NASA's Radar Found 4 Men Trapped in Rubble in Nepal by Their Heartbeats

http://gizmodo.com/nasas-radar-found-4-men-trapped-in-rubble-in-nepal-by-t-1702553957

by kaa2102 • 11 years ago

473 86 11 years ago

gizmodo.com

mezeek• 11 years ago

I wonder for how long the Navy Seals have been using this.

dangerlibrary• 11 years ago

It seems likely that the US GEO-INT has more purpose-built tech for the Seals than NASA uses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligenc...

mikeyouse• 11 years ago

I distinctly remember Tom Clancy writing about this type of technology near the end of Rainbow Six (published in 1998) -- He always seemed pretty well informed on what was undergoing testing if not what was actually in use.

andrewrice• 11 years ago

The "heartbeat sensor" was actually an item in the Rainbow Six FPS, too.

Terr_• 11 years ago

Nah, Clancy just got taken in by a common fraud:

http://articles.latimes.com/1998/sep/24/local/me-26013 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadro_Tracker

There have been dozens of similar frauds since, where the snake-oil-salesmen just dress up a dowsing-rod with blinking lights.

Remember, Tom Clancy was a fiction writer in the same vein as Dan Brown novels or CSI TV shows. His main nod to realism was in realms like military jargon or describing the correct fire-selector for a given model of gun.

sean-duffy• 11 years ago

I came here to say this, a device for tracking heartbeats was described quite extensively in Rainbow Six. I got the impression it was more of him extending his fiction creative license than drawing any inspiration from a real product, though. But it does make it very exciting that there appears to be an actual way of doing this.

soup10• 11 years ago

"NASA's" yea right. This screams military tech.

tomswartz07• 11 years ago

Not to split hairs, but NASA and the military are, and throughout their history, very much intertwined.

There's a reason that the first astronauts were fighter pilots.

castis2• 11 years ago

Serious question, would anyone else have been more qualified for those positions?

whyaduck• 11 years ago

I won't argue that there isn't cross-pollination between NASA and the military, but if you're looking for a test pilot for your new, high-performance aircraft (or, say, rocket), you'd be hard pressed to find a more qualified candidate than a military test pilot.

mturmon2• 11 years ago

Nope, you're wrong. It's not really military. This particular project has been funded for many years by DHS.

It's based on radar tech that has been used in many past space-based contexts. For synthetic-aperture-radar-based mapping of Earth's topography from space (http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/), for radar science (e.g., looking beneath the surface of Mercury using the 70-m Goldstone radar, http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/mercury-2007...), and for precisely retrieving the Doppler shift of receding spacecraft for science and communications. (Source: I know some of the JPL radar group.)

There is military-funded work that goes on at NASA, but this particular radar tech is not such an example.

For (much) more: https://radar.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm

madengr• 11 years ago

It's probably pulsed UWB, not SAR as that requires a moving aperature:

http://www.timedomain.com/news/wall.php

UWB has been around for 20+ years, and IIRC there was a big patent dispute back in the late 90's.

https://books.google.com/books?id=6_XVg-nX9qgC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA...

reverend_gonzo• 11 years ago

This goes to show that even seemingly ridiculous (from the layman's POV) technology can be eventually used to create tecnology that can directly better our lives.

This was originally designed to detect alien life on other planets, but was converted to look for heartbeats and breathing under rubble.

HenryTheHorse• 11 years ago

It certainly makes for a hell of an executive summary for a project status report.

"The bad news is we still don't know if there's life on Mars. But the good news is we just located 4 men under a flattened Dunkin' Donuts in Kathmandu".

incompatible• 11 years ago

However, the claim that this is "based on technology used to detect alien life on distant exoplanets" sounds dubious. Exoplanets are far too distant to use radar on them at all, let alone pick up alien life signs.

aaron6953• 11 years ago

I tend to think those four men, and the many others who died would have preferred the money had been spent on the simple, known process of better earth quake proofing the buildings in the region.

I'm not anti science for sciences sake, but this is not a logical argument. Bettering lives in Nepal is cheap and easy with current tech.

michaelkeenan• 11 years ago

I think you might be replying to a different idea than reverend_gonzo was proposing. I think he's just noting that not-obviously-useful technological advances can have unexpected applications. I don't read him as saying that not-obviously-useful technological advances are the best way to save lives in Nepal.

If you just want to save lives, donate to whichever charity GiveWell[1] says is the best charity at saving lives per dollar. Every other use of money is vulnerable to the "but you could save more lives a different way" criticism.

[1] http://www.givewell.org/

Shivetya• 11 years ago

With their GDP, only if someone else does it. Plus Nepal is filled with some very old temples and the like which are not going to be easy fixes; if they survived this long its a testament to chance or their builders.

Bring up their GDP through economic development which will eventually provide the money needed for better construction but that will need to wait until their political situation settles down.

dsr12• 11 years ago

Link to NASA article: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4574

VonGuard• 11 years ago

Wow, Star Trek life signs sensors!

coverup• 11 years ago

Off topic, but this headline is a good example of a crash blossom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity#In_headline...

castis2• 11 years ago

Its awful to imagine someone was trapped in rubble by their own heartbeat.

civilian• 11 years ago

Or, alternatively, the heartbeat of NASA's radar found 4 men trapped in rubble?

lifeisstillgood2• 11 years ago

Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo

(It's a valid sentence, honest)

applecore• 11 years ago

Indeed. Most people feel trapped, not by their own heartbeat, but by the electrical impulses that lie within their brains.

lloydde• 11 years ago

used to detect alien life on distant exoplanets

I love that lead. Life detected!

nitinics• 11 years ago

First of, Thanks for this technology that helped save some of my countrymen. This goes to show that technology can indeed help in many avenues to save lives. I am originally from Nepal living in NYC, and looking for ideas that could create technology-aided sustainable development as a key to rebuilding. Ideas that come to me, which might have high $$ values for implementation are - 3D printed housing, Organic Farming for quick rehabilitation on these villages, Open-Source BTS for communications etc. As costs go lower, these affected areas might be the right place to implement these. As much as I am devastated by what is happening in Nepal right now with the death toll only rising, I would like to reach out to the technology community out here or anywhere to provide me with ideas into helping us rebuild. Most of the relief efforts are donation-based, however, for longer term - creating a sustainable economy in these low privileged areas with the help of emerging technologies is what I think is crucial for faster recovery.

fasteo• 11 years ago

Slightly OT, but along the same lines.

Measuring the human pulse from tiny head movements to help diagnose cardiac disease [1]

[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/measuring-the-human-pulse-from-tin...

pbhjpbhj2• 11 years ago

In the same vein [ugh, sorry, pun not intended] there's the video magnification techniques that detect and amplify micro variations across video frames - e.g. in skin tone/colouration for pulse monitoring [1] and e.g. in structures for engineering analysis [2].

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/

[2] http://people.csail.mit.edu/celiu/motionmag/motionmag.html

klean92• 11 years ago

It sure is great for those guys.

But it also says it is getting harder and harder to hide...

arjn• 11 years ago

This is both fantastic and frightening. Imagine what capabilities the US military has for finding people.

mangeletti• 11 years ago

This technology is really awesome, but I have to admit that I am scared to death of anything that can find me by my heartbeat under 6 feet of building rubble. The first thing that came to mind were those robotic octopi from The Matrix.

Phlarp• 11 years ago

Or the little compliance spiders from Minority Report

socceroos• 11 years ago

No need to give the pollies any ideas, mate.

stephengillie3• 11 years ago

Why is our first response to new technology one of fear? This is a device designed to find alien life, the article is about it being used to save human lives, but all you see is a tool to find and attack you.

This isn't meant personally; you see this "Dystopia ex Technology" in Hollywood movies and popular novels. For every "Pacific Rim" we have, there's several "Matrix" clones ready to tear down our confidence in machines.

fredkbloggs2• 11 years ago

It's not the machines we fear. Most people do understand that it's not the tools but the people using them, and we know far too well the sort of people those are likely to be. The dystopian nightmare has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with governments. It's always been so.

SomeStupidPoint• 11 years ago

You realize that there was an article just today about a large spy agency violating the foundational laws of the country it was chartered in and using technology to spy illegally on citizens there, right?

The reason that people have a negative reaction to technologies that can be used for spying is that right now, in real life, spies are committing crimes against citizens using virtually every technical facet of modern society.

angersock• 11 years ago

I hope that one day our children or their children can feel as you do--in the meantime, things are looking grim.

nandemo• 11 years ago

I think calling it "fear" is a bit simplistic. It's about thinking critically about new technology and how it can have unintended, negative effects.

hueving• 11 years ago

The parent poster is not afraid of technology, he/she's rightfully afraid of the idiots that will use it in light of the spying that's been revealed.

whichfawkes• 11 years ago

The most impressive new technology is often the result of massive spending by entities far more powerful than myself.

Guns are technology which can directly kill me, but I'm not too worried about guns, or even must gun owners. But when you're talking about a technology that (due to massive cost) is only available to governments with questionable oversight, that gets worrying.

In this specific case, I'm not particularly concerned - but you can see how the availability of the tech in question matters. If only people who are already more powerful than me can have it, it's much more likely that its power can be (ab)used to my detriment.

pjbrunet• 11 years ago

I was thinking X-Men. In the last movie, didn't they have robots to detect mutants underground? LOL.

Crito5• 11 years ago

It would be pretty hard to hide from a totalitarian government in an attic if that government had sufficiently comprehensive residency information and this sort of technology. Count the bodies in each house on a regular periodic basis, and then figure out which ones consistently have more people than their census report indicates.

You could probably come up with some sort of regimen that would have people coming or leaving the house such that the number of people in it always stayed below what was indicated on the census, but it would still be a major concern.

Related are sentences that are grammatically correct, but semantically nonsense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_fur...

chopin• 11 years ago

I'm not sure whether you need such sophisticated technology for that. A smart meter will do for this purpose. And the data mining for that can be applied remotely, no need to bring any fancy stuff to the site.

Crito5• 11 years ago

Last line was meant to be an edit on another comment obviously. Too late to fix it.

kragen• 11 years ago

Yeah, the technology seems tailor-made to amplify schizophrenic paranoia; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9507458 for an example saying, "I suspect that this technology was used by an upstairs neighbor to track me around the apartment and electronically harass me using a microwave device. He would use a pulsed RF/microwave device (a Directed Energy Weapon [2]) to irradiate me as I moved around my apartment and also while I slept."

It's going to get harder and harder to reassure delusional people that their delusions are false when they become technologically feasible.

beloch• 11 years ago

I can't believe nobody's said it... They're "scanning for lifeforms".

Chalk up another Star Trek technology made real!

kristopolous• 11 years ago

With technology like this, Anne Frank's diary, if written today, would be the size of tweet.

indians_pro• 11 years ago

That makes no sense.

Already__Taken• 11 years ago

She would have been found immediately. Because a tweet is very short.

edvinbesic• 11 years ago

Is this part of the program that just received budget cuts so that NASA can focus on the 'hard sciences'?

lifeformed• 11 years ago

So how does this actually work? What aspect of a heartbeat is detectable in such circumstances?

NASA's Radar Found 4 Men Trapped in Rubble in Nepal by Their Heartbeats

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