Remote Sensing

Folding Drone Can Drop Into Inaccessible Mines

IEEE Spectrum: Inspecting old mines is a dangerous business. For humans, mines can be lethal: prone to rockfalls and filled with noxious gases. Robots can go where humans might suffocate, but even robots can only do so much when mines are…

Atomically Precise Sensors Could Detect Another Earth

IEEE Spectrum: Gazing into the dark and seemingly endless night sky above, people have long wondered: Is there another world like ours out there, somewhere? Thanks to new sensors that we and other astronomers are developing, our generation may be the…

The Pierre Auger Observatory shares 10% of data

Symmetry Magazine: In Argentina, far to the west of Buenos Aires, sits the world’s largest cosmic-ray detector: the Pierre Auger Observatory. It’s made up of an array of 1600 detector stations, each spaced about a mile apart. From the mountains that…

Complex light waves measure hidden objects

Physics World: Researchers in Europe have developed a technique for obtaining accurate laser-based measurements of objects hidden behind complex scattering structures. They say that their mathematical formula, which calculates the optimal waveform needed for the scattering environment, can also be applied…