Deterrence of birds with an artificial predator, the RobotFalcon.

Collisions between birds and airplanes can damage aircrafts, resulting in delays and cancellation of flights, costing the international civil aviation industry more than 1.4 billion US dollars annually. Driving away birds is therefore crucial, but the effectiveness of current deterrence methods is limited.

Innovative Visualizations Shed Light on Avian Nocturnal Migration.

Globally, billions of flying animals undergo seasonal migrations, many of which occur at night. The temporal and spatial scales at which migrations occur and our inability to directly observe these nocturnal movements makes monitoring and characterizing this critical period in migratory animals' life cycles difficult. Remote sensing, therefore, has played an important role in our understanding of large-scale nocturnal bird migrations.

Birds flee en mass from New Year's Eve fireworks.

Anthropogenic disturbances of wildlife, such as noise, human presence, hunting activity, and motor vehicles, are becoming an increasing concern in conservation biology. Fireworks are an important part of celebrations worldwide, and although humans often find fireworks spectacular, fireworks are probably perceived quite differently by wild animals. Behavioral responses to fireworks are difficult to study at night, and little is known about the negative effects fireworks may have on wildlife.

Dependence of the tray transmission factor on collimator setting and source-surface distance.

When blocks are placed on a tray in megavoltage x-ray beams, generally a single correction factor for the attenuation by the tray is applied for each photon beam quality. In this approach, the tray transmission factor is assumed to be independent of field size and source-surface distance (SSD). Analysis of a set of measurements performed in beams of 13 different linear accelerators demonstrates that there is, however, a slight variation of the tray transmission factor with field size and SSD.

Effect of electron contamination on scatter correction factors for photon beam dosimetry.

Physical quantities for use in megavoltage photon beam dose calculations which are defined at the depth of maximum absorbed dose are sensitive to electron contamination and are difficult to measure and to calculate. Recently, formalisms have therefore been presented to assess the dose using collimator and phantom scatter correction factors, Sc and Sp, defined at a reference depth of 10 cm. The data can be obtained from measurements at that depth in a miniphantom and in a full scatter phantom.