Brood X made itself known in a way that could change how we monitor insect populations.
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Roar of cicadas was so loud, it was picked up by fiber-optic cables
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SubWoofer2
Ars Tribunus Militum
Audiophile footnote: a reminder that cable lifters are often worth a try when tweaking the system. (avoidance of microvibrations). Ears are always the judge. Also, if you can't hear the music when cicadas are swarming, it's time for headphones!
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No, it takes 12k satellites replaced every 5 years to provide internet because, at least in 'muricah, the government can't get it's shit together and install nationwide broadband access.
As mentioned above, still need to cover a whole bunch of areas where fiber isn't feasible - oceans, deserts, mountainous national parks, warzones, etc.
Satellites have their uses, and "glass in a trench" isn't perfect. Even just having a secondary system is a good idea by itself.
The 12k satellites blocking earth-based astronomical observations? Build bigger, better space-based ones. If the billionaires don't like it, slap them and do it anyways.
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Leo is hindering only ONE kind of astronomy and that was already being affected by light pollution even before Musk was even a word. That's why the James Webb telescope was such a big deal.
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Ahem, I wasn't really aware that Cicadas were a space‑faring species launching satellites. Could we please just once, maybe keep it on topic, at least until the page ten? That's when I truly plan to unleash my Cicada Battleships, just wait for that ;-)
Oh, and if you want to complaint about satellites, I believe there is the Rocket Report thread for that. Good luck.
Oh, and if you want to complaint about satellites, I believe there is the Rocket Report thread for that. Good luck.
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I was in Tokyo in August and the cicada sounds were nuts. Super loud and at first it honestly sounded like electrical equipment. IIRC I didn't figure out it wasn't electrical equipment until I went to Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden since it clearly couldn't have been electrical equipment in out in the middle of the park.
View: https://youtu.be/Z0g8YzyAD_k?si=9ozeYZ_JQ0viP_qA&t=105
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Not cicadas, but my complex has a lot of water features, and there are nights when the frogs are so loud I need to close the patio door. It is mostly pleasant white noise with the door pulled to.
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Not true brood cicadas either, but a few decades back, I remember that every summer I couldn't go through a meadow without dodging dozens of grasshoppers (katydids) at every step and couldn't sleep because of the insanely loud bush crickets every evening.
Nowadays, just hearing a few crickets outdoors is almost a cause for celebration ;-(
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And now you know why every US embassy is torn down before being rebuilt - to prevent exactly that sort of thing. Too bad more places can't afford to do that...
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We have decimated (in the modern sense of the word, not the Roman army 1 in 10 version) the insect populations of many species. Even in large fields in parkland I rarely see more than just a tiny few grasshoppers. As a youth I would walk in the margins of my grandfather's orchard and there would be thousands, in a single square foot I would estimate more than a hundred. It's very concerning to me.
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Litton Industries in Los Angeles, right? They had the whole industry wrapped up. I was employed as a part time lab tech while still in college. Got into industrial and scientific laser product engineering after graduation.
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Fireflies is one biggie that comes to mind. I use to remember when they were numerous.
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I think you might remember from another thread's tangent that I like scything (not scathing, though I guess I can be sometimes called that as well, lol). Some of the places I went to scythe at one environmental camp were some rare flower meadows, a nationally protected nature preserve, with plenty of wildflowers growing there unmolested*.
And even there, in a magical‑looking mountain wildflower meadow, the amount of grasshoppers, crickets and all the other insects has decreased over the years, not really comparable to the amount one would see in a totally ordinary grass field decades ago. At least there are still some fireflies, which was quite magical, but only because we have grown so unaccustomed to them elsewhere.
*: They are scythed at the end of the growing season to protect some rare endemic orchids there after all the seeds have dispersed, as otherwise it would just overgrow with invasive grasses.
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Good call. We would catch them by the jarful in summer (and release them), and our windshields would glow at night as we drove. No release from that, sadly. My son had the giggly pleasure of catching some on a visit last year to my sister's, in the Midwest, and it is unfortunate they are being depleted.
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Nice, more ways for the automated surveillance and war machines of the future to detect and incinerate people in service to the ruling class.
Hopefully it can be jammed effectively.
Hopefully it can be jammed effectively.
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Welcome to the wonderful world of technology. Right from the early Stone Age, it's been used for both the good and the bad...
Just like the very Internet you are posting upon, in case you haven't noticed.
And yes, I can imagine plenty of scenarios where the fibre DAS can be both very good or very evil, even in the very same security monitoring applications.
From preventing Russian GRU saboteurs crossing NATO borders, sabotaging an undersea comms cable or pipeline, to China or North Korea fortifying its remote borders (or even internal province borders) against people wanting to get out, like the Uyghurs or NK defectors. Or some rich arse Nazi billionaire brat putting it all over his mansion's perimeter in case the hungry masses come.
Then again, stuff like securing an internet backbone – or a HVDC interconnect – against some random farmer with a backhoe ignoring maps and digging up a trench, plunging a whole country into a total internet or power blackout might be a good thing? As well as monitoring car traffic, earthquakes, railway lines for broken rails in real time (yes, that's actually already being done with fibre DAS), or even the cicadas?
There is very rarely any such thing as a purely evil or good tech – making me wonder why do you even post on a tech site, if you seem to be against all of it?
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You do know that over half of area of the US has no wired Internet or POTS , right? Yeah, 90+% of the population is concentrated enough to get access to wires. It is a lot of land without decent communication infrastructure.
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If they're on the grid, we can run fiber there too. That covers effectively everyone. The handful of people living off the grid can get cellular, if they even want internet.
Sure, it'll be expensive. That's infrastructure.
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This reminds me a of a section in the book Robopocalypse where an AI used tremors in the earth to send data to remote parts of itself when all other means of communication had been cut. The book released in 2011 it seems likely that this technology could be used to transmit data through the earth for a distance.
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There are hundreds of Earth-based observatory telescopes. Our space telescope constellations have some catching up to do.
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Disappointing and misleading headline. The fibers didn't "pick up" the audio. They were deliberately used in a special way intended to capture artifacts from pressure waves.
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Billionaires are like terrorists: until you change the system you can't wipe them out by violently getting rid of them, another one will always pop up.
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They picked up a signal they weren't expecting to pick up.
I was disappointed though that they couldn't just use commercial fibre that's laid all over the place as an acoustic array.
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"Fireflies is one biggie that comes to mind."
The decline of "Lightning Bugs" in my area over the last 40 years is
nothing short of stunning. Even in my rural area they have collapsed.
I fear we are past the point of no-return on "our" little blue ball.
The decline of "Lightning Bugs" in my area over the last 40 years is
nothing short of stunning. Even in my rural area they have collapsed.
I fear we are past the point of no-return on "our" little blue ball.
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No changes need to be made to the fiber for it to work. Now if you want to optimize sensitivity, you can come up with changes to the fiber that will get you a few dB. There is also the question of whether you need a dark fiber, or whether this will work alongside other fibers in a WDM link. Or, more specifically, how well this will work in a WDM link when kept to a power low enough not to interfere with the other channels, or what changes to optical filtering would be necessary to make sure it all works together properly.
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I visited a friend in DC as this was waning, and every square foot of ground in the city was covered with dead or dying cicadas. Every tree trunk was covered with dozens of them trying to hang on. It was crazy.
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I had the same impressive experience. I wore earplugs when working in the yard to protect my hearing.
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While there are several ways to do DAS, what is being described in the article is similar to an OTDR, but quite different. In an OTDR you send a broadband pulse of light down the fiber and look at the intensity of the return. With an OTDR, all you see is the Rayleigh scattered light and large scale effects like a source of loss, or a reflection from a break or connector. In an OTDR based DAS, you send a pulse from a narrow linewidth laser and use coherence effects of the return light to detect changes in the fiber. because the light in pulse has a long coherence length, you get interference between the light scattered back from different sections of the fiber that arrive at the detector at the same time. In addition, the phase of the returned light will change from pulse to pulse as the fiber is stretched or bent.
There are many ways to use this technique to detect vibrations and sound. The most basic version of this would be to send the light down, measure the optical intensity of the reflected light from each pulse, and just rely on the fact that as the fiber is stretched or bent, the coherent interference of the light returning from that area of the fiber will change, so the intensity will change from pulse to pulse. For a more complicated and sensitive version, you would use some form of coherent detection to detect the change in intensity and phase of the reflected light. There are dozens of these systems out there being produced by multiple groups for commercial and research purposes (perimeter defense, pipeline protection, "smart infrastructure", etc.). For a while the Oil and Gas industry was putting big money into this for their applications, but I don't know if they still are.
edit: by dozens of these systems, I mean versions/brands. There are probably hundreds (or more) of these systems on fences, pipelines, or just in labs. (The commercial ones for fences and pipelines can be rather expensive (few hundred thousand $), the no frills systems are closer in price to a modes luxury car).
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Laying fiber alongside all the highways and streets isn't a bad idea, though.
I mean, it should be easy to determine the difference in local vibrations between "no traffic," "normal traffic," and "a bunch of people sitting in one place with engines idling." That could pinpoint the location of traffic jams and accidents on a continuous basis. Local emergency services could be notified of at least some accidents automatically, without waiting on someone to report them. The same thing goes for mobile map apps routing around traffic jams.
Even better, the info could be used to adjust timing and synchronization of traffic signals depending on how heavy traffic is, so you don't back traffic up as much during rush hour, but you don't have to wait forever to cross the main streets during off-peak traffic.
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Of course, because webcams don't need people watching them to send out an alert.
How silly of me.
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Automatically flagging an event for review is something that's had commercial vendors selling solutions for a couple decades already. I would presume they've gotten better over the years.
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Most fiber runs along streets already (or railroads or some other existing right-of-way). Groups have written papers talking about using this technology on existing fibers for similar purposes. I'm pretty sure I saw a Princeton-NEC-Verizon talk about an experiment doing this in some urban area at a fiber optics conference I went to in the pre-COVID days. I did a search and here it is.
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