Tech
Researchers launch smoke-sensing drones that one day could fight wildfires
Plumes of smoke drifted up from a fire steadily taking over a 30-acre prairie at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve, north of the Twin Cities. Amid the haze, five black drones zipped around.
More than 150 feet below the flying robots, research student Nikil Krishnakumar raised the controller in the air. The work has been published on the arXiv preprint server.
“It’s all autonomous now,” he said. “I’m not doing anything.”
The aerial robotic team’s mission: examine the smoke from the prescribed burn and send the data to a computer on the ground. The computer then analyzes the smoke data to understand the fire’s flow patterns, Krishnakumar said.
The University of Minnesota project is the latest research into using artificial intelligence to detect and track wildfires. The work has become more urgent as climate change is expected to make wildfires, like those that devastated Manitoba this summer, larger and more frequent.
NOAA’s Next-Generation Fire System consists of two satellites 22,000 miles above the equator that detect new sources of heat and report them to local National Weather Service stations and its online dashboard. Earlier this year, the satellites were credited with spotting 19 fires in Oklahoma and preventing $850 million in structure and property damage, according to the agency.
In Minnesota, Xcel has installed tower-mounted, AI-equipped high-definition cameras near power lines in Mankato and Clear Lake. Thirty-six more are planned. When a fire is detected, local fire departments are notified.
Krishnakumar and other members of the U’s research team performed their 11th trial at the U’s field station in East Bethel on Friday, with notable improvements from their previous attempts.
The first-generation drones crashed several times during previous field tests, Krishnakumar said. The team upgraded sensors for better data collecting and autonomous steering, and improved the drones’ propulsion by making them bigger and fitting them with better propellers.
“The big picture is one day these drones can be used to understand where the wildfires go, how they behave and to perform large-scale surveillance of wildfires,” Krishnakumar said. “The major challenge we’re trying to understand is how far these smoke particles can be transported and the altitude at which they can go.”
Understanding the behavior of particles like embers can help firefighters prevent wildfires from spreading, said Yue Weng, another researcher on the team.
Though the project has a way to go before it can be used for large-scale wildfires, the research represents a significant step toward using fully autonomous drone systems for emergency response and scientific research missions, said Jiarong Hong, professor at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.
This year, 1,200 wildfires have been recorded in Minnesota so far, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. On a smaller scale, the technology could also be used to better manage prescribed burns, Hong said. Between 2012 and 2021, prescribed burns that went out of control caused 43 wildfires nationwide, according to the Associated Press.
“To characterize and measure particle transport in the real field is very challenging. Traditionally, people do small-scale lab experiments and study this at a fundamental level,” Hong said. “Such an experiment doesn’t capture the complexity involved in the real field environment.”
Smoke changes direction with the wind. Deploying multiple drones—with one at the center managing the four around it—enables them to navigate in the air without human intervention, Hong said.
The 11-pound drones were custom-built by the students to autonomously collect particle data. Future improvements to the project include collecting more data and extending the battery life of the drones. The drones are currently able to operate in the air for about 25 minutes, less in colder temperatures, Hong said.
“We have drones flying out at different heights, so we can actually measure the particle composition at different elevations at the same time,” Hong said.
“Particles are in a very irregular shape and some of them are porous and have varying levels of density. But we have been able to characterize their morphology and shape for the very first time.”
More information:
Nikil Krishnakumar et al, 3D Characterization of Smoke Plume Dispersion Using Multi-View Drone Swarm, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2505.06638
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Tech
LG’s High-End Soundbar System Makes My Living Room Feel Like a Home Theater
Setup was relatively quick and painless. You just have to unbox four speakers, a soundbar, and a subwoofer, attach their power cables, and plug in everything. Pairing happens through the LG ThinQ app, which allows you to set up the Sound Suite system and tune it to exactly where you’re sitting in the room using your cell phone’s microphone.
You can also set up each speaker to play music and group it with any other LG smart speakers you might have around your home, like the more affordable $250 M5 bookshelf speaker, to create a whole-home system.
Once all the components were synced, I plugged the soundbar into the C5 OLED via HDMI, and was able to easily control everything via the TV remote’s volume and mute buttons. More in-depth settings had to happen in the app, but if you’re anything like me, this won’t become a regular chore. You’ll set it how you like it once and move on. While the pairing functionality with the LG TV was nice, it’s not required–the eARC port lets the Sound Suite work perfectly with any modern TV.
The bar itself runs the show, with a black-and-white display on the far left that shows your mode and volume, among other settings. In the center of the bar and below each speaker, an LED light strip that also shows you the volume when you change it, which is a nice touch.
Getting Musical
Photograph: Parker Hall
The sound of the LG Sound Suite is full and cinematic, thanks in no small part to the extra dedicated speakers. Most competitors lack front left and right, simply opting to use the soundbar for these channels. As such, the width and breadth of the soundstage were bigger than most competitors I’ve tried, with only Samsung’s flagship HW-Q990F as a real contender. Even the Samsung lacked the lower-frequency audio quality that these LG speakers provide.
Tech
‘The Last Airbender’ Leaked Online. Some Fans Say Paramount Deserves the Fallout
The online leak of a full version of Avatar: Aang, The Last Airbender—a highly anticipated animated film in a multimedia fantasy franchise—has divided passionate fans while upsetting those who spent years working on the film.
The leaks began on X late on Saturday night, about six months before Aang was scheduled to premiere on Paramount+. User @ImStillDissin posted two short clips from the film. “Nickelodeon accidentally emailed me the entire Avatar aang movie,” he claimed. He also threatened to stream the entire movie if Paramount didn’t release an official trailer, and he posted a still from the movie’s end credits, revealing previously undisclosed voice-over cast and roles. The media from @ImStillDissin’s posts were later hit with copyright strikes and removed.
But within 48 hours, links to download the full movie appeared on 4chan and X, where some users also directly streamed the film. Across the web, fans said they had successfully pirated and watched what appeared to be a nearly finished and “beautiful” animated film.
While some argued that Paramount deserved to be punished because of certain creative and marketing decisions around the movie, others noted what a blow the leak was to the animators and production crew. A number of those team members took to social media to convey their sadness and frustration.
“We worked on the aang movie for years with the expectation that’d [sic] we’d get to celebrate all of our hard work in theaters. Just to see people unceremoniously leak the film and pass our shots around on twitter like candy,” animator Julia Schoel wrote Tuesday on X.
The user behind @ImStillDissin, who would not reveal his real name due to fear of legal repercussions, tells WIRED that he obtained the movie almost by chance and did not expect his posts to set off such a crisis in the entertainment world. “When I posted those clips I was purely trolling,” he says. “I was expecting a day of clout farming at best, not for the whole thing to blow up like this.”
(While WIRED has done its due diligence in verifying that the person speaking to us was behind the @ImStillDissin X account, we acknowledge that the hacking community is known to troll.)
According to @ImStillDissin, a screen-grabbed version of Avatar: Aang, The Last Airbender was circulating among people he knew from his days in the hacking community, one of whom shared it with him. “Broadly speaking, the supply chain for movies and TV is rife with insecure companies and vendors and lax checks,” he claims. He notes that two different SpongeBob SquarePants movies leaked months before their release dates in 2024. “Someone on 4chan who wasn’t happy at me drip-feeding stuff posted a copy of a draft script [of the new Avatar film] from like two years back,” says @ImStillDissin.
Neither Nickelodeon nor its parent company Paramount have confirmed a hack had taken place, nor have they issued a statement on the matter. They also did not respond to requests for comment.
Originally announced in 2021, Avatar: Aang, The Last Airbender marked the first production for Avatar Studios, a division of Nickelodeon’s animation department.
Some people felt justified in pirating and sharing the movie due to the recasting of voice actors. Last year, during a Reddit AMA, casting director Jenny Jue wrote that the voice cast from the Avatar TV show that aired on Nickelodeon in the 2000s was not returning due to efforts to “match actors’ ethnic/racial background to the characters they’re portraying.”
Tech
NASA Wants to Put Nuclear Reactors on the Moon
Having demonstrated that it has the operational capability to transport humans safely to the moon and back, the United States is moving on to its next major aim: It wants nuclear reactors in orbit and on the lunar surface by 2030. For such a feat, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will have to work in conjunction with the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy.
In a post on X, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) unveiled a document with new guidelines for federal agencies to establish the space nuclear technology road map for the coming years. This, they say, will ensure “US space superiority.”
At present, space instruments use solar power to operate. However, this is considered impractical for more complex purposes. Although technically there is always sunlight, the power is intermittent and almost always requires bulky batteries to store it.
Reactors produce fairly continuous energy for years through nuclear fission. They can also be used for so-called nuclear electric propulsion. Continuous output makes them the most viable option for lunar base subsistence, but they can also allow spacecraft to undertake long or complex missions without worrying about depleting a limited supply of chemical fuel.
Nuclear technology, in short, makes it possible to go farther, with more payload, for longer, and with fewer constraints.
According to the memorandum, the US goal is to put a medium-power reactor in orbit by 2028, with a variant designed for nuclear electric propulsion, and a first functional large reactor on the surface of the moon by 2030. To achieve this, both NASA and the Pentagon will develop energy technologies in parallel, using the current strategy of competition among contractors.
The reactors will have to be modular and scalable, and will have to include applications for both future life on the moon and space propulsion. For its part, the DOE will have to ensure that these projects have the fuel, infrastructure, and safety features necessary to achieve their objectives. In addition, the agency will evaluate whether the industry has the capacity to produce up to four reactors in five years.
The plan contemplates technologies that produce at least 20 kilowatts of electricity (kWe) for three years in orbit and at least five years on the lunar surface. In the meantime, they should have a design capable of raising power to 100 kWe. The first designs should arrive within a year.
Finally, the order tasks the OSTP with creating a road map for the initiative, noting obstacles and recommendations for addressing them.
“Nuclear power in space will give us the sustained electricity, heating, and propulsion essential to a permanent presence on the moon, Mars, and beyond,” OSTP posted. For his part, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman posted, “The time has come for America to get underway on nuclear power in space.” The message was followed by an emoji of a US flag.
The plan provides a common framework for each agency to work within. In the background, the race for space infrastructure is evidence of technological competition with China, which is also seeking advanced energy capabilities for the moon.
This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.
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