A jump to the left and a step to the right are signs of healthy activity, as chicken farmers who stroll among their flocks already know. Now a team led by robotics engineer Stephen Roberts at the University of Oxford has found that patterns in the collective motion of a flock of chickens can help farmers predict disease weeks before onset. Call it a chicken time warp.
Roberts and animal-welfare researchers at Oxford first tested their pattern-detection system by asking it to warn farmers before a flock got “peckish.” That’s not a euphemism for “hungry.” Well-fed hens, it turns out, sometimes take out their worm-hunting instincts on one another. The system, which consisted of cameras recording a flock, followed by computer analysis of the footage, beat human experts at flagging the at-risk flocks before the madness took its toll [“Computer System Counters Hen Horrors,” September 2010].
Read the rest of this news story in IEEE Spectrum [html] [pdf]
Urbanization shapes the environment, but the way in which it does so depends on where and how cities grow. In an effort to forecast how urbanization over the next couple of decades might affect biodiversity and the carbon cycle around the world, researchers have made detailed predictions about how urban areas are likely to grow. Continue reading How future urban sprawl maps out→
Deep-sea trawling smoothes out the wrinkles of canyons on the continental slope, making marine mountainsides look more like ploughed fields, changing the habitat of deep-sea creatures. The process rivals landslides and storms as a shaper of the deep sea, according to work published today in Nature. Continue reading Fish trawling reshapes deep-sea canyons→
A jump to the left and a step to the right are signs of healthy activity, as chicken farmers who stroll among their flocks already know. Now a team led by robotics engineer Stephen Roberts at the University of Oxford has found that patterns in the collective motion of a flock of chickens can help farmers predict disease weeks before onset. Call it a chicken time warp.