The Otago Daily Times, in New Zealand reports that a group of teenagers lost in the Southland bush have been praised by police for making the right decision by notifying emergency services and staying put for help.
Police said they were notified at 8.15pm on Friday the 26th April that a group of teenagers had unexpectedly been caught out while walking the Makarewa Falls track in the Hokonui Hills, Southland.
As the group started to lose daylight they also lost the track route and became lost.
When they realised they were in trouble, the group alerted police by using the SOS function on their cellphone before lighting a fire.
Invercargill police search and rescue co-ordinator Sergeant Alun Griffiths said a group of 10 Land Search and Rescue volunteers, supported by Amateur Radio Emergency Communications, was deployed and the group was located shortly after midnight.
The group arrived in the carpark at 2am in good health despite some miserable weather conditions, police said.
The boys did all the right things and stayed calm, Sgt Griffiths said.
Continuing its studies into Infrared Laser Communications, NASA’s Psyche’s mission team has been testing a new communication system. The new approach doesn’t use radio waves but an infrared laser and it has now shown that it works successfully from the most distant place yet. Psyche was 226 million kilometres from Earth when the message was sent. That’s 1.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
Psyche was transmitting its engineering data over radio waves through NASA’s Deep Space Network. The mission team decided to also transmit the data over the Deep Space Optical Communication system for the first time. The previous transmissions were not data from the spacecraft but test data.
The April 8 test showed that even from that distance, the data could be downloaded with a maximum rate of 25 Mbps. This is already well beyond the expected goal of “at least 1 Mbps” and is 10 to 100 times faster than radio transmissions.
“We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on April 8,” Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement. “Until then, we’d been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche. This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency comms system.”
The technology continues to show promise but there are still a few problems that need to be ironed out. For example, optical observations are blocked by clouds. Radio communications do not suffer from this issue.
“We’ve learned a great deal about how far we can push the system when we do have clear skies, although storms have interrupted operations at both Table Mountain and Palomar [receiving stations] on occasion,” said Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead at JPL.
I thought you’d like to know something interesting about South Africa’s favourite alarm clock bird – the dreaded Hadeda, or Glossy Ibis.
Various ibises and shorebirds (like sandpipers) are able to use the “sixth sense” of remote-touch. This allows them to detect vibrations in soil and water, and use this information to locate invisible buried prey items. When they hunt for soft-bodied prey (such as earthworms), these vibrations result from the movement of prey in the soil. The birds can sense these vibrations using a special sensory organ in their beaks, called a bill-tip organ, which evolved during the time of the dinosaurs.
In recently published research from her Ph.D. at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology and reported on in Phys.org, Dr Carla du Toit has shown that Hadedas have this sixth sense too—something that had been assumed based on the anatomy of their beaks but never tested. In addition, she and her co-authors discovered an added twist to their sixth sense—their ability to use it is closely tied to the amount of water in the soil. This has likely played a role in Hadedas’ range expansion, and has global implications for key groups of wading birds.
They tested Hadedas housed in free-flight aviaries at a bird sanctuary, presenting them with trays filled with soil, in which they buried several worms. They knew the birds couldn’t see the buried worms, but they also needed to make sure they weren’t using hearing or scent to find them. They therefore masked any sounds the worms made by playing white noise from a speaker next to the trays. To ensure the Hadedas couldn’t smell the worms, they mixed crushed worms into the soil.
Neither of these affected how quickly Hadedas found their prey. So they concluded that they weren’t using hearing or scent to locate the worms in their experiments.
To test whether Hadedas were able to use remote-touch, the researchers gave them either live worms (which moved around and produced vibrations) or dead worms (which did not produce vibrations). The birds were able to find the moving worms significantly faster than the dead ones, indicating that they are able to sense vibrations, and use them to find prey in the absence of all other sensory information.
The mechanical waves (vibrations) that the birds sense are transmitted better in liquids than in gases, so Dr du Toit predicted that Hadedas would be more successful at detecting vibrations (and finding prey) in wetter substrates. Once they had established that Hadedas could use remote-touch, they tested how adding different amounts of water to the soil affected how quickly they located their prey, as this could be a factor that affects where they are able to forage.
When they were using remote-touch, the birds located the worms significantly faster in wetter soils, supporting the prediction. If they were given dead worms (no vibrations), adding water to the soil had no effect on their prey capture rate, so it wasn’t simply because the wetter soils were easier to dig around in. If the soil was too dry, Hadedas lost their ability to sense living worms faster than dead ones. This indicates that they could not use remote-touch in dry soils, and were instead having to rely on random probing to find prey.
And all along, you, like I, thought the hadedas were just plain simple lunatic birds. I wonder whether we could harness them for emergency comms, by getting them to signal looming danger at great distances. Their raucous cries will certainly carry for kilometres.
Thank you to Phys.org for these excerpts from Dr du Toit’s research.
This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.