• Question: Will your work benefit animals and the environment or do they not

    Asked by anon-226058 to Sameed, Jose, joannabarstow, Heidi, Freya, Chris on 14 Nov 2019. This question was also asked by anon-226451, anon-226197.
    • Photo: Heidi

      Heidi answered on 14 Nov 2019:

      Realistically, my work won’t benefit animals and the environment directly, but there’s a lot of technology that comes out of astronomy that has benefits to life on Earth.

      Two really cool examples:
      1) A project at the University of Portsmouth is looking into using code written to model galaxies to instead model the brain to help understand how to treat dementia.
      2) A project at Liverpool John Moores University is looking into using code written to identify stars and galaxies to instead track endangered animals and stop poaching!

      So even if you think that astronomy is all very up in the air, there’s always applications down on Earth. 🙂

    • Photo: Freya Addison

      Freya Addison answered on 14 Nov 2019:

      Not directly. The cloud work I do, I am trying to improve the position location of our radar beam. This work will be published, and it has been tested with our research radars. In best case scenario, if we improve the location of our beam, we improve the location of the cloud and therefore precipitation (rain). With better knowledge on precipitation, that leads to better forecasting. However this is a small subset of work, and it is not going directly into forecasting so theoretically maybe it could benefit but we will see how practical it is and if it wants to be adopted on a wider scale. With the insect work, the project (https://biodarproject.org/) is in the very early stages. If the project gets another round of funding and everything works, there is the potential for it to benefit insects and the environment, because the idea is to monitor flying insects, if we know what insects are around and where we can do better to protect them and see areas where we are lacking biodiversity. But the work is not there yet. Science is slow and we make incremental and tiny differences.

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