ICYMI: Animals can communicate better than we’d realized

Today on In Case You Missed It: We are adding horses to the list of animals who can communicate via some form of symbolic language, now that researchers taught a group of horses how to understand three symbols related to whether they wanted a blank...

ICYMI: Rock-like smartphone, stomach tap and more

Today on In Case You Missed It: The FDA has just approved a device for obese people that is first surgically inserted into the stomach, then used like a tap after meals to drain up to a third of the food inside. The Runcible 'anti-smartphone' is go...

Londoners: Wanna Know How Safe The Air Is To Breathe? These Pigeons Will Tell You

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In an effort to raise awareness about air pollution, Twitter put on a contest where ones of the winners was a team composed of PR agency DigitasLBi and tech startup Plume Labs. Their project involves strapping tiny air sensors to the back of domesticated racing pigeons (which return home to roost every night) and have them fly around the city. You’re then free to Tweet your location to any of the 10 birds in the project, and they’ll send you back info about ozone, nitrogen dioxide and volatile compound levels. In other words, the birds will tell you how safe it is to even breathe the air around you. Granted with only 10 birds you won’t get a very complete snapshot of the city’s pollution levels, but again, this is more about raising awareness than it is about creating an accurate network. The bird squad is known as the Pigeon Air Patrol, and they’ll fly the skies for only 3 days.

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[ Project Page ] VIA [ Gizmag ]

ICYMI: Pigeon cancer detection, pill stethoscope and more

Today on In Case You Missed It: Researchers were able to train pigeons to choose whether medical images contain a benign or malignant tumor with 99 accuracy. MIT scientists made a biomonitoring pill that patients can swallow to collect their pulse,...