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- In its biorhythm: the brain of honey bees as a navigator for drones and an UZI for Arctic ice
In its biorhythm: the brain of honey bees as a navigator for drones and an UZI for Arctic ice
Bees have taught drones to find their way home without GPS, ultrasound is used in the Arctic to study ice, and hantavirus has proven to be especially dangerous for teenagers. Izvestia collected the main scientific news of the week: from contactless control of machinery in mines and operating rooms to a new theory of the origin of continents. For more information, see our article.
Scientists use "ultrasound" to study the ice in the Arctic
Russian researchers from MIPT have taught ultrasound to "see" through Arctic hummocks — large-scale ice ridges that threaten ships and oil platforms. Numerical modeling has shown that by the nature of reflected acoustic waves, it is possible not only to detect hidden cavities inside these lumps, but also to determine what they are filled with: air or water.
In order to safely lay routes and build underwater infrastructure, engineers need to know not only the shape of the hummock from the outside, but also what is hidden inside. Ice is far from a monolithic material. Cavities filled with air or water can hide inside it. It is almost impossible to detect such hidden structures by looking only at the surface of the boulders. Ultrasound can help here, the scientists said.
The source sends an acoustic pulse, the wave propagates through the medium, reflects off the interface of materials with different physical properties, and returns to the receivers. To correctly describe such a system, scientists have used special mathematical tools.
— A hummock is a complex three—dimensional structure with an unpredictable internal structure: cavities, layers of different densities, cracks. Our method allows you to look inside without destroying the object or going out onto the ice with drilling equipment. We have shown that the ultrasonic signal carries the imprint of this structure, and we have learned to read it using numerical modeling," said Alyona Favorskaya, a leading researcher at the Laboratory of Applied Computational Geophysics at MIPT.
Hantavirus is especially dangerous for teenagers
Brazilian scientists have found that mortality from hantavirus infection among adolescents aged 15-19 reaches 50%, which is the highest rate among all age groups. Experts suggest that this may be due to an excessively strong immune response of the young body.
— Such results can be explained by the fact that young people had close contact with rodent-infested land. For example, during a football game or agricultural work. In addition, they develop a stronger immune response, which is common in hemorrhagic fevers. The infection was probably diagnosed too late. In case of infection, timely medical care and control of inflammation are extremely important," immunologist Mikhail Bolkov commented on the study.
In total, scientists analyzed 177 cases of infection. 89.7% of patients required hospitalization, and the average mortality rate for all age groups was 33.3%. The first pronounced symptoms of the disease appeared on average 3.5 days after going to the doctor, and recovery occurred after about eight days. The most common clinical manifestations of infection were fever, headache, and muscle pain.
Industrial AI has been taught to understand gestures with dirty gloves
Programmers at Novgorod State University (NovGU) have created a hardware and software complex that allows you to control industrial computers and equipment using gestures in real production conditions.
The system, using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and a conventional webcam, allows you to recognize hand movements in a protective glove in conditions of poor lighting, dust, noisy background and other interference. The accuracy of the program was 90-95%, and the reaction speed was less than 0.1 seconds.
— The developers did not set out the task of creating a gesture recognition system from scratch — such algorithms exist. The goal is to make the software package work stably where ordinary computers go blind," Igor Kulakov, one of the developers and a senior lecturer at the Department of Information Technology and Systems at NovSU, told Izvestia.
The system can be used in workshops, mines, or during rescue operations in rubble. Similar solutions are also in demand in medicine, where, for example, surgeons in sterile gloves will be able to contactlessly flip through computer images and rotate 3D models of organs. In addition, gesture control is in demand for manipulating ATM interfaces and information desks without touching the screen.
Scientists have uncovered the origin of the Earth's oldest continents
The first continents of our planet arose not from fresh mantle material, but from recycled ocean rocks. This conclusion was reached by scientists who analyzed granites about 3 billion years old. This was reported on May 12 in the journal Science X.
"Our results show that most Archean continental crusts were formed by partial melting of above—crust sources, rather than intact deep—seated rocks," the authors of the study wrote.
A team of scientists has collected Archaean rock samples from the North China Craton, one of the oldest fragments of the earth's crust. The study involved 22 granite samples and several amphibolites ranging in age from 2.5 billion to 2.7 billion years.
Scientists were interested in two elements — sulfur and silicon. Both leave stable chemical "fingerprints" of surface processes in the rocks, which are difficult to erase even under high heat and pressure. All the studied granites showed anomalies of isotopic composition: unusual ratios of sulfur isotopes and slightly heavier silicon atoms than those of mantle rocks.
When scientists compared their data with global Archaean rock samples, the picture emerged: almost all preserved continental granites formed after 3.8 billion years ago bear the same isotopic labels. This means that the first continents were everywhere built from material that had already been on the surface. The authors believe that such an active rock cycle is possible only in the presence of an early protoform of plate tectonics. It was this process, according to their version, that provided the connection between the atmosphere, the ocean and the earth's interior and created the conditions for the appearance of life about 3.8 billion years ago.
Bees have taught drones to find their way home
A group of roboticists from Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands), together with biologists from Germany, presented the Bee-Nav strategy, which fully reproduces the navigation algorithms of honey bees. Scientists have created a system for minidrons that takes up only 42 kilobytes of memory. Robots equipped with it can fly hundreds of meters away from the base and return, even without GPS, using only a camera and a tiny neural network.
Nature has decreed that bees with a brain the size of a sesame seed are able to move away from the hive for kilometers and return unmistakably. The secret lies in a combination of two mechanisms: odometry (estimating the distance traveled by visual cues) and visual memory. During the first flight, the bee makes a short flight around the house, memorizing the panorama. Later, returning from afar, she first relies on odometry, and approaching familiar places, on visual landmarks.
Engineers have converted this algorithm to a number. The drone they created first makes a training flight near the base, collecting panoramic images. The micro-neural network (only 3.4 kilobytes of the model's weight) learns from these images to determine the direction and distance to the house. During the return journey, the robot accelerates when far from the target and slows down when approaching, just like an insect.
During indoor testing, the system worked smoothly. The drone traveled more than 600 m outdoors in a field laboratory and returned home.
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