AS SKIERS SCHUSSED AND SWERVED in a snow park outside Beijing during the 2022 Winter Olympics, a few may have noticed a string of towers along the way. Did they know that those towers were collecting wavelengths across the spectrum and scouring the data for signs of suspicious movement? Did they care that they were the involuntary subjects of an Internet of Things–based experiment in border surveillance?
This summer, at the Paris Olympic Games, security officials will perform a much bigger experiment in the heart of the City of Light, covering the events, the entire Olympic village, and the connecting roads and rails. It will proceed under a temporary law allowing automated surveillance systems to detect “predetermined events” of the sort that might lead to terrorist attacks.
Before architect César Martín Gómez could send his latest thermoelectric experiment to Antarctica in 2018, he had to make sure that soldiers from the Spanish Army could get it right on the first try. In the laboratory, he could always run the experiment—a scale model of a solid-state thermoelectric heater—a second time if it needed troubleshooting.
But at Spain’s Gabriel de Castilla base in the South Shetland Islands, soldiers would be too busy running other civilian experiments to troubleshoot Martín’s for him if it failed. And in a place like Antarctica, the goal of his experiment—providing efficient heat from direct current electricity—was both important and difficult. The experience “forced us to make a jump in quality,” recalls Martín, who is a professor at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain.
In August, Oleksii Kryvobok walked through a green and yellow field of sunflowers south of Kyiv, Ukraine, and measured the harvest’s photosynthetic activity with a device on a tripod. Hundreds of kilometers overhead, the EOS SAT-1 satellite, launched by Kryvobok’s employer, EOS Data Analytics (EOSDA), in Mountain View, California, was making the same measurements from orbit.
The satellite, one of a planned fleet of seven, was joined in orbit in early November by a pair of competing Open Cosmos satellites. EOSDA and Open Cosmos are part of an emerging trend for earth observation (EO) satellites: they aim to use mini-constellations of small satellites to offer specialized EO data in much the same way bigger companies such as Planet and Maxar offer high resolution optical data to customers of all kinds.
On Thursday November 9, Spain got a new government. On that same day, in Madrid, the far-right commentator and Vox party co-founder Alejo Vidal-Quadras was shot in the face, and nobody quite knew what to make of it.