Dr Gábor Horváth [pictured here], who discovered that white horses attract fewer flies (described here a few months ago), now may have shed light on an old, somewhat related question about Vikings. The study is “On the trail of Vikings with polarized skylight: experimental study of the atmospheric optical prerequisites allowing polarimetric navigation by Viking […]
Tag: flies
Horseflies, Horses, and Horvath
Dr Gábor Horváth discovered that white horses attract fewer flies. Horváth, head of the Environmental Optics Laboratory at Eotvos University in Budapest, solves mysteries about light and about living creatures. He and five colleagues wrote a study called An Unexpected Advantage of Whiteness in Horses: The Most Horsefly-proof Horse Has a Depolarising White Coat, which […]
Surveillance: Tracking multiple fruit flies
The science and engineering of tracking multiple missiles (which tend to move in fairly predictable paths) pales compared to this advance in surveillance: “Multi-camera Realtime 3D Tracking of Multiple Flying Animals“, Andrew D. Straw, Kristin Branson, Titus R. Neumann, Michael H. Dickinson, 2010, arXiv:1001.4297v1. (Thanks to Ben Stromquist.)