They also left an open cavity within the bottle, so the trapped air would give it buoyancy, keeping about half the device above the waterline and half below. They couldn’t, for instance, load all the batteries onto one side of the bottle. “It’s all about the center of gravity, really,” says Davies. ![]() (Their designs are open source, so any plastic researcher can build their own and even improve upon the system.) “The right everything”įor both versions of the device, they had to figure out how to make an electronics-stuffed tube behave like a real piece of plastic trash. Here they took inspiration from their prior work tracking sea turtles: GPS works great on the open ocean, far away from any cell service. ![]() So they outfitted a second generation with GPS. But the researchers also wanted to see how plastic bottles might behave once they get to the ocean. Their first generation of devices, the ones that sailed along the Ganges, had plenty of cell towers to ping along the way, so a SIM card would do. So our misadventures also give us a realistic idea of what happens.” Advertisementĭuncan and Davies actually cobbled together two generations of electronic bottles. “Some might be taken out of the river, and some might get caught in fishing gear out there. “It kind of gives realistic data of what does happen to plastic,” says Duncan, lead author on a new paper in PLOS ONE describing the system. But that’s not a waste of an electronic research bottle-quite the opposite, in fact. Still others seem to have got caught up in fishing nets. While some of the bottles traveled many miles over many weeks, others lost their ability to transmit their location. “Then it went offline, and then the data started accumulating,” he says. So they looked at the location logs, and watched the bottle jump out of the river and land in someone’s house-not typical behavior for an inanimate object. “We were like, ‘How the hell has our bottle used 300 megs’ worth of data?’” Davies recalls. This card had managed to rack up 300 megabytes of data. The researchers had planned on the SIM card using no more than 100 megabytes of data, given that each upload to a cell tower took a mere 2 kilobytes, max. ![]() One sailed 380 miles over 51 days.īut this particular bottle had gone rogue. SIM cards allowed the ill-fated bottle and its companions to connect to cell towers every three hours as they journeyed down the river, recording in great detail how far and how fast the devices traveled. You see, Davies, along with conservation scientist Emily Duncan of the University of Exeter and other researchers, had not long before released the bottle and nine others into the Ganges as part of a clever experiment to show how plastic pollution moves through rivers and eventually out to sea. “The reason we knew it was in use was when we got the bill,” says Alasdair Davies, a technical specialist at the Zoological Society of London. Those included a SIM card, which the person popped into a mobile device and then logged into Facebook. The giftee, who remains anonymous, must have gotten curious and ripped open the 500-milliliter bottle, finding that it was in fact packed with electronics. At first, it must have looked like an ordinary plastic bottle floating down the river, save for the rod poking out of its top, like a sailboat with a mast but no sail. Someone living along the Ganges River in India recently received a gift that we can safely say no one on Earth had ever gotten before.
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