mapping

Mapping the inside of cramped, difficult-to-reach areas can be helpful to people such as plant operators, but drones flown in such places could easily crash. The LiDAR- and cage-equipped Elios 3 quadcopter was designed with that challenge in mind.We first heard about the technology behind the Elios line of drones back in 2013, when a prototype was unveiled by engineers from Switzerland's EPFL research institute. Commercialized by spinoff company Flyability, Elios quadcopters have since been put to a number of interesting…

Pokémon Go creator Niantic this week announced its new location mapping software for AR, VPS, along with a brand new location-based social network called Campfire. Niantic's Visual Positioning System lets developers give users the option to determine their position and orientation and anchor AR content, adding locations to Niantic's AR map of the world to build their own location-based AR apps and experiences. 30,000 such public locations are available including in San Francisco, London, Tokyo, LA, NYC, and more. Niantic…

on May 17, 2022…

Large fish in the open sea have declined by at least 90 percent over the past century due to overexploitation.To pull fish like tuna, swordfish, and marlin back from the brink, scientists argue we need to protect their migration superhighways known as 'blue corridors'.  A recent study on the Pacific Ocean has mapped the busiest of these underwater traffic lanes using a fish's tendency to return to its birthplace.This behavior is known as philopatry, or natal homing, and it's not just an impulse for salmon.  Other fish…

Spatial map depicting mean geothermal heat flow in and around Greenland derived from machine learning results. Heat anomalies appear off the coast of the capital area in the southwest, which might be interesting in relation to harvesting geothermal energy. In general, though, the heat flow from beneath Greenland is lower than previously estimated. Credit: Colgan and Wansing, 2022 In our understanding of global geothermal heat…

In a massive collaborative effort, researchers have compiled the most complete healthy human cell atlas yet, mapping the positions of more than a million cells across 33 different organs.  This incredible feat forms a comprehensive reference to help us better understand human health, diseases, treatments, and vaccines, with the aim to map every cell type in the human body as part of the international Human Cell Atlas."You can think of it as a Google Maps of the human body," Wellcome Sanger Institute cellular geneticist…

Firms are colored according to their systemic risk for the entire economy. Credit: CSHVienna Researchers at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH) created a complete representation of Hungary's economy. They mapped the entire country's production network, including literally all of the relevant firms and all of the supply relationships with their clients and customers. With such detailed knowledge of the economy, they can…

NASA and partners are developing backpack-sized technology for future Moon explorers that will allow them to map and navigate the lunar surface in the darkness of the high polar regions to within a centimeter without GPS.Precision navigation is something that Earth dwellers have come to take for granted over the last 30 odd years. Satellite systems like GPS and digital mapping technologies have made us assume that we can always find accurate maps and fix our position to within a few feet at the touch of a screen.On the…