Using Drones for Science - DTNS Weekend

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2:09Dr Niki: Hello, everybody. Welcome to another wonderful weekend edition of Daily Tech News Show, gratefully provided to you in thanks for your support of the show. And joining us today is Dr. Nikki. Hey. We are going to talk about a new paper in the journal Marine Mammal Science, where researchers used a drone to film sperm whales headbutting for the first time. Well, they may have not been headbutting for the first time. It's the first time we've captured them on film. So we're going to learn about how drones help science. Yeah, we'll use this paper as a jumping off point and then dive into all the other drone applications.

2:49But of course, this paper came across my radar or sonar because I'm the headbutting person. Right.

2:57Dr Niki: Perfect. Yeah. It's been hypothesized, you know, since Moby Dick, basically, that whales headbutt things. But thanks to this drone footage in the Azores, we now can prove it with video that they actually underwater sperm whales. Well, you know, they have this giant bump in the front of their head called the junk and they'll ran into each other with it. kind of like rams do on land, potentially, you know, fighting for mates. And we now know this thanks to a drone. Sperm whales, the rams of the sea. Yes. And I will be using that. But so this is just a cool example that I got really excited about.

3:38And I said, Tom, I can't only talk about whales on DTNS. We have to talk about tech. So let's talk about drones. What's a drone?

3:45Dr Niki: Yeah, I for a long time insisted on saying unmanned aerial vehicle when I said drone to make sure you knew that I meant like a quadcopter or something like that. But honestly, people just keep saying drone to refer to unmanned aerial vehicles. So I've kind of given up on that because when you say unmanned aerial vehicle, a lot of people are like, what's that? Whereas you say drone, they know exactly what you're talking about. But a drone doesn't have to be aerial. That's what we're going to be talking about today. But it could be other things, right? Yeah. And a lot of the examples we're going to look at is based on aerial drones.

4:21But honestly, for science, you can put drones underwater. I think if we can count like space drones as drones and like rovers, basically like robots that are, you know, controlled by a human and can go and do stuff for you and are kind of small, I guess that's the definition of a drone.

4:39Dr Niki: Yeah, something that just goes off, maybe not even entirely autonomous, but without a person on board and can do things for you. Not to put you on the spot, but off the top of your head, without looking at our notes, if you had to think about some uses that drones have for science, what would you think about? uh okay so i would think of uh mapping observation obviously like with the sperm whales um i don't know maybe even a little bit of exploration you know like flying the drone into a cave or something okay yeah yeah okay we're gonna get into that and it turns out way more than i thought before i looked into this so i broke it down into different categories exploration intervention and surveillance but not like the surveillance that you think although So drones do that too.

5:30Dr Niki: Not the spy surveillance. I mean, unless you're spying on whales, which we kind of are. True, true. The whales may not realize. Yeah, they didn't sign an agreement to be on the drone footage. So we'll start with the exploration. So I didn't think of the intervention. That's the one I'm interested in. But yeah, let's start with the exploration. So this is the classic drone. The reason you buy a drone at home is because you want to fly it around and look down at stuff. Take images, take video. You can do 2D and 3D mapping. And we used to do this with satellites, but with drones, now you can do it in a higher resolution and in whatever location you want.

6:06And it's cheaper. So as you can imagine, this has a ton of applications for science, even just mapping sites, taking video of a landscape. Let's say you want to look at how many trees grew here. And now there was an earthquake and the trees fell down and there's less trees, like just that kind of imaging over time. But then if you add on different sensors, you can kind of expand this times 100 of things you could look at. So if you think about LIDAR, which is kind of this larger type radar system where you can scan, you know, 3D from the air, you can. This is used a lot in archaeology and in paleontology.

6:46In fact, we've covered it before on DTNS, where you can survey a site way quicker than you could on foot, which is how you would do it before, up to like 20, 30 square kilometers. And you can look at the elevation and see, yes, this looks like a T-Rex skeleton or yes, this looks like a Roman settlement based on the data from that kind of imaging. So this is huge for those kinds of fields. You can also do thermal imaging. This is great for biology, especially if you're looking through trees for an animal. because you just use their thermal signature. And for little animals or what we call cryptic animals, which is not Bigfoot, but more like animals that are good at hiding, that's what cryptic means.

7:28So thermal imaging is super helpful for biologists for this kind of thing. There's other, you know, I look at things from a biological focus, but I try to incorporate other fields. So geological mapping is a big one. And this one surprised me. You can use spectroscopic imaging to kind of see from the sky what kind of minerals are in the ground. You know, not like the microscopic composition, but on a bigger scale, like this is granite. Just based on the surface view.

7:57Dr Niki: Yeah. So for mining, if you wanted to map out, where's a good place to do that? Gotcha. And this works also underwater. So you're mapping out the Earth, but you're mapping out potentially other planets. And you'll have to correct me. I think we either have drones or are planning on having drones that can fly on other planets. Yes, there is some work being done on making sure that you can fly in the very thin Martian air. And there's definitely things that can fly into gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Yeah, I did read there's a Venus or at least a potential for a Venus drone. So this would be a lot of mapping.

8:34You just have to make sure it doesn't melt.

8:35Dr Niki: Yeah. You got the atmosphere. That's the other problem. So there would be 3D mapping, 2D mapping, imaging, et cetera. This is also, you know, if you think about, like I said, you know, let's say you're looking at tree area. This is important for looking at change over time. So climate change is a big one for this and disaster impact. If you want a really quick, you know, there's a tsunami and you want a really quick assessment of what happened going up into the air and taking some images is going to be really helpful for that. Legendary doesn't happen by chance. It happens because it's what BetMGM does.

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12:19Dr Niki: Yeah, that makes sense. Anything else before we move to intervention on the exploration uses? So there's some big advantages to this. if you're thinking about, you want to do a sampling of, again, thinking biology, this certain tree and how much of it is in the state of Alabama. You would want to do a random sampling. However, when we do it without drones as humans, it's not as random because we have to be able to actually go to the place. Like you have to drive down a road, bring your field truck and walk out and actually sample there. Yeah. If all the sycamores are in a valley that people can't get to, then you're going to undercount.

12:55And we can't count them. So with a drone, you have a better accessibility to do stuff like this okay um and if you're looking at stuff that for example animals you're reducing the human disturbance so you're stressing the animals less in the case for example of these sperm whales maybe they wouldn't be performing this behavior with a boat around them so with the drone maybe they don't notice it and they'll have like a more

13:15Dr Niki: natural which i imagine somebody's like those drones are loud but if they're far enough up yeah the sperm whales i will talk about the cons at the end and like yes they are loud but they're less loud than like me traipsing through the woods. Yes, me too. All right, let's get into interventions because this is not sitting down your drone and telling it it's flying too much. What are we talking about here? Yeah, so this is when you're doing something to the environment and I'm keeping that very broad. And again, keep in mind Earth environment, potentially Mars environment, underwater environment.

13:47And there's lots of things that drones can do that are apparently we are doing and I didn't know we were doing. And I'll start with farming. So you can do localized pesticide or fertilizer spraying. So if you, you know, all of these things depend on special equipment that your drone has. So let's say you equip your drone with a special pump and you identify specifically this one weed that I see over here in the field. I'm going with the drone and just spray that so you don't spray your whole crawl. And you can also do seed dispersal, although apparently it's not super effective by drone. And like planting small trees for reforestation.

14:22You may have seen this. I think it happened in California with the fires. They had drones with like torpedo trees and they just dropped them back into the forest and then they started growing there.

14:33Dr Niki: Yeah. I know some people who use this for pesticide spraying and they argue with their friends about whether it's worth it or not. Oh, they have an own drone that they do this with? Yeah. I don't know if they own it or rent it, but they use it for the pesticide. the seed dispersal though i don't know anyone who actually does that on a farm i'd like like you i've heard about it with this would be more for like i don't know native species reforestation things like that yeah on a farm i think you would want to control it a bit more um there's also ways that you can remove invasive species so whether that's plants and you might have little like shovel not shovel but like a scoop attachment to pick them out or underwater um you can remove parasites or invasive fish, for example, like you can have a drone spear fish.

15:20Really? I mean, it's possible. Whatever attachment, it's like a Lego, right? You put whatever attachment you want on it.

15:26Dr Niki: And then you go collect the invasive species and serve it at an ecologically sound restaurant. There you go. If it's a tasty kind, you can do that. Yeah, yeah. And if it's safe to eat. Of course, one of the big ones with drones is data collection. So you don't have to physically go into the environment to do things like temperature collection in general, in the air, humidity, air quality, pressure, wind speed. Used to be that we had to set up towers to measure all these with sensors on them. With a drone, you can go wherever you want. And also things like chemistry levels. So CO2, if you wanted to do pollution monitoring.

16:01So the movability now, maybe it can't do them while it's in the air, but it can go somewhere, sit down, take the measurements, right? Send them back.

16:08Dr Niki: It's kind of like the tree counting that we talked about earlier. You can get better sensors if you can go more places to take those samples. It's also an interesting example of what we mean by intervention. It doesn't necessarily mean stopping something. It just means inserting yourself into the environment. Yeah. So that's the kind of broader way to look at it. Some pretty fun ones that I thought were pretty innovative. So I started reading about this paper where they use it as an anti poaching tool. And I was like, are they like shooting poachers from the sky? But actually, it's the opposite.

16:43The drone chased a rhinoceros away from a potential like human population or poaching area.

16:50Dr Niki: So they ruin it for the poacher. So they use the loudness of the drone to kind of move the animals away, which I thought was interesting. So it's like herding capabilities. It's like herding rhinos. Yeah, you know. And then a fun one is delivering wildlife medicine. So you can drop vaccines from drones, but not like syringes, like you're thinking, although that's possible. How did you know that that's what I was thinking? Because that's the visual. Although you can do that, but it's more expensive. Yeah. For example, prairie dogs, you've heard probably they carry the plague and we don't want that.

17:24Dr Niki: No. So you can put edible pellet vaccines and drop them around where prairie dogs live and they eat them up and then they hopefully have less plague. Oh, it's like treats. Yeah. And you can do this with lots of other kinds of modifications like antiparasitics and so on. Okay. Yeah. So like gummy vitamins. Yeah. Isn't that a fun little treat for the rodents? I like treats. Given the prairie dogs, some treats that are good for them. Okay. let's talk about surveillance. Oh, I have one more cool one though. It's a bit different than medicine. It's kind of for humans, but you know how we can get like malaria through mosquitoes.

17:59You can put a box of specially modified mosquitoes onto a drone that are sterilized so that they, you know, they can't reproduce. So you release those and it reduces the population of disease carrying vectors for a bunch of different insects. So that minimizes human exposure for the people delivering it because the drone delivers it. You don't have to go deliver it. And the people who might get bitten, there's less mosquito. So that's also very cool.

18:26Dr Niki: I don't know if we've talked about it on DTNS before, but it's the thing where Bill Gates released a bunch of sterile mosquitoes in a conference once to kind of demonstrate, like, this is what we do. We release the sterile ones. They mate, and then they don't reproduce, and that causes the population to die out. Exactly. You want to do that in a place where there's a lot of mosquitoes. But like you say, no one wants to. You don't want to go there. So, yeah, that makes sense to me. OK, let's do talk about what we mean by surveillance with drones. Yeah. So not necessarily human surveillance, although that is part of it.

19:02But with things like sensors, like I said, you can equip a drone with a lot of different sensors. And before, if you wanted to transmit this kind of information, you had to rely on towers, whether that's a cell tower or, you know, any data transmission tower. And you're limited, again, in locality. So once again, the drone gives you a flexible location and you can do things. This one's really cool, like radio telemetry. So you know how we put callers, tracking callers on like panthers. Every time you see a documentary, there's like the cheetah that has a caller. So those to find them, you have to run around the savannah with a radio like antenna and follow them.

19:43It's literally like Marco Polo. That's how you do that. If you put that equipment on a drone, it's a lot easier.

19:50Dr Niki: You just fly until you get a reading and then you can circle until you narrow it down. So it's a huge plus for telemetry. Yeah. And you can put telemetry on. We've made it so small now. You can put it on like little tiny birds even and rodents. So there's a lot you can do with that. I mentioned, you know, different sensors. So again, this thermal sensing. So what I mean by surveillance is just kind of live capture of data from the environment, whether that's climatic data, animal data. You can also take physical samples. So you can put a little scoop on the end of your drone and go take a water sample for water quality and do live water quality measurement and send the data back.

20:31You could do – there's a little corer, so you could do a soil core, a little drill.

20:37Dr Niki: this all feels like the stuff that mars rovers do but we're just yeah it's putting yeah i mean mars rovers are drones that we engineered to put in space but we had to try it out on earth first yeah so some more fun ones for sample collection you have you have a special drone that does scat samples so that's cool a poop drone um you can cover your drone in sticky paper and go in a certain habitat where you want to collect insects and they stick to the paper and you bring them back. And one of my favorites, getting back to the whales, you can have drones hover over whales. And when they blow air out, they blow a lot of mucus out with that too.

21:11And you can do DNA collection from that and learn about if they have viral contaminants or what their DNA is.

21:18Dr Niki: Talk about your non-invasive DNA connection. And that is surveillance. We are collecting surveillance, collecting data, collecting DNA evidence. If we want to prove that this whale had motive, it's a whole different thing, but we can at least get the DNA. We know that they don't have an alibi. So that's our overview of like all the things that drones can do. Okay. That's great. I get the exploration, the intervention, the surveillance that those are all great examples. We talked a little bit about the noise, you know, earlier and that you said that's one of the cons. Let's talk about some of the things we could improve to make these work better for science.

21:58Yeah. So you may, if you've seen these nature documentaries, you may have caught sometimes the shadow of a drone because the footage now is a lot of it is drone footage. And you see like these big herds of zebras, you know, running away and it is, they're getting chased by the drone. And this is, as far as I'm concerned, a bit unethical because you're stressing the animals for no reason. And now, of course, all the drone makers are trying to make them quieter for their own reasons. But this would also benefit things like this. And researchers have put together a code of conduct to try and, like, use drones in a very specific way that they agree on to reduce negative effects.

22:30But I think, honestly, as the technology improves, this will become less of a problem. We can probably make quiet drones. In fact, the military probably already has much more silent drones and they'll eventually make their way to us. you can't joke about that right now um and then all the things i mentioned are very very specific so it's i can't give like a specific thing that should be improved but like every every sampling technique has its own specific you know hardware that can be improved always kind of so just like more specificity in hardware um and actually the researchers mentioned that not only because a lot of this is like MacGyver-y type hardware.

23:13But not only would that be better, but to have a better coordination with machine learning, because a lot of the data analysis, especially the stuff that's happening instantaneously, is machine learning based. And as you know, and we talk about this a lot on DTNS, your machine learning is only as good as your data set and as the training. So if you have more specific training for whatever tree you're trying to identify that will improve the whole drone, you know, workflow, I guess. Yeah.

23:39Dr Niki: And using drones to collect the data to improve the drones is a nice cycle. There you go. Yeah. It's like AI as well. Yeah. And for that kind of machine learning and everything, open source software, researchers always encourage that because all of us are broken. Also, we think we should share things. So that's another recommendation. People also really thought that it would be, basically what we're seeing with drones in science is like uh the tech world is way further ahead than the science world or the the stem world you know what i mean so there's stuff that people are doing that's way advanced and we haven't even thought to incorporate that yet and that includes things like community science so i don't know if you use ebird or i naturalist this is apps where you can take a picture of a flower and it tells you what the flower is but it also collects data for scientists okay and if you could just like have that run on a drone it would be way more effective than people just taking pictures with their cell phones so like better ways to in um put that into the drone somehow yeah and use it and using drones for community science too yeah yeah yeah and like you know if you have your backyard drone and it's scanning and doing tree cover and you can opt in to like send that data something like This episode is brought to you by Capital One.

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25:55Dr Niki: Now, so far, we've talked about all of this use as like, well, we're doing it with sperm whales. So, you know, it's not a big deal. We're talking about surveillance, but it's not that kind of surveillance. But we could be applying some of this to humans. And that gets tricky, right? Yeah. And the NIH even has put out kind of guidelines for this. So there's a lot. This is where it gets tricky, because normally when you study humans, you have to do ethical approval and you have to ask for consent with things like drones. If you're just looking at, I don't know, the Shibuya crossing and doing a drone footage of that, like you can't ask all those people for their consent.

26:33So and this is more of a specialized field, right, like population movement or maybe, you know, surveillance, actual surveillance falls into this. So there have been guidelines raised about if you're going to use drone footage that has people in it, here's what you should follow. But there are definitely concerns that we have to catch up with in terms of technology. Like, you know, the legislation has to catch up with the technology.

26:57Dr Niki: Because as we have become very aware, data can be used and misused. The data existing doesn't care, but you need to have guidelines about how the data is used. Should be a crossing is a great one, right? If anybody's not familiar, it's one of the busiest crossings in the world. It's one of those. It is the busiest. Any direction. You don't have to go along the sides. And so understanding how people move in crowds, how people move with each other, how people move in condensed spaces, I could see that being extremely valuable and drone footage being extremely valuable. Sure, you could just go up onto the buildings and shoot down.

27:40Dr Niki: But maybe there's some angles you could get there. But that data could be misused, right? And so having guidelines around exactly that to say, you can use it for the generalized things, but you should not use it. And we should have guardrails to stop you from misusing it. I think that's - Yeah. And like what level is on anonymity when your resolution is really high? Yeah, yeah. So things like that. People just have to kind of put that into their methodology when they're doing those kinds of research projects. Anything else that you found in digging into this? because this this is great stuff i found that i need to be thinking more about drones and like turns out we can use them i mean basically the consensus from this review was like we're not using drones enough for science as much as we could especially that i don't know how much drones cost but uh i think they're like affordable to everyday people now yeah they they i mean certainly to a science budget i think they're not out well these days just looking up like a dji mini is $326, right?

28:40Dr Niki: Yeah. You could buy a drone for your lab on, you know, goat surveillance and collect data on that overhead data if you wanted to. How long can a drone stay in the air? I'm just thinking for myself. Yeah. What is the battery life on? What's the longest flight duration of a typical consumer drone? Let's say a consumer drone, just so that we're talking about About an hour. Okay. Yeah, that's what I would have expected. 30 minutes to an hour, depending, but they're getting closer to an hour. Yeah. So I think with technology advancement, this is going to be, you know, that limits your location too.

29:16But we're going to see where we should be seeing more drones in science and not where you would maybe expect. Like we covered the orange bones, I think, a few maybe last summer, which was looking at paleontological samples from space or from space with drones, I think. Yeah. And it was because there was a special kind of lichen that grew on these bones that made them orange. And then you could map it out with drone footage. So who would have thought?

29:43Dr Niki: So many cool things, Dr. Nikki. Thank you so much for digging into this. I know it was fun, but we really appreciate benefiting from you having the fun learning about it. I gave you a flyover, a bird's eye view of drones and science. Perfect. If folks want to follow you and more of what you do, remind them where to go. I am over at NicoleAckerman's.com and I have the same handle on Blue Sky and I will be there for the foreseeable future. Fantastic. Thank you, Dr. Dickey. Thanks for having me. And thank everybody for watching and supporting us in all the various ways. DTNS.substack.com, Patreon.com slash DTNS.

30:20Dr Niki: If you're not a patron already, go check it out. It's easy. Get you some cool stuff. We'll talk to you soon.

30:32The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand.

30:37Dr Niki: Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

30:44This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Breaking news for your home, Wayday. Wayfair's big sale is almost here, and you can score the best deals in home.

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