Badger study may prove key

Badger study could bring rescue system Oxford - UPI   Technology used to track badgers underground could help locate people in an emergency situation such as a bomb attack or earthquake, British researchers say. While global positioning system devices are good at pinpointing locations in open spaces, below the surface they are useless, scientists at Oxford University said. Because of this, emergency services often struggled to locate people in underground areas or buried beneath debris, they said. A new technology that could help was developed by Oxford researchers Andrew Markham and Niki Trigoni as part of a project to study badgers in an Oxford forest, a university release said Tuesday. Badgers spend much of their lives underground where conventional technology can't keep tabs on them, so the researchers developed a system based on generating very low frequency fields to penetrate obstacles, enabling positioning and communication even through thick layers of rock, soil and concrete. "Our technology can work out your position in three dimensions from a single transmitter," Markham said. This contrasts with other approaches such as GPS or WiFi that are based on triangulation and typically require signals from at least four transmitters, he said. The technology has potential in many areas such as finding victims in emergencies and tracking people and equipment in modern mines, the researchers said.