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In the past decade, navies have been roundly criticized for extensively testing active sonar due to its potentially detrimental affect on marine life. Military-grade active sonar sends out a powerfully loud low-frequency signal with a range anywhere from tens to hundreds of miles under water. The effect on whales has been well documented—it’s akin to you or I standing next to a jet engine without ear protection. The active sonar interferes with their ability to navigate, often stranding them in unfamiliar waters where they may be unable to find food and starve to death.

Fortunately for whales and other cetaceans (dolphins, porpoises) who use echolocation, an entirely different sonar technology may now prove to save these animals’ lives.

Fishing nets are estimated to kill upward of 300,000 cetaceans every year. The problem is the nets are too thin and amorphous for the animals to see with their sonar and so they get caught unintentionally. Now, a beacon used by the British Navy to mark mine fields has been miniaturized to the extent that it can be strung on to fishing nets to warn cetaceans to stay away. The device is a spherical plastic shell which acts like a satellite dish to amplify and reflect sonar waves. It is entirely passive (meaning it doesn’t transmit sound, only listens for it), which gives it a big advantage over battery-powered active-sonar equivalents which can be difficult to maintain. When a dolphin’s sonar hits it, the signal is sent back so that the animal knows something is ahead in the water and can swim to avoid it.

While the beacon is a promising technology, it does nothing to prevent the entanglement of cetaceans who do not use echolocation to navigate. For those animals, the only current recourse is better fishery management.

A device used by the British Navy to mark minefields has been repurposed to keep sonar-equipped marine animals out of fishing nets

Multiple studies confirm red-light cameras do more harm than help. So why are they still so prevalent?

Add another study to the growing body of evidence that red-light cameras cause more accidents than they prevent. University of South Florida researchers found drivers are more likely to attempt to stop abruptly at camera intersections than otherwise, which results in a significant increase in injuries from rear end collisions. Red-light cameras are designed to snap a photo of a car’s license plate if the driver moves through the intersection under a red light. The theory should hold that if drivers know they’re being watched, they’ll be less likely to run the lights.

As it turns out, the University of South Florida study shows that drivers were already being more cautious without the cameras, noting “the injury rate from red-light running crashes has dropped by a third in less than a decade.� What’s worse, the cameras are often coupled with a disruption of the yellow light timing, making the caution signal shorter than normal to increase the number of tickets generated. That’s a benefit to the municipality and a benefit to the insurance companies, who are able to raise premiums with crashes and citations, but no benefit to drivers.

The report also noted that much of the research bolstering the efficacy of red-light cameras was flawed, either with incomplete data or poor research design.

Via The Agitator

Cancer research gets a major boost from an innovative new center

Metastasis is the process through which cancer cells detach from a tumor and travel the circulatory system until they reach an uninfected site on which to grow anew. It is one of the least understood mechanisms in medicine though it is the cause of nine out of every 10 deaths from cancer. Traditional research has so far yielded little headway, which is why M.I.T. is building a new institute which will pair cancer scientists with engineers to conduct research under the rubric of systems biology.

Systems biology is a relatively new field of science in which the conventional method of reduction is turned on its head. Instead of breaking a problem into its component parts and studying them individually, systems biology attempts to study the entirety of a process. The hope with the M.I.T. institute is that engineers will be able to map the complex interactions and pathways that lead to infection and metastasis by using multiple levels of abstraction, in much the same way they would chart the flow of electrons through a wire.

The institute opens in late 2010 and has already attracted top names in relevant fields.