SAN DIEGO LEADS THE WAY WITH SMART STREETLAMPS
Q: Smart technology is taking center stage in many venues, including San Diego. What is the far-reaching innovation being ensconced there?
A: Sensor-laden streetlights (developed and operated by Current, a subsidiary of General Electric) that can monitor temperature and humidity, spot parking spaces, listen for gunshots and track air pollution, reports Tekla Perry in IEEE Spectrum magazine. Why streetlights? According to Austin Ashe, Current’s general manager for intelligent cities, because they “have power, ubiquity and the perfect elevation — high enough to cover a reasonable radius, low enough to capture a lot of important data.”
About 3,200 such lights will help San Diego determine, for example, “what intersections are the most dangerous and need to be redesigned, based on information on near misses, not just the accident data.” And expanding on the city’s existing ShotSpotter, the lights will not only locate the source of gunfire, but also detect other sounds like breaking glass or cars crashing.
Since much of this data will be publicly available, the city is encouraging software developers to build targeted apps that might identify the quietest walking route for those interested in easy conversation; or employ traffic and location data to help visually impaired people safely navigate street crossings (a “digital cane” app); or find hot spots in real time “by tracking where pedestrians are congregating or heading.” And there’s more to come. Do smart streetlights have a future in your city? Stay tuned!
Q: There may be more to “nose-witness identification” than meets the eye. How so?
A: Researchers from Portugal and Sweden had male university students watch a video of a man assaulting a woman while sniffing a scent they were told was that of the suspect, reports Discover magazine. Later, when given a “lineup” of five odor samples and asked to identify the person they had smelled, the “witnesses” pinpointed the would-be suspect an impressive 75 percent of the time.
As Swedish neuroscientist Johan Lundstrom explains: Every person has a unique scent, like a fingerprint, with a large genetic component. “Even trained sniffer dogs have a hard time distinguishing between identical twins, unless the twins are on different diets.”
How human body odor can act like a scented fingerprint is still unclear, but PET scans indicate that human scent affects the brain differently from other scents, lighting up areas responsible for social processing. Much more information can be extracted from body odor than from normal odors, Lundstrom says.
Q: It may not take much to get you interested in a daytime excursion in the sun. Long ago, what was it that started mammals doing this?
A: Though mammals date back at least 160 million years, most were small and spent their first 100 million years in the dark, possibly only foraging at night, says Claire Asher in New Scientist magazine. The dinosaur extinction 66 million years ago may have “opened up new niches for mammals, particularly daytime foraging.”
Today, many mammals are active during the day (diurnal) but have eyes adapted to darkness. Interested in determining the advent of diurnality, Tel Aviv University Roi Maor and colleagues compared the lifestyles of 2,415 living mammals with their related but extinct ancestors and found that diurnality appeared 65.8 million years ago — a few hundred thousand years after the dinosaur extinction (Nature Ecology & Evolution).
According to the research, monkeys and apes and other simian primates — our direct ancestors — were the first solely diurnal group with visual systems specially adapted to daytime. As nocturnals, it would have been hard to communicate, explains Maor, so their sunny lifestyles might have affected their sociability.