No audio available for this content.
India gives up on GNSS tolling
Instead, the ANPR-FASTag hybrid system will continue to rely on ground-based high-speed cameras to identify vehicles and radio-frequency-identification FASTag readers to charge them.
The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways is proceeding with corridor projects relying on automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) and FASTag systems, which don’t require vehicles to stop. A GNSS toll system tracks the exact location of the vehicle and calculates the distance traveled on a toll roll, ensuring that users end up paying for just the distance they actually traveled.
For several years, the Indian government had intended to implement a GNSS-based toll system based on real-time location tracking. Now, it looks like these plans have been scrapped.
Promoting precious pollinators
Washington State University (WSU) is leading the Pacific Northwest Pollen Atlas (bees.wsu.edu) to map and describe pollen. It aims to determine pollinator health and thus food humans eat that depend on pollination. Honey bees and other pollinators collect pollen from plants within a two-mile radius of their hive.
“We hope to create a database of plants and share the nutrient content in their pollen so gardeners can plant a healthy variety,” said Priya Chakrabarti Basu, WSU assistant professor, Entomology.
Researchers will map pollen varieties collected by citizen scientists in every Washington county over a four-year period and colleagues around the Pacific Northwest are also recruiting to increase the project’s scope. Expected to take decades to complete, the efforts are part of Basu’s larger effort to map pollen nutrition across North America.
How’s the weather out there?
High-resolution atmospheric data is the missing link in forecasting weather. A new approach sharpens GNSS tomography, while showing how the model makes decisions — a transparency critical for building trust as AI enters weather forecasting.
By revealing the hidden details of storms and humidity patterns, the new method can give forecasters the tools needed to anticipate extreme events with greater confidence, according to researchers at Wrocław University, Poland. The team described their deep-learning framework in a paper published in Satellite Navigation in August.
With sharper GNSS tomography, meteorologists can feed more accurate humidity fields into both physics-based and AI-driven forecasting models, significantly improving storm prediction and early-warning systems.
Africa is really huge
A Correct the Map campaign aims to replace the 16th-century Mercator map because it doesn’t show the true size of Africa, which is three times as large as Europe. Supporters say the historic map — created to guide European explorers — promotes a false view of the continent and its size, fostering a false impression that Africa is “marginal.”
In August, the 55-country African Union endorsed the campaign to have organizations around the world replace the Mercator with alternatives such as the 2018 Equal Earth projection. The African Union is expected to make an official decision to adopt the Equal Earth map in February. The campaign also asks the United Nations and the BBC to adopt the Equal Earth map.
