Gaia Desert

We wanted to use a balloon to do aerial mapping rather than a drone. Before the Peru trip we assumed that a tethered weather balloon would be more sustainable than using a drone for aerial mapping  which can include a downward facing camera gimble. Mario Melgar students at Laguna Chacas with an aerial mapping weather balloon. PRE-TRIP hypotheses: My hypotheses of why a balloon would be preferable to using a quadcopter equipped with a downward facing camera: Inexpensive: helium is the largest expense at about $40 for one balloon. Less accident prone and less costly if an accident happens.  If I crash my quad-copter, the cost could be a few hundred dollars. A balloon won't crash and if something happens, the string will break and you have to go hunt for it.   Faster planning. You just need a balloon, camera and helium. The outsider excitement and alarmist perspective may vary: A community response to what we know as a "DRONE" has some fear associated with

In the last few years there has been an upswing of infection control research within the context of US healthcare. The APIC and other groups are starting to accumulate an enviable amount of fun environmental microbiology field based studies. Scientists are ev aluating contamination and health risk of curtains, hands, linens, gowns, tap water and anything else that you can find in a US hospital. My favorite are the copper hand washing sinks.  Those are deluxe! The biggest source of global fecal contamination still appears to be largely unstudied. A recent editorial in Lancet Global Health discusses this. Stephen Luby states that we still do not have enough data to generate sufficient evidence about the relationship between sanitation and health. He says that this is true because of the wide variety of pathogens, climate, environments, cultures and individual behaviors.  The Luby PDF is here .  More research is certainly complicated but also necessary. I find this promising.

Here is a report  that summarizes  the reusable grocery bag ban trend that is hitting the US for the past 4 years. The article is written by the reason foundation , a libertarian institute in California. The article summarizes many points developed by a  lifecycle assessment on plastic bags , a report developed by the UK's environment agency. That lifecycle assessment has many scientifically valid studies that the average grocery shopper never encounters. The Reason Foundation's report summarizes many of the findings.   Here is a useful table that details most of the bags available for users.  If I had to choose, I would use the cotton bags simply because they are washable, bleach-able and easy to disinfect.  All the others don't hold up well in the Washing machine. There is fabric technology that integrates disinfectants for infection control scenarios. That would also be an interesting choice. 

So I had a crash on my 3dr IRIS in Peru and the details are here. Here are some of the photos from the timelapse series. Everything going normal and the IRIS is hovering Uh oh..loiter doesn't work, I'll try altitude hold...  Oh no, those don't work..I'll try to get it back in stabilize...  Maybe RTL...nope...I'll try fly mission...maybe it will go back to California....Stabilize isn't working and it has now started on its fly away... Still no response... Click on the picture below you and you can see me starting to run in an attempt to grab the up-and-coming wreckage before someone else does. It is not easy to run/walk through a sewage wetland at 12,500 feet. Add caption LUCK #1 - Thankfully it crashed into a bush in a little lake side park. The Mobius camera was in good condition. LUCK #2 - A nice man saw it and stood next to it for a while and then handed it to me when he saw me running over.