Word: scanners
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...Aerial Scanner. The U.S. Forest Service has mustered 11,000 men, nearly 100 planes and some 50 helicopters. But traditional techniques-dropping chemical fire retardants from planes, bulldozing swaths in front of fires, setting back fires, and simply shoveling dirt-have not been sufficient. It is be coming increasingly evident that if a blaze is not detected soon enough, is allowed to spread beyond a few hundred acres and is fanned by high winds, there is little that man can now do to control the flames...
Recognizing the difficulties of putting out huge fires, scientists at the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Forest Fire Laboratory, established at Missoula, Mont., in 1960, are concentrating on prevention and early detection techniques. Their most dramatic accomplishment to date is the perfection of an aerial infrared scanner that can detect fire in a small bucket in a forest 15,000 feet below. Installed aboard a Convair, it has been flown over areas recently struck by lightning and has already picked up 220 fires-which show up as white spots in an infrared photograph. Forest rangers discovered that many were...
Tail-Wind Fliers. With a Polaroid-backed camera set up in front of a 50-mile-range radar scanner, the scientists shot a succession of twelve-minute time exposures. As a result, the bird echoes-which normally appear as indistinct dots on the radar screen-formed easily discernible lines on the film that enabled experts to determine the approximate density and direction of bird concentrations. Meteorologists and biologists were then able to predict the location of the flock for the following few hours and warn pilots of its presence. "The predictions are based on weather and migration patterns," explains Engineer...
Because of their photoelectric cells, Seawright's machines respond to one another and to the presence of people. When Searcher beams light from its circling radarlike dishes, Scanner's flailing arm picks up the beacon with its light sensors; then Captive, impelled by a motor, skids and twitches about on a mirrored platform. "The machines process information," says Seawright, 30, an Ole Miss grad who instructs at Manhattan's Electronic Music Center (run by Princeton and Columbia). "Their cells and sensors collect information on light and sound, and they behave accordingly. My aim is to produce...
Cold Stills & Hot Springs. Geologist William Fischer, who headed the survey, soon recognized the significance of the findings: like an aerial divining rod, the infra-red scanner had spotted streams of cool, fresh rain water flowing out into the ocean. After completing the volcanic survey, the B-25 flew back and forth over Hawaii's entire coastline, eventually detecting a total of 219 shore areas that might have underground fresh-water springs. In one 5-sq.-mi. area in Hilo Bay, the scientists estimate, the discharge of fresh water amounts to 100 million gallons a day. Using the infra...