Tag Archives: technology

Trekkers to ‘climb’ Everest from their sofas

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Tourists are being invited to scale Mount Everest without leaving the comfort of their sofas with the world’s first interactive 3D virtual tour of the highest mountain on Earth.
The technology has been developed by the Nepal Tourism Board and tech firm 3rd Planet, which says its software will allow virtual trekkers to experience realistic sights and sounds from the roof of the world at the click of a mouse.
“The beauty of Nepal cannot just be described in pictures and words, and 3rd Planet has an amazing technology that enables us to showcase our country in a totally new dimension,” Prachanda Man Shrestha, CEO of the Nepal Tourism Board, said.
The application, which will be available free-of-charge on the Internet before the end of the year, will also take in many of Nepal’s ten UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the tourism board says.
“This project is a significant milestone for Nepal as the Nepal Tourism Board is the first official tourism board that utilises this cutting-edge technology,” said Pawan Tuladhar, chairman of the Pacific Asia Travel Association Nepal Chapter.
“Users will experience the sights and sounds of several tourism locations in the ‘Journey to Everest’ online, and you’ll be surprised to find that Nepal has a lot more to offer to the global audience than Mount Everest.”
During the summer scientists installed the world’s highest webcam in the Nepalese Himalayas, setting it up to beam live images of Everest’s 8,848-metre (29,028-foot) summit back to researchers studying the effects of climate change. See my post about it here.

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Google helps track Nepal typhoid

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Families using a communal water well in Kathmandu. These wells have been identified as a major source of typhoid outbreaks [Image courtesy of Stephen Baker

by Frankie Taggart

This is based on my article for AFP published on October 17. The original can be read here.

Scientists announced this week they had combined cutting-edge gene sequencing technology with Google Earth to accurately map the spread of typhoid in Kathmandu for the first time.

The Nepalese capital was described in a 2008 study as “a typhoid fever capital of the world”, with thousands of cases a year reported, but outbreaks have been hard to chart in a city where streets are rarely given names.

Researchers say they have used GPS signalling and the latest DNA sequencing techniques to plot the course of the disease — and have discovered the source of outbreaks is usually communal water spouts.

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Google Earth map of Kathmandu showing locations of the residences of confirmed typhoid infections and the 42 functional water spouts nearby. [Image courtesy of Stephen Baker/Google Earth

The research, published in the journal Open Biology on Sunday, was carried out by scientists at the Vietnam-based Wellcome Trust Major Overseas Programme and the Oxford University Clinical Research units in Kathmandu and Ho Chi Minh City.

You can read it for yourself here.

“Until now, it has been extremely difficult to study how organisms such as the typhoid-causing bacteria evolve and spread at a local level,” said Stephen Baker, a scientist with Oxford University’s Vietnam unit.

“Without this information, our ability to understand the transmission of these diseases has been significantly hampered.

“Now, advances in technology have allowed us for the first time to create accurate geographical and genetic maps of the spread of typhoid and trace it back to its sources.”

Health workers visited typhoid patients’ homes and used GPS technology to capture the exact location, which was then plotted onto Google Earth, which maps the Earth by superimposing images from satellites and aerial photography.

They took blood samples from hospitalised patients to isolate the organism — which mutates as it spreads — and allow analysis of its genetic make-up to identify where the disease had started.

The researchers found that people living near communal water spouts and those living at a lower elevation were at by far the greatest risk of contracting the disease.

“Improvements in infrastructure are fundamental to the control and elimination of typhoid”, said Baker.

Recent advances in DNA sequencing have allowed scientists to accurately track the spread of some diseases by measuring mutations in the pathogen’s DNA when the DNA replicates.

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World’s highest webcam brings Everest to internet

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Mount Everest

Mount Everest (source: public domain)

by Frankie Taggart

Note: This article was originally published by AFP on October 6, 2011.

The world’s highest webcam has been installed in the Nepalese Himalayas, beaming live images of Mount Everest back to scientists studying the effects of climate change on the planet’s tallest peak.

The solar-powered camera, set at 5,675 metres on Kala Patthar, a smaller mountain facing Everest, will withstand temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius and operates during daylight hours.

The device, developed by German surveillance firm Mobotix, is more than a kilometre higher than the previous record for a high-altitude webcam set by a 4,389-metre-altitude camera at the base camp of Mount Aconcagua in Argentina.

“We spent months developing the perfect set-up for the installation and invested a lot of time testing and verifying the system,” said Giampietro Kohl of Ev-K2-CNR, the mountain research group which installed the camera.

“It inspired us on to set a record: operating the highest webcam in the world.”

The webcam operates from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm Nepalese time (0015 to 1215 GMT) from the Kala Patthar summit, recording stunning images of 8,848-metre Mount Everest as well as the South Col.

The image is updated every five minutes, allowing climatologists to track the movement of the clouds around the mountain’s summit.

“Researchers selected Kala Patthar as the camera location because it offers an excellent view of the western side of Mount Everest, including the north and southwest faces of the mountain and the West Ridge,” a spokesman for Mobotix said in a statement.

The camera, which went live in September, uses a wireless connection to transmit images to the Ev-K2-CNR Pyramid Laboratory, located at an altitude of 5,050 metres.

The footage is then analysed by scientists in Italy who hope to learn more about climate change and global warming using the images in conjunction with meteorological data gathered from Everest.

The exact height of the world’s tallest peak is also being re-measured in a separate Nepali project attempting to end confusion on the issue.

The mountain, which straddles Nepal and China, is generally thought to stand at 8,848 metres after an Indian survey in 1954, but other more recent measurements have varied by several metres.

Last year, officials from Nepal and China reached a compromise under which Nepal measured the height of Everest’s snowcap at 8,848 metres and China measured the rock peak at 8,844 metres.

The final result will be known in two years’ time after reference points are set up on Everest and then global-positioning system satellites are used to calculate the precise measurement.

The first measurement of Everest was made in 1856. It was conquered in 1953 by Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, and has since been climbed by more than 3,000 people.

Images from the world’s highest webcam can be seen here.

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