• Can drones fly as well as Luke Skywalker?

    Fish and Wildlife Service

    Researchers are modeling how birds such as the northern goshawk, shown here, zip through the forest without crashing into trees. Such knowledge could lead to drones that fly fast through cluttered environments.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Next-generation drones may fly like Luke Skywalker zipping through the Endor forest on a speeder bike, suggests new research which focuses on how birds such as northern goshawks determine their maximum speed limit.

    These birds race after prey through the forest canopy without smacking into tree trunks.

    They avoid this fate by observing a theoretical speed limit, according to scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    If researchers can figure out how birds intuit this speed limit, they could use the logic to program drones that race through dense urban cores and other cluttered environments.

    State of the art
    Most drones today fly at speeds slow enough to stop within the field of view of their sensors. 

    "If I can only see up to five meters, I can only go up to a speed that allows me to stop within five meters, which is not very fast," Emilio Frazzoli, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, said in a news release.

    If the northern goshawks were limited by what they could see, they wouldn't fly nearly as fast as they do, he reckons.

    Instead the birds likely gauge the density of trees and speed through the forest knowing that given a certain density they can always find an opening.

    This is similar to skiers who dive into the trees to find powder. These daredevils maneuver through openings in the forest trusting that they'll keep appearing as they head down the slope. 

    As long as the skiers obey their intuited speed limit, they should maintain enough control to avoid obstacles such as partially buried stumps.

    Speed limit calculus
    Frazzoli and his colleagues used a statistical model of a forest and some tricky math to determine the probability that a bird flying through it at a given speed would crash into a tree.

    They found that for any given forest density, there's a critical speed above which there is no "infinite collision-free trajectory," MIT explains.

    "If I fly slower than that critical speed, then there is a fair possibility that I will actually be able to fly forever, always avoiding the trees," Frazzoli said in the news release.

    In a follow-up email, Frazzoli explained that this finding is non-trivial.

    "While it is obvious that the faster one goes, the higher the probability of collision is, it is not obvious that there is a finite 'speed limit' that cannot be exceeded safely," he said.

    The research established a theoretical speed limit for any given obstacle-filled environment. Going forward, Frazzoli and colleagues will compare their model results with real-world observations of birds.

    They are also creating a video game in which people navigate through a simulated forest at high speeds in order to determine how close humans can come to the theoretical limit.

    That sounds a lot like a group of researchers pushing to give real-world drones Luke Skywalker-like abilities.

    Updated at 2:00 pm PT

    More on drone technology:

    A paper detailing the results has been accepted to the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation.

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

     

     

    Where nations used to compete to get into space, now the competition focuses on private businesses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into next-generation spaceships. Msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.

     

  • Don't mess with the magpies

    U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

    Black-billed magpies are among the few wild animals that have been shown to recognize humans.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Add the black-billed magpie to the list of birds that can recognize individual humans who pose a threat, scolding them when they approach, according to a new study.

    The birds are part of the crow family, among the most intelligent animals. Previous studies have shown, for example, that crows can wield tools to find food and American crows have been shown to recognize humans who threaten their nest or captured them.

    Until now, however, experimental evidence was lacking that magpies would do the same.

    This changed in 2009 when Won Young Lee, a doctoral student at Seoul National University in Korea, was constantly taking eggs out of magpie nests for a long-term survey project and started to be followed and scolded by the nest owners.

    He tried to fool the magpie by giving his cap to another person. "This did not work. When I moved away, the bird followed me rather than the fellow observer wearing my cap," he said in a news release. 

    The researchers followed up on this finding with a controlled experiment. A pair of humans, a climber who went up to nests and a non-climber, wearing the same clothes, were presented to the magpies. All the magpies showed aggression to the climbers, but not the non-climbers.

    The researchers suggest the birds learn to recognize the threatening humans by vision, learning over time to distinguish individual faces. If so, magpies would be most likely to recognize humans in urban settings, a theory the team plans to test.

    The findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Animal Cognition.

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

  • How male birds affect female fertility

    Felix Kaestle / AP

    A blue tit is reflected in a wing mirror of a car that is covered with raindrops in Friedrichshafen, southern Germany in this file photo. Female blue tits who mate with experienced males have slower ticking biological clocks, a new study says.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Biological clocks tick more slowly for female blue tit birds that consistently choose mates whose first reproductive success came in their first year, according to a new study.

    The finding suggests that males, who help build the nest and feed mom and her chicks, create an environment that influences how the female interacts with the world.

    "The thought was that males didn't matter," Josh Auld, a study co-author at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina, said in a news release.

    It turns out that they do.

    Auld and his fellow researcher, Anne Charmantier of the French National Center for Scientific Research, don't know exactly why certain male blue tits fail to reproduce in their first year, nor do they know what cues a female uses to pick different males. But the birds mate once a year, often with a different partner, and the females with mates that started reproducing early have slower-ticking biological clocks.

    The age of the male in a given mating year doesn't matter; the key factor is his history. Males with early experiences are somehow superior.

    "These males that are able to reproduce early may in some way ameliorate the decline and fitness of the females," Auld told me today.

    French data
    To determine the male factor in female fertility, the researchers took advantage of a long-term data set from the yellow and blue forest birds on the French island of Corsica. The birds were outfitted with identification tags on their ankles, allowing researchers to track who mated with whom, how many eggs they laid, and when and how the fledging birds fared over time.

    Auld and Charmantier analyzed data collected between 1979 and 2007 for nearly 600 female and 600 male birds. They found that the positive effect of experienced males is greatest a bit later in the birds' 6-year or so lifespan, Auld noted.

    "Going through parenting once means the second round might go a little bit better … so when that 4- or 5-year-old female chooses even a 4-year-old male, and he started reproducing when he was 1, that's when we see that decline was lower," he said.

    Broader effect?
    Whether this positive effect of male experience on female fertility is broader than just the world of blue tit birds is, for now, unknown. Auld and Charmantier are currently studying swans, and they're not getting exactly the same result.

    "But they are very different," Auld said of the swans. "They are long-lived. So it is a little early to say. Certainly we would like to know that, but I really don't know for sure how general these effects are," he said.

    The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, and the findings were published online last week in the journal Oikos.

    More stories on bird mating:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).