Satellite images show devastating effects of a big tornado on a small Illinois town

The Nov. 17, 2013 tornado outbreak ended the lives of three people in the town of Washington, Ill., and upended the lives of many in the town of 15,000.

Many news stations released aerial photos of the devastation, but only recently were satellite photos released which gave a new appreciation of the scope of the disaster. As many as 500 homes were damage or destroyed during the tornado outbreak.

A bug's eye view, brought to you by a nano quadrotor drone.

What's better than a tiny drone that buzzes like a bee through offices and hallways? How about a tiny drone shielded with a 3D-printed frame, controlled by a Raspberry Pi base station, and equipped with a miniscule video camera and transmitter?

A discussion on deploying drones for international development

Last month, Deutsche Post DHL transported six kilograms of medicine from a pharmacy in Bonn, across the Rhine River, to its headquarters.

This wouldn't have made international news, except that DHL accomplished this with an unmanned aircraft system - commonly known as a drone.

This came less than a week after Amazon's Jeff Bezos claimed his company would deliver products to customers' doorsteps via drone in three or four years. Regulations  and technological hurdles would make Bezos' plan all but impossible in the US near-term, but DHL proved that with proper planning and logistics, you could deliver small parcels with small drones today.

On January 22, The International Research and Exchange Board, or IREX, will be hosting a "deep dive" discussion on how this same technology could benefit international development.

Missed target, found hooliganism on drone mapping mission

A small unmanned aircraft system for mapping, developed for a National Science Foundation grant to improve STEM education.

In north Louisiana, there’s a fantastic little place known for Muscadine grapes, pecans, and on occasion, alligators.

Muscadines always get turned into jelly; an excellent topping for southern-style biscuits (my wife says she’s still working on mastering the family biscuit recipe, but she’s produced the finest biscuits I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating).

Pecans, a grocery bag of which could fetch a gold bar by northern exchange rates, are so plentiful that they must be given away. They’re so much a part of my wife’s heritage that we decided to get married beneath those pecan trees.

And when the water is high in the backyard bayou, a small alligator sometimes will make itself at home. If the alligator is lovingly cared for and becomes fat, a portion of that alligator eventually will make its way to our dinner table in the form of a delightful alligator sauce piquant (wife insists that it be cooked like shrimp, and not burnt to a crisp as it’s done here in the North).

So before we went down to visit my wife’s family farm for Thanksgiving, I decided to pack up one of the “drones” I’ve developed at the National Science Foundation grant where I work, to see if I couldn’t map out this interesting place.

There's been a big uptick in drone research over the last decade

Recently, I was tasked with producing some basic citations on unmanned aerial vehicles, more commonly called drones, for a new grant proposal. As you could imagine, it was not hard to find a cornucopia of papers reflecting the many novel uses for the technology.

What might surprise some, though, was the sheer increase in drone research, how popular these papers are in the academic world, what that research trying to accomplish, and who was funding it.

Building and flying an incredibly tiny quadrotor drone

At the National Science Foundation grant where I work, EnLiST, we've been tinkering with various different drone platforms which could be easily deployed in classrooms for valuable STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) lessons.

Although we're focused on STEM education, it's not hard to see how some of these drones can be used in a variety of other fields. The quadrotors we develop one day could be deployed for research in environmental science, geology, city planning, and even "evidence-based" journalism.

Drones are useful like that. At the end of they day, they're simply a means of getting a sensor from one place to another. What you use that sensor for, is entirely up to the teacher, scientist, or journalist.

We needed a drone that was small enough to fly in a classroom, easy enough for children to fly (not saying much as kids tend to pilot drones with relative ease), and hackable enough that we could mold it to fit our science curriculum.

Giving the CrazyFlie nano quadrotor a spin in the EnLiST grant office. We call it "bumble." https://t.co/ySDnm26wAi

— Matthew Schroyer (@matthew_ryan) October 14, 2013

Enter the Crazyflie nano, a tiny, open-source drone developed by Swedish hackers at Bitcraze.se. At 19 grams, and measuring 9 cm from motor to motor, it's one of the smallest quadrotor drones on the market today.

Measure air pollution in your home or backyard with a DustDuino

This week, the World Health Organization (WHO) took a major step by announcing that air pollution is carcinogenic to humans.

WHO also announced they are considering particulate matter, a major component of indoor and outdoor air pollution, as carcinogenic to humans as well.

International Agency for Research on Cancer announced today: outdoor #airpollution is leading environmental cause of #cancer deaths
— WHO (@WHO) October 17, 2013

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a special unit inside WHO tasked with promoting international collaborations on cancer research, reached that conclusion after reviewing more than 1000 scientific papers on the carcinogenicity of air pollutants.

Air pollution and particulate matter will be included in IARC's Monograph, which is an encyclopedia of known carcinogens. Particulate matter will be classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, along with tobacco smoke and asbestos.

In an IARC press release [1], the Deputy Head of the Monographs Programme, Dr. Dana Loomis, said that the group's goal was to "evaluate the air everyone breathes rather than focus on specific air pollutants."

"The results from the reviewed studies point in the same direction: the risk of developing lung cancer is significantly increased in people exposed to air pollution," he said.

This finding elevates the urgency to clean up the air, both outdoors and indoors. But how does one find out the condition of the air in the first place? How healthy is your air?