(Press-News.org) Using lights to make aircraft more visible to birds could help reduce the risk of bird strikes, new research by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has found. The study, which examined how Canada geese responded to different radio-controlled model aircraft, is the first of its kind and is published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology.
Aircraft collisions with wildlife – primarily birds – is a serious and growing threat to civil and military aviation, as well as an expensive one: bird strikes cost civil aviation alone more than $1.2 billion a year world-wide.
Although almost all efforts to prevent bird strikes focus on the airport environment, the fate of US Airways flight 1549 – which was forced to make a dramatic landing in the Hudson River in New York in 2009 after several Canada geese were sucked into its engines – shows that effectively reducing bird strikes requires developing strategies that work far beyond the airport perimeter.
Now, a team of researchers from the USDA, Indiana State University and Purdue University, is taking a bird's eye view of the problem. According to Dr Bradley Blackwell of the USDA's National Wildlife Research Center: "Birds see so much differently than humans do, so we cannot translate our own perceptual understanding to the problem of birds avoiding aircraft."
Using knowledge about birds' visual systems, the team tested the response of Canada geese to three radio-controlled aircraft: the first with lights off, the second with lights on, and the third painted to resemble a bird of prey.
They found geese respond more quickly to the threat of an approaching model aircraft when its lights were on, making it more visible to the birds.
The study also found that the geese were just as cautious of the standard radio-controlled aircraft as the predator model, an important finding. According to Dr Blackwell: "Because Canada geese will respond to aircraft approach as a potential threat, the theory behind how animals respond to predators is very applicable to understanding the response to aircraft approach, and we can enhance this response via lighting."
The research – the first to combine visual sensory ecology with anti-predator behaviour – could set the aviation industry on the right track to developing lighting systems that will reduce the rate of bird strikes.
Next, the team hopes to expand their understanding of the visual ecology of other bird species commonly struck by aircraft, so they can design aircraft lighting that will be seen by a range of species. "This is only the first step. As well as lighting, we also want to understand how to manipulate aircraft paint schemes so that birds find them easier to detect. It's exciting work," he says.
INFORMATION:
Bradley F Blackwell et al (2012). 'Exploiting avian vision with aircraft lighting to reduce bird strikes', doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2664.2012.02165.x, is published in the Journal of Applied Ecology on Tuesday 10 July 2012.
END
Men who are recent immigrants and over qualified for their jobs are more than three times as likely to sustain an injury at work as their appropriately qualified peers who have been in the country for some time, suggests Canadian research published online in Injury Prevention.
In Canada, in 2008, one in four employees between the ages of 25 and 54 was overqualified for the job they were doing, figures indicate.
The researchers drew on almost 63,500 responses to the representative household Canadian Community Health Surveys of 2003 and 2005 to look at the relationship ...
[Sedentary behaviour and life expectancy in the USA: a cause-deleted life table analysis doi 10.1136/bmjopen-2012-000828]
Restricting the amount of time spent seated every day to less than 3 hours might boost the life expectancy of US adults by an extra 2 years, indicates an analysis of published research in the online journal BMJ Open.
And cutting down TV viewing to less than 2 hours every day might extend life by almost 1.4 years, the findings suggest.
Several previous studies have linked extended periods spent sitting down and/or watching TV to poor health, ...
Nearly a third of adults with the most common type of brain cancer develop recurrent, invasive tumors after being treated with a drug called bevacizumab. The molecular underpinnings behind these detrimental effects have now been published by Cell Press in the July issue of Cancer Cell. The findings reveal a new treatment strategy that could reduce tumor invasiveness and improve survival in these drug-resistant patients.
"Understanding how and why these tumors adopt this invasive behavior is critical to being able to prevent this recurrence pattern and maximizing the benefits ...
Investigators reporting in the July issue of the Cell Press journal Cancer Cell have found that blocking a fundamental process deep within cancer cells can selectively kill them and spare normal cells.
For more than a century, clinicians have known that abnormalities of the nucleolus—a small, rounded mass within the cell nucleus—can be diagnostic for cancer. The nucleolus is where certain genes are read to form the components of ribosomes, the cellular machines that make proteins. While abnormalities in the nucleolus are known to be diagnostic for cancer, researchers ...
Stem cells that come from a specific part of the developing brain help fuel the growth of brain tumors caused by an inherited condition, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report.
Scientists showed in mice that disabling a gene linked to a common pediatric tumor disorder, neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), made stem cells from one part of the brain proliferate rapidly. But the same genetic deficit had no effect on stem cells from another brain region.
The results can be explained by differences in the way stem cells from these regions ...
So far it has seemed an irreparable limitation of human perception that we strain to perceive things in the very rapid succession of, say, less than half a second. Psychologists call this deficit "attentional blink." We'll notice that first car spinning out in our path, but maybe not register the one immediately beyond it. It turns out, we can learn to do better after all. In a new study researchers now based at Brown University overcame the blink with just a little bit of training that was never been tried before.
"Attention is a very important component of visual perception," ...
NEW YORK, 9 July 2012—Punitive laws and human rights abuses are costing lives, wasting money and stifling the global AIDS response, according to a report by the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, an independent body of global leaders and experts. The Commission report, "HIV and the Law: Risks, Rights and Health," finds evidence that governments in every region of the world have wasted the potential of legal systems in the fight against HIV. The report also concludes that laws based on evidence and human rights strengthen the global AIDS response - these laws exist and ...
A team of scientists led by Assistant Professor Ganesh S Anand and Professor Linda J. Kenney from the National University of Singapore (NUS) Department of Biological Sciences (DBS) and the Mechanobiology Institute (MBI) has discovered how bacteria respond to salts in their environment and the ways in which salts can alter the behaviour of specialised salt sensor bacterial proteins.
This novel finding sheds light on how microbes detect levels of salts or sugars in their watery environments – a problem in biology that has been studied for more than 30 years.
The NUS ...
Rice consumers concerned about reports that rice is linked to diabetes can rest assured that rice can be part of a healthy diet, with scientists finding that the glycemic index (GI) of rice varies a lot from one type of rice to another, with most varieties scoring a low to medium GI.
The findings of the research, which analyzed 235 types of rice from around the world, is good news because it not only means rice can be part of a healthy diet for the average consumer, but it also means people with diabetes, or at risk of diabetes, can select the right rice to help maintain ...
Researchers at the RUB and from Berkeley have used metal complexes to modify peptide hormones. In the Journal of the American Chemical Society, they report for the first time on the three-dimensional structure of the resulting metal-peptide compounds. "With this work, we have laid the molecular foundation for the development of better medicines" says Prof. Raphael Stoll from the Faculty of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Ruhr-University. The team examined hormones that influence the sensation of pain and tumour growth.
Peptide hormones have many functions in the body
Hormones ...
