Friday, May 21, 2004
Nicolas writes:
From this week’s New Scientist:
FAKE ROCKS TRACK FLASH FLOODS
Dry stream beds in Arizona are being seeded with fake rocks to reveal what happens to the river bed after flash floods. The 200 tangerine-sized concrete stones contain transponders that squawk a unique ID signal when a radio device “interrogates” them.
After torrential rain from summer thunderstorms has sent the rocks rolling and tumbling downstream, scientists from the US Agricultural Research Service in Tuscon will scan the rivers for the ID signals. They will record the rocks’ progress to get a better understanding of erosion patterns and sediment deposition in the parched south-west.
I think this is the research centre carrying out these experiments: http://www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/
(Thanks to Nicolas)
From this week’s New Scientist:
FAKE ROCKS TRACK FLASH FLOODS
Dry stream beds in Arizona are being seeded with fake rocks to reveal what happens to the river bed after flash floods. The 200 tangerine-sized concrete stones contain transponders that squawk a unique ID signal when a radio device “interrogates” them.
After torrential rain from summer thunderstorms has sent the rocks rolling and tumbling downstream, scientists from the US Agricultural Research Service in Tuscon will scan the rivers for the ID signals. They will record the rocks’ progress to get a better understanding of erosion patterns and sediment deposition in the parched south-west.
I think this is the research centre carrying out these experiments: http://www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/
(Thanks to Nicolas)
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Bendable Computing seems to be a nice enabling technology for Smart Objects. A credict card size rubber can be bend to zoom in and out a map that is displayed on the rubber. Here is a story from The Register and here Sony's page
Sensornetwork: Scatterweb developed by the CST Group, University of Berlin (Hartmut Ritter, Jochen Schiller). Features over the air programming with a node directly plugged in the USB port etc.
