This week IEEE Spectrum is covering CeBIT, the enormous information and communications technology show that takes place annually in Hanover, Germany. For up-to-the-second updates, you can follow our CeBIT Ninja, Stephen Cass, on Twitter (@stephencass), or catch daily highlights throughout the week here.
The World Wide Web is the most famous technology to emerge from the needs of the international particle physics research center CERN, but it’s not the only one. In the latest example, a lightweight, inexpensive (and maker-friendly) range sensor has come about because scientists want to use drones to survey tunnels and vaults without smashing into expensive and difficult to replace equipment.
CERN’s massive subterranean facility lies underneath farm fields between Geneva and the Jura mountains. The centerpiece is the Large Hadron Collider, housed in a tunnel that forms a ring with a 27-kilometer circumference. As well as lots of interesting physics, these accelerators can also produce lethal amounts of radiation (hence the need to keep everything underground). A few years ago, CERN looked into the possibility of having drones create three-dimensional surveys of the radiation levels in the accelerator tunnels and the vaults that house CERN’s giant particle detectors.
No comments:
Post a Comment