Friday, March 14, 2025
Home Blog Page 1359

Amazon says new technology in delivery vans will help sort packages on the fly and save time

0
Amazon says new technology in delivery vans will help sort packages on the fly and save time


Amazon says new technology in delivery vans will help sort packages on the fly and save time
The Amazon logo is seen, June 15, 2023, at the Vivatech show in Paris. Credit: AP Photo/Michel Euler, File

Amazon has revealed new technology that it says will help delivery drivers avoid organizing packages at stops or manually check to see if they have the right parcel for each delivery.

The technology—called Vision-Assisted Package Retrieval, or VAPR—is intended to cut down on the time and effort it takes drivers to retrieve packages, Amazon’s retail chief Doug Herrington said at a company event in Nashville on Wednesday.

Amazon expects to put 1,000 delivery vans that contain the technology on the road by early next year.

The company says VAPR essentially works like this: Once an Amazon delivery van arrives at a customer’s location, it will project a green “0” on packages that need to be dropped off, and a red “X” on those that should remain in the van.

The technology will also use audio and visual cues to let drivers know they have found the right package, Amazon said.

The Seattle company has been testing the new feature with its Delivery Service Partners, the businesses that deliver packages across the country for Amazon.

It said early tests have showed the technology helped reduce “perceived physical and mental effort” for drivers and saved them more than 30 minutes per route.

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Citation:
Amazon says new technology in delivery vans will help sort packages on the fly and save time (2024, October 9)
retrieved 9 October 2024
from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-10-amazon-technology-delivery-vans-packages.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





Source link

Tsuchinshan-Atlas comet visible with naked eye this month

0
Tsuchinshan-Atlas comet visible with naked eye this month


A rare comet brightens the night skies in October
This photo provided by Nicolas Biver shows Comet C/2023 A3 (ATLAS-Tsuchinshan) as seen from Eure-et-Loir, France, June 6, 2024. Credit: Nicolas Biver via AP

Prepare to spot a rare, bright comet. The space rock is slinging toward Earth from the outer reaches of the solar system and will make its closest pass on Saturday. It should be visible through the end of October, clear skies permitting.

Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas should be bright enough to see with the naked eye, but binoculars and telescopes will give a better view.

“It’ll be this fuzzy circle with a long tail stretching away from it,” said Sally Brummel, planetarium manager at the Bell Museum in Minnesota.

What is a comet?

Comets are frozen leftovers from the solar system’s formation billions of years ago. They heat up as they swing toward the sun, releasing their characteristic streaming tails.

In 2023, a green comet that last visited Earth 50,000 years ago zoomed by the planet again. Other notable flybys included Neowise in 2020, and Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake in the mid to late 1990s.

Where did comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas come from?

The comet, also designated C/2023 A3, was discovered last year and is named for the observatories in China and South Africa that spied it.

A rare comet brightens the night skies in October
This image provided by Patrick Ditz shows two views of comet C/2023 A3 with bars added to indicate it’s angular size, seen from San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, Sept. 24, 2024. Credit: Patrick Ditz via AP

It came from what’s known as the Oort Cloud well beyond Pluto. After making its closest approach about 44 million miles (71 million kilometers) of Earth, it won’t return for another 80,000 years—assuming it survives the trip.

Several comets are discovered every year, but many burn up near the sun or linger too far away to be visible without special equipment, according to Larry Denneau, a lead researcher with the Atlas telescope that helped discover the comet.

A rare comet brightens the night skies in October
This photo provided by Nicolas Biver shows Comet C/2023 A3 (ATLAS-Tsuchinshan) as seen in the night sky of Granada, Spain, on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. Credit: Nicolas Biver via AP

How to view the comet

Those hoping to spot comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas should venture outside about an hour after sunset on a clear night and look to the west.

The comet should be visible from both the northern and southern hemispheres.

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Citation:
Tsuchinshan-Atlas comet visible with naked eye this month (2024, October 9)
retrieved 9 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-tsuchinshan-atlas-comet-visible-naked.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





Source link

A ‘scent fence’ that targets elephants’ sensitive nostrils could stop herds from trashing crops and trees

0
A ‘scent fence’ that targets elephants’ sensitive nostrils could stop herds from trashing crops and trees


Elephant house
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Elephant numbers are surging in southern Africa, with fewer natural predators, reduced hunting pressure and feeding by farmers and tourist operators.

While this is good for elephants, it’s making life harder for humans who live near them. These huge herbivores can raid crops and destroy large trees in national parks with impunity, causing problems for farmers and land managers alike.

Traditional solutions aren’t ideal. Culling is controversial, and building fences strong enough to deter elephants is very expensive.

But there’s another option: a fence made of scent. We have explored how specific plant scents can stop wallabies from eating native seedlings. The technique works on Australian herbivores. Would it work for southern Africa’s much larger elephants?

Our new research put this idea to the test. We mimicked the scent of a shrub known as common guarri (Euclea undulata), which elephants avoid eating, and built a Y-shaped maze for elephants. We placed the scent on one side of the Y and left the other side scent-free.

The results were clear—our elephants voted with their trunks and avoided the stinky side. This suggests scent could play a useful role in fending off hungry pachyderms.

How can elephants be a problem?

The world has three species of elephant. The small Asian elephant is endangered while the even smaller African forest elephant, which lives in rainforests in West Africa and the Congo Basin, is critically endangered.

But the largest species, the African savannah elephant, is bouncing back in southern Africa from decades of poaching and habitat loss.

This is great on a conservation front. But it brings fresh problems. As elephant herds expand, they increasingly come into conflict with people—especially farmers. Losing a year’s crop to hungry elephants is devastating. When farmers try to stop them, the elephants can attack and even kill.

In large numbers, elephants can damage the natural environment like other herbivores—but even more so. In South Africa’s Kruger National Park and other wild places, their enormous appetites have reshaped whole plant communities. The plants elephants like disappear, while those they don’t spread. Elephants also destroy large trees and prevent the growth of new ones.

As elephant numbers grow, desperate farmers and land managers have scrambled for solutions. Killing problem elephants has been a common fix. But the practice now faces strong public opposition. Fencing is costly and usually impractical for lower-income farming areas. Other deterrents, such as using flashing lights and annoying sounds to scare off the pachyderms have had mixed success.

Curiously, elephants are scared stiff of bees. This knowledge has been used effectively by Kenyan farmers, who install beehives around their fields. Studies have shown the technique deters up to 80% of elephants. This method has limits, though, as there are only so many bees an area can sustain and maintaining hives takes work.

The scent defense

To deter an elephant, it helps to think like an elephant. We’ve long known carnivores rely heavily on scent to find prey. But scent is very important to herbivores too, as our team has explored. Herbivores rely on smell to tell them which plants to eat and which to avoid.

In Australia, we have used this knowledge to artificially replicate the scent of boronia pinnata, a flowering shrub which swamp wallabies avoid. These wallabies are the local native equivalent of deer in their eating habits—they eat many different plants, including tree seedlings land managers would rather they did not.

When we put vials of boronia scent next to vulnerable native seedlings in Sydney’s Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, we found these seedlings were 20 times less likely to be found and eaten by pesky wallabies.

Researchers have found similar scent “misinformation” tactics substantially reduced how many eggs from threatened birds were eaten by invasive predators such as ferrets, cats and hedgehogs in New Zealand, while others have found it can reduce losses of wheat grain to house mice in Australia.

But would this approach work on elephants? We were hopeful. We know elephants can smell water from afar. Better still, elephants have the strongest sense of smell of any land animal.

We went to South Africa to test it out.

A proof of concept

We set up our experiment at the Adventures with Elephants tourism and research center north of Johannesburg, which is home to six semi-tame elephants.

Here, we built a large maze shaped like a Y to let us test our idea in a controlled and safe environment. This is essential when working with temperamental animals weighing up to six tons.

From almost ten meters away, elephants had to choose which path through the Y to follow using only their sense of smell. Plants and odor vials were hidden down each arm of the maze, ensuring the animals were not using vision to choose. Both exits to the maze contained lots of leaves and stems of the jacket plum (pappea capensis), a tree elephants love to eat. On one side of the Y, we placed a single glass vial containing just 1 milliliter of a mixture mimicking the smell of common guarri.

The results were exciting. Time and time again, the elephants avoided the side where the artificial odor was present.

Scaling up

Our results suggest using scent could provide a practical way we could avoid human-elephant conflicts and help people protect crops and national parks at a larger scale.

Combining artificial odors with existing control measures such as fencing or beehives could offer more accessible and cost-effective methods to live alongside elephants.

What’s next? We aim to scale up this research in the hope of creating a practical, versatile and cheap tool which people in elephant territory can use to protect crops, trees, and houses from these giant herbivores.

Provided by
The Conversation


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.The Conversation

Citation:
A ‘scent fence’ that targets elephants’ sensitive nostrils could stop herds from trashing crops and trees (2024, October 9)
retrieved 9 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-scent-elephants-sensitive-nostrils-herds.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





Source link

Maui wildfire survey finds sharp, persistent increases in poverty, housing instability

0
Maui wildfire survey finds sharp, persistent increases in poverty, housing instability


city in Maui
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

The number of households living below the poverty line has more than doubled since the August 2023 Maui wildfires—one of a host of alarming findings revealed by the University of HawaiÊ»i Economic Research Organization (UHERO)’s new survey of fire-affected Maui residents.

The August 2024 survey also showed that fire-impacted households typically pay 43% more rent for the same or fewer bedrooms, and nearly one in five participants have seen their income drop by more than half. The data came from 402 individuals representing 374 households.

The survey results are presented in UHERO’s Maui Recovery Dashboard: Housing & Jobs.

“This dashboard is a critical tool for measuring and accelerating Maui’s recovery,” said UHERO Executive Director Carl Bonham. “It provides key insights into housing and economic challenges.”

This initiative, launched one year after the devastating August 2023 wildfires, provides continuously updated data after individuals and households who lived, worked, or owned businesses in fire-impacted areas at the time of the wildfires complete monthly surveys about their current situation.

According to UHERO, the findings from the survey reflect the ongoing challenges fire-impacted households face. Poverty, unemployment, rent costs and housing instability have risen dramatically, and these increases are persisting more than a year after the disaster. This suggests that gaps in assistance are still widespread and disproportionately affect the most vulnerable population groups.

Key survey findings

Housing

Fire-impacted households typically pay 43% more rent for the same or fewer bedrooms.

  • At least 14% of surveyed households live in crowded conditions.
  • The proportion of fire-affected households living with family/friends or unhoused has nearly doubled since the wildfires.
  • 80% of West Maui residents from the sample were displaced from their homes and almost half had to leave West Maui.
  • Displacement has not only affected residents of West Maui and Kula. More than a third of those who worked or owned businesses in West Maui or Kula, but lived elsewhere, were displaced from their homes following the disaster.
  • Almost a third of households currently living outside of West Maui plan to move back within the next year.

Economic Impact

29% of fire-affected households now live below the poverty line, compared to 14% before the fires and 9% for Maui County in 2023

  • Nearly 1 in 5 survey participants have seen their income drop by more than half.
  • Fire-impacted individuals face reduced job stability. Many work fewer hours, earn less income, or have lost their jobs entirely.
  • Only about 70% of the survey participants who were employed in the tourism industry before the fires still have jobs in the sector. Less than half kept their full-time employment in the tourism industry.
  • Many survey respondents report ongoing unmet needs: more than 45% require financial support, more than 30% need housing assistance, and more than 20% lack adequate food.
  • Gaps in assistance persist. Individuals who are not receiving government support are more likely to report unmet needs.

A tool for timely recovery monitoring and transparency

The ongoing, frequently updated nature of this survey is critical to assessing the progress of Maui’s recovery. For example, the poverty rate for the survey cohort is more than three times higher than the most recent available poverty data for Maui County in 2023. This staggering disparity underscores the importance of collecting data in real time and on an ongoing basis.

“There’s a lack of timely data on how fire-impacted individuals are coping,” Bonham said. “Without this information, it’s hard to fully grasp the true pace of recovery or identify unmet needs. This is why we launched the survey.”

According to UHERO, most of the existing data about the fire-affected community is held by federal and state agencies. It is often not publicly available, not updated on a frequent basis and not shared between agencies. This lack of transparency hampers public accountability and effective coordination among stakeholders.

Most publicly available data is only released with a substantial time lag, limiting usefulness for timely decision-making. The Maui Recovery Survey contributes to filling this data gap.

Citation:
Maui wildfire survey finds sharp, persistent increases in poverty, housing instability (2024, October 9)
retrieved 9 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-maui-wildfire-survey-sharp-persistent.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





Source link

Virtual reality separates the wood from the trees in forestry industry

0
Virtual reality separates the wood from the trees in forestry industry


Virtual reality separates the wood from the trees in forestry industry
UniSA immersive technology expert Dr. Andrew Cunningham demonstrates the VR training tool for the forestry industry. Credit: University of South Australia

Virtual reality is set to revolutionize Australia’s $24 billion forestry industry by training workers risk-free, remotely, and much faster.

A VR immersive training tool developed by the University of South Australia is expected to save the industry millions of dollars in the long term.

Lead researcher and immersive technology expert Dr. Andrew Cunningham and developer Jack Fraser have spent the past year working on the VR tool to support training in South Australia’s forestry mills, and hope to roll it out nationally.

The “Mills Skills VR” tool uses virtual reality across a range of scenarios, immersing users in a 3D environment that simulates all aspects of forestry practices, training them in a risk-free setting.

“For the untrained, the forest industry is inherently risky, especially in the mills because it involves large, heavy machinery,” Dr. Cunningham says. “It is also a fast moving and busy environment, so if we can train workers to recognize the hazards and equip them with the skills before they step into the mill, it’s better for everyone.”

A significant benefit is that the trainees can use the VR tool anywhere in Australia, with a virtual reality headset, saving time and costs in flying them halfway across the country.

Workforce Development Manager at the Green Triangle Forest Industry Hub, Josh Praolini, says the VR training model could reshape how training is delivered to forest industry workers in Australia.






“At the moment, we rely on access to trainers and machinery that is an essential part of the mill operations. By training new recruits on these machines, you slow or halt production, and expose them to potential risks,” Praolini says.

“This virtual reality tool allows us to safely introduce recruits to multiple scenarios they could encounter in the mill, as well as offering updated training to existing workers without impacting day-to-day operations of the mill.”

Beyond the VR training, UniSA researchers are using immersive analytics tools to gather data on plantations and view the trees virtually in a 3D environment, checking for defects, wood quality and growing conditions.

“The ability to track, monitor and interact in virtual environments opens the door to an exciting future for Australia’s forest industry,” Mr. Praolini says.

Dr. Cunningham is confident the industry’s willingness to embrace new technology will also make it an appealing career choice for high school and university students.

“The forest industry currently supports around 80,000 direct jobs in Australia, but we still need a lot more workers. Virtual reality can take people into a mill and a plantation, showcasing what is involved and the opportunities that lie ahead for a progressive and satisfying career.”

The next step is to adapt the training tool to other industries where safety is important, including building and manufacturing.

Citation:
Virtual reality separates the wood from the trees in forestry industry (2024, October 9)
retrieved 9 October 2024
from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-10-virtual-reality-wood-trees-forestry.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





Source link