New wireless sensor network keeps tabs on the environment

Have you ever wondered what happens in the rainforest when no one is looking?.

Research in the University of Alberta's Faculty of Science may soon be able to answer that question. The departments of computing science and earth and atmospheric science have been working together to create a Wireless Sensor Network that allows for the clandestine data collection of environmental factors in remote locations and its monitoring from anywhere in the world where the Internet is available.

The research team, including Pawel Gburzynski, Mario Nascimento, and Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa, recently launched EcoNet, a functional model of a WSN for environmental monitoring in the display house in the University of Alberta's Agriculture/Forestry Centre. The display house hosts a small but feature-rich environment that mimics that of a tropical forest. Using a WSN, many sensors can continuously monitor factors like temperature and luminosity and will process, store and transmit data co-operatively and wirelessly with other sensors to generate data that can then be collected and made available to users virtually anywhere on the globe. The sensors represent a technology for scientists to monitor diverse phenomena continuously and inconspicuously.

Having the data continuously monitored by scientists substantially increases the chances of uncovering anomalies early enough to investigate them promptly and thoroughly.

The overall framework of WSN can also be extended for use in other closely related scenarios such as monitoring potentially dangerous situations like hazardous waste disposal, or hard-to-witness phenomena such as ice cap movements in the Arctic.

The opportunities these sensors will provide to researchers are paramount in a global environment that is changing at an ever-increasing pace.

Once the display-house prototype is tested and customized, at least two sites are to be fully deployed in the fall, one likely in the Brazilian rainforest, and the other in a forest in Panama.

* Social Web * Email * Close Digg Slashdot Fark Stumble Reddit MIXX del.icio.us Newsvine Technorati Facebook Buzz up! Twitter Your Name: Your Email Address: Recipient(s) Email Address: (Comma separation for multiple addresses) Your Message: You are previewing premium content. Become an Insider to read the full article. You are viewing Insider content. Browse other Insider articles 5 Best Browser Innovations of 2010

The browser wars have changed. During the last couple of years, the four or five leading browsers have all greatly improved--to the point that the choice often comes down to taste or political conviction, as in "I hate Microsoft and I'll never use IE."

Apps may displace the browser as your working Web environment, in the future, but for now, the browser is still the most visible and critical piece of your day-to-day online experience. Indeed, as Google and its myriad line of tools become more every more pervasive, the distinction between online and offline is getting dimmer by the month.
So it's fortunate that 2010 was rich with browser improvements and innovations. Here's a look at five that stand out and deserve a round of thanks from users everywhere. If you're not taking advantage of some of them yet, you're missing out.
1. Tab Candy from Mozilla
Strictly speaking, this is a future innovation, but because a preview was rolled out in July, this innovative feature deserves recognition. Tab Candy is aimed at reducing the unwieldy clutter of tabs users generate every browsing session. Instead of a string of tabs across a bar, Tab Candy allows a user to organize tabs into logical groups that can be accessed with just a click.
Say you're shopping for a camera. That search could result in five or six tabs competing for attention with everything else you've got going. With Tab Candy, the user can click on a named tab and see a thumbnail view of all the relevant pages. It's not yet clear when we'll see Tab Candy, but it may well appear in Firefox 4 in 2011. Meanwhile, here's an explanatory video by a prominent developer that will whet your appetite for this digital treat.
2. Safari 5.x
The latest versions of Apple's Safari browser for Windows and Macs add a nifty new feature called Reader. Reader allows the user to see the text of an article, free from surrounding clutter. What's more, when the article opens in its own window, you can see all of it without clicking from page to page. I suppose some publishers will be upset because Reader obliterates ads, but users won't be. Safari 5 also supports extensions that Apple collects in its Extensions Gallery. Extensions enable you to customize your browser by changing color schemes or layouts.
3. Browsers Tuned for Social Networking
With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like occupying more and more of our time online, it's no surprise that a number of new browsers are focused on social networking. I wrote about RockMelt a few weeks ago. It's a slick browser built on top of Chromium, the open source code base of Google's Chrome browser. Flock is built on Mozilla's Firefox code base, and it's more of a departure from the norm than RockMelt. Flock users store bookmarks in the cloud and can share them with trusted friends. Its built-in word processor makes it easier to submit blog entries to a number of services such as TypePad and Blogger.
4. The rise of HTML 5
Standards can be too geeky and boring to think about; but this one isn't. If you've been using the Web for more than the last few weeks, you know that different sites can look different in different browsers. And some content--Flash being the most obvious example--can only be viewed using a browser that supports it. With HTML 5, Web content becomes browser agnostic and the need for plug-ins disappears, or at the very least, will be greatly reduced. Getting rid of plug-ins does more than make the Web easier to use, it makes browsers more stable, since plug-ins are often responsible for crashes.

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