these plants have to be turned off," he said.
However, there have been distinct reductions in temperature since 2004 due to dust storms and their effect solar dimming. The frequency of dust storms has increased in recent years due to decreasing rainfall and increasing desertification. How this will interact with other local, regional and global factors to affect average temperatures in the long term remains uncertain.
"The lesson learnt is that temperature trends that we experience may be quite different from place to place due to variations in local and regional effects," said Dr Al-Rashidi
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