SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
20,000 Robots Under the Sea
from Miller-McCune
If you're a scientist who wants to study animals in their natural habitats, the process is simple enough: get a pair of binoculars, find a shady spot to sit, and watch the critters.
But what if your quarry lives deep in the ocean--and is so tiny it's barely visible?
Jules Jaffe, a research oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, thinks he's got a solution. With the help of a few million dollars in National Science Foundation funding, Jaffe is developing an army of small, networked, underwater robots that will drift passively along with the ocean's currents and unobtrusively keep tabs on other things doing likewise, from algae to fish larvae to globules of spilled oil. The 'bots will relay data on what's happening around them to human beings on the surface, providing unprecedented insight into how tiny organisms and objects travel in the complex welter of sub-surface ocean currents.
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