When a landslide tore through a remote Alaskan valley in July, no one was there to bear witness. But hours later, geoscientist Colin Stark of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory spotted the event in the pattern of seismic waves passing through the Earth’s crust. Within days, using data from earthquake sensors and satellite images, he and colleague Göran Ekström were able to estimate, from their lab in New York, the landslide’s size, and even determine its path.
Category Archives: Outlets
Satellites to Monitor UN Forest Protection Goals
Climate change negotiators agreed Sunday to monitor deforestation and to pay developing countries for keeping carbon trapped in forests. To measure just how much forest those countries are conserving, the United Nations Collaborative Program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD+, to its friends) will rely on a complex system of satellite measurements and field checks. The agreement is a victory for advocates in the research and conservation communities. Yet they face a lot of work implementing the program. Continue reading Satellites to Monitor UN Forest Protection Goals
Remote Mappers Enable Relief to Reach Filipino Typhoon Victims
The typhoon that hit the Philippines last week killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands more, according to the BBC. The damage to infrastructure and the dislocation of all those people make it difficult for relief agencies to know where to route aid. Yet this typhoon, called Yolanda in the Philippines and Haiyan elsewhere, hit just as the technology to update maps and sift through social media is maturing. Filipinos and their faraway friends may be in the best position yet to respond to a typhoon, thanks to better digital coordination among volunteers.
Read the rest of this post at IEEE Spectrum’s Tech Talk blog post [html] [pdf]
UCSD researcher shot by cofounder
On September 18, former Traversa Therapeutics CEO Hans Petersen went on a shooting spree. One of two people wounded was molecular biologist Steven Dowdy, a professor at University of California San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, in La Jolla, and cofounder of Traversa, according to a San Diego police report. Continue reading UCSD researcher shot by cofounder