'Flying cell tower' to aid search and rescue operations

A new piece of tech from a company in Spain is proving very effective for people involved in search and rescue. It's effectively a portable cell 'tower' that can be mounted on a helicopter in very little time, claimed three minutes. The concept is to get the lost people's phones to connect to the tower - which the device can detect from twenty miles away(!), then by circling the area the device detects, they can quickly zero in on where the people are.

How quickly?

During a test mission, they found their 'lost people' in two minutes and 14 seconds!

The portable phone tower also allows text-based broadcasts from the helicopter, allowing the rescuers to instruct the lost people to move to a clearing for the helicopter to land, or stay in place if there are injured people, etc.

This is a very cool tool, and I expect will be helpful in saving lives. It can also be used to fly over areas and broadcast messages about impending flash floods or fires, etc.

Privacy implications. Pretty minimal, as far as the article reveals. This is not a Stingray device, it doesn't capture, intercept and record all cell traffic in an area. It looks for a phone's beacon, detects it, and uses directional antennas/analysis localizes it and can send text messages - much lower power requirement and longer range than voice comms so the lost people's battery will last longer. I don't think this will have any application in law enforcement or surveillance. But I could be wrong.

https://coloradosun.com/2024/05/28/new-technology-search-rescue-helicopters/

https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/24/05/29/0543211/new-tech-may-help-find-missing-people-in-the-backcountry-within-minutes

The Colorado Sun article has a very good description of the broad usage of the device, the Slashdot story has some good technical description of how such a device could work and why it would take a long time to bring such a thing to market.

The only space probe orbiting Venus has gone silent

The Japanese probe, named Akatsuki, has gone dark. Mission control thinks that the craft may have lost its pointing with Earth and are working to reestablish contact.

The probe got off to a slippery start. It launched on a Japanese rocket in 2010, then a burn to lower its orbit fired for only three minutes instead of twelve. This put it in an orbit around the Sun, instead of Venus. After much research and study, they were able to get it into the orbit of Venus by venting a large quantity of fuel oxidizer. The orbiter began "taking data in 2016 about the planet and its atmosphere. In 2018, the mission's lifetime was extended, and it has continued to collect data until this spring."

There are two solar probes that occasionally slingshot around Venus for a gravity assist to boost their orbits, but their scientific gazing is focused on the Sun.

As it happens, a woman on Russet's crew is a specialist and somewhat of a noted expert on Venus and studies it frequently. It's a difficult planet to study as the window that it's above the horizon is very small.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/our-only-mission-at-venus-may-have-just-gone-dark/

Our local wildfire - now listed as inactive!

We survived the weekend! It was listed as a red-flag warning weekend in terms of high winds and increased fire danger, but it wasn't much of an event. They gained total containment on the 27th, though what I'm reading from the updates implies that it was all but completely extinguished at that point. There were hot spots and points where the fire was looking for fuel to burn and not finding it.

So we're happy! More or less....

There's a fire burning north of us - a good distance away - at a place called Alto. It's called the Blue 2 Fire, just north of the Sierra Blanca peak, which might be the highest peak in Southern New Mexico at almost 12,000 feet. I think the area up there is more high prairie/grassland than forest like it is by my house.

Now THIS sucker is a fire! It's now at 7,400 acres and ZERO percent containment! It's been burning for twelve days at this point. Hot shot crews are setting controlled fires to burn fuel before the main fire can get to them and trying to clear fuel for bulldozer crews to build breaks in an attempt to control it. Several communities are under evac orders, with many more under Set or Ready orders.

My understanding is that fires are named after the hill name they started closest to. In this case, the number 2 indicating the second fire started here. No idea when the first Blue fire happened.

It's really dry and hot here, yesterday in Alamogordo we hit close to 90. Today is cooler, so the library's HVAC decided to drop the temperature inside from 72 to 64. Not going to be quite so cold for those firefighters.

New super writable DVD(ish) disk stores 128,000 GIG of data!

The article describes the disc as 1 Petabit in storage, but you need to divide that by 8 to get it in bytes, so 128,000 gig of storage. Which is pretty good.

They're using a 3D effect to pack in 100 layers of data to achieve this density. The problem is, this is 'researchers from...' In other words, 'We've done this in a lab! Er... lab model.' We don't have a working prototype shown, we don't know what kind of read/write speeds, we don't know longevity or durability.

In other words, it's sort of vaporware. Could be really nice if it happens, if they ever start showing off production samples, when we can believe a little more of it. Show me an entire season of General Hospital on a single disc, I'll be impressed.

Of course that would require a new series of DVD/BR players, but for something like that, could be worth it. Could even return disc burners to desktop PCs. Or not.

I am reminded of a similar piece of vaporware from the late '80s/early '90s, someone claimed to have created a laser-written crystal lattice storage form, think something along the lines of the little data cartridges they carried around in Star Trek TOS. I think they were claiming something sized along the lines of 35mm slides. Promised amazing storage density at the time, which by now might be laughable. But never saw the light of day.

https://gizmodo.com/meet-the-super-dvd-scientists-develop-massive-1-petabi-1851272615