Life-Saving Baseballs

DeAshcroft writes "Researchers at the Penn State Acoustics Lab have developed life-saving baseballs. As described in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, the team put microphones and wireless transmitters into baseballs, which they toss into piles of rubble to find the (noise-making) survivors. The advantage with baseballs is that they apparently don't have to stop work on the pile to listen for survivors. So, remember, if you're ever trapped in a collapsed building, the basball is your friend. The college paper has a story."

Comments

Not Baseballs

[rcs2]

they are wireless microphones, theres nothing about the baseball that means anything. The article says they put one of the mics in a baseball and hit it with a bat to test shock resiliency.

Re:Triangulation, tetrahedrons, golf balls

[Eivind]

You're wrong.

To find a spot in a 3D-environment the direction from 3 distinct baseballs is enough. In a 2D field, *2* baseballs would be enough.

Re:Why baseballs?

[Black Copter Control]

It seems like you never bothered to read the article.. putting it into a baseball was just to test the resilience of the unit--- Hit a home run, then check to see if the microphone is still transmitting when it lands. The reason why they didn't play golf with it may simply be that (including the transmitter and battery) it was simply too big to fit.

"Far be it for me to criticize, sir, but that golf ball aooears to be almost the size of a baseball...

Re:someone already did this?

[Black Copter Control]

I have seen a few shows on discovery channel about avalanches and using transmitters to find people. What is the difference between those devices and this one done by Penn State?

For avalanche rescue, the transmitters are usually being worn by the people who buried. If you're hunting for someone trapped in an avalanche, there's not much need for tranmitting microphones in the hands of the rescuers. At the most, you'd want a microphone on the end of a long stick that you'd poke into the snowpile while listening for an "ouch".