Short Wave - Once A Satirical Conspiracy, Bird Drones Could Soon Be A Reality

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Millions of people in the U.S. are bird watchers. But a couple of years ago a satirical conspiracy theory gained popularity because of an absurd claim: That those birds were also watching people. Now, rather than being the stuff of internet memes, some engineers are, in fact, trying to reverse engineer how birds fly to eventually take what they learn to create more efficient bird-like drones. Today on the show, host Regina G. Barber talks to reporter Anil Oza about how scientists are using real birds to make fake ones. Want to learn more about innovations in science? Email us at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers. Regina Barbara here, and today we're welcoming back reporter and shortwaver Anil Oza. Hey, Anil. Hi, Gina. Okay, what do you got for us today? Today, I have a story about some high-tech birds. Oh, Nell, you and your critters.

I love critters, but it's not just me. So many people love birds. True. According to the government, somewhere around one in five people in the U.S. are bird watchers. But a couple of years ago, birds kind of got a bad name, and we're getting attention for all the wrong reasons. Wait, what was that? This is from what's called a bird truth or protest.

It comes from the satirical conspiracy theory that has a pretty provocative claim that birds aren't real. It was created as a commentary on how misinformation spreads nowadays, but I know someone that can explain it a lot better than I can. I've been running a fake conspiracy theory called Birds Aren't Real

for the past five years or so, which posits that the U.S. government killed over 12 billion. billion birds in the American skies and replace them with surveillance drone replicas that watch you and me every day. Peter McIndoo's fake conspiracy theory caught a lot of people's attention, including news outlets like CBS and Fox, because of how absurd it was, which was kind of the whole point. More than a million people have become followers of a conspiracy theory that birds aren't real. A campaign called Birds Are Not Real brings this efforts to them itself. I believe the government replaced birds,

with deep state agents who surveilled the American citizenry. Is it crazy? But having a drone that looks and functions like a bird doesn't quite sound as out there now. I came up with that concept because I thought, you know, that's one of the most outlandish things, but is sort of believable. But the times have sort of grown around the idea.

Like, as the years past, birds aren't real fits in more and more with things that are actually happening. And one of the people that is making that happen is Mustafa Hassanalyan. He's an engineer at New Mexico Tech. So I have been doing research on drones in about 15 years. And at the beginning, I was doing research on fixed-winged micro-aerial vehicles. Mustafa works in a field called biomimetics or biomimicry.

Okay, so like seeing how you can take ideas from nature and use them in your own technology. Yes, and that's not super uncommon. I mean, a lot of inspiration for technology comes from the natural world. Some of the earliest planes and subs were made because we were jealous of birds and fish. I mean, I am totally jealous of birds and fish. Right, you would be. But anyway, at a certain point, Mustafa hit a wall in his work, mimicking birds in drone technology. I had plenty of uncertainties during my design.

So, for example, how I can find out the optimum flapping frequency for my flapping wing, or what is the best wing shape for my flapping wing drone. And that was the time that I got to the area of biomimicry. And as he was exploring all of these questions about flight, it took him to one conclusion. Artificial material cannot replicate the actual flight of the birds. He just couldn't get it as good as nature had. And so he stopped trying to copy it himself.

Maybe instead of artificial material, I can use the feathers or the wings of the actual birds that they naturally did and they are taxidermite and use them for my flapping wings. Wow. Okay, so they use real birds to make drones. So what made them want to do this? Yeah. First, I want to clarify that no birds were harmed in the making of these drones.

They were already dead, but Mustafa was hoping that they can tell us a little more about how the bodies of these birds actually work. And these drones could be used for surveillance, just not on humans. The drones that are being used for wildlife monitoring, so for example, you want to study the herd of the elephants in Africa. So if you use those quadcopters or hexocopters with a camera mounted, to observe nature, we know that those type of drones, they are so noisy. They create lots of noise. And most of the times, animals will be scared and scattered. So today on the show, birds are real.

But some drones of the future may look more like birds than quadcopters. Plus, three ways birds are teaching scientists to make better drones. I'm Anil Oza. And I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shorewave from NPR. Okay, so Anil, we're going to talk about drones that are. are taking inspiration from birds. Big first question, why not just

model all our robotics after nature? Clearly, Mustafa's pretty sold on this idea of bio-inspiration. His lab is chock-full of a bunch of different robots that are based on a ton of different things. Birds, fish, spiders, roly-pollies. He's doing this because nature has been tinkering

for so much longer than we have. So we know that during the millions of years of evolution, nature has developed like processes, objects, materials, and functions. to increase its efficiency. So whatever we see in our daily life, or basically in the current life, is a treasure of millions of years. But it isn't perfect. And for Mustafa, it all comes down to scale. For example, nature hasn't quite tried to make something the size of an airplane that can

fly and hold a ton of weight. But it's pretty good at getting flight on a smaller scale. So for example, I can develop insect-sized flapping wing drone. It would be more efficient to develop a drone using flapping motion in the size of insects rather than having a wing or propellers. So looking at birds may not have us rethinking how we make our planes, but they could reshape smaller drones. Okay, so that makes sense. But you mentioned three main lessons birds are teaching engineers. Does one have to do with wings? Yes, it does.

I'm so good at this. Yes, you get a gold star for today. Yay! So lesson one is all about these wings and how efficient they are. So when you're flying, you're trying to generate force in two directions, up, which is called lift, and forward, which is called thrust. Yes, this is bringing me back to physics. I'm feeling comfortable now. Yeah, it's not my favorite subject, though. Well, it's because I wasn't your professor.

That is so true. But regardless of my personal feelings, in traditional drones, you have different parts of the vehicle doing these two different things, lifting the plane up and moving it forward. But in birds, they're doing both at the same time. When they flap their wings, they're getting lift and thrust at the same time. and it can really pay off. So how they save energy, what type of kinematics they are applying

in order to be more efficient for this long migration? That's actually fascinating. Like, what about their wings make them such efficient flyers? So scientists have a couple of ideas, but they don't get the full picture quite yet. And it probably has to do with everything,

from the shape of their wings to the way that they flap these wings and how they interact with the environment around them. And digging into the details about their wings brings me to lesson number two. And for that one, I want you to think about color. Okay. Why? Are we talking about fabulously colored birds like flamingos or peacocks or two cans or something?

No, less fun and fabulous in that, sadly. We're thinking black and white for this one. And I think a good example of this is an albatross. We actually covered them on the pod before, right? They're these huge birds that fly long distances over the ocean. Yeah, they've got these mostly white and black bodies. So they look kind of like a lot of sea birds, but that's kind of the key. here. The common things between them is their coloration. They have black color at the top side of

their wing and they have white color at the bottom side. Right. And now coming from a biology background, I'm used to thinking about colors on birds being for camouflage or mating or things like that. That's not what's going on here. The black color is absorbing more sound radiation. So it gets heat. So it changed the flow patterns around the wing. So the top surface of the wing is going to be hotter than the bottom side, and those birds, they can gain extra lift, and in the same time, reduce their drag. This is, like, really fascinating to me because I never thought about it in color, but it makes complete sense, right?

Because when you have hot air, you have lower pressure, and cold air has this, like, higher pressure. And if you have higher pressure underneath the wing, you're going to create that lift. Right. And that's part of what helps these albatrosses so that they can migrate super long distances without even flapping their wings that much. They do this thing called dynamic soaring, which helps them fly with so much less energy. Ooh, so cool. Okay. So let's move on to the final lesson.

So it has to do with what these colors are on, the feathers, bones, and also the fact that birds can very easily go with the flow. So when we're thinking about planes, David Lentink, a professor of biometics at the University of Froninga, says, We need to know the position of every part, at every moment, and make sure it does exactly what we wanted to do. And, you know, it means many motors, many sensors, and a complicated control loop, you know, over many degrees of freedom, so many movements, parts. And that's just not possible. When you're flying, there's wind coming from a bunch of

different directions. There's other objects, clouds, and even different temperatures. And birds are definitely very smart, but they're not consistently calibrating themselves to all of these different things and angling themselves in their bodies. That's not how birds do it. Specifically, their feathers can help them be really flexible. There's like an elastic ligament between all the feathers that just distributed automatically. If you pull on one feather, like the ones next to it, move a little bit with it. So that means, means that when a bird stretches its wing, all the feathers are automatically redistributed. Yeah, I can see why that would help. You don't have to coordinate each feather or muscle to move in a certain way.

But do we know how the bird's bodies do this? Not entirely. And part of it is that our technology isn't good enough to capture all of this. While we've been mostly talking about these larger migratory birds, David basically trains hummingbirds to voluntarily fly in a wind tunnel in his lab. We, for example, can fit them out with tiny markers. like a Hollywood motion capture studio. Cool. And so he's taking snapshots really quickly to see what's going on

down to the thousandth of a second. We can free-d-scan an entire bird at 1,000 frames or 3,000 frames per second. And that really doesn't exist elsewhere. So that's how we're able to actually see how they change the shape of their wing. And I talked to Shin Yonding,

an engineer at Purdue University, who's doing something similar with hummingbird drones, built with really flexible materials. And she told me that even when they put it through this really complicated obstacle course and it's bumping around or even after slicing off a part of its wing, it still worked. I feel like one of the biggest advantages of a bio-inspired robot, the flying one especially, is the resilient of the vehicle.

Okay, and so to recap the three lessons that these bird researchers have learned are, like, one, their wings are efficient and generate force in multiple directions, unlike drones, which currently use different components for each force. And two, birds have evolved to be colored in a way that maximizes the air pressure around them to have, like, better lift. Right. And three, birds have really flexible bones and feathers to make them more aerodynamic. So where does all this, like, these three lessons leave researchers? Well, with more research to do, they're still trying to close that gap between the limits of current drones and the perfection of bird flight. But if you ask Shinyan, the field has really progressed from where it was even just a few years ago.

And so when I talked to her for the story and about the idea that some birds might not be real, she initially laughed it off, but then she told me this. Maybe down in the future and not so distant future, you will not be able to distinguish the real and artificial birds. While these convincing bird drones could become a reality, it's not as grim as Peter's conspiracy theory could be. Technology is like a double sword, but I think I really like the idea of companion birds and a toy for kids. and for good, you know, pretty to good use. And nature is such a wonderful gift to human, and we should respect it and build man-made vehicles to do good things. But in the meantime, current drones can help us spy on other animals,

including birds, and help us learn more about them while making better bird-like drones in the future. Plus, the technology can help us understand the physics of flight so much better. Thank you for bringing us this story. It's always my pleasure, Tina. And they'll say it with me. Birds are real. I don't know if I can bring myself to do that.

Do it. All right. Birds are real. Before we head out, the end of the year is coming up, and we're reflecting a bit here at Shortwave. We've loved bringing you stories and interviews about everything from AI to astronauts in space to rats to the James Webb Space Telescope. And we're excited about everything we're going to get into in 2024. Hopefully with your financial support. This is where we want to say a big thank you to our Shortwave Plus.

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PR.org slash shortwave. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by a showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Britt Hansen checked the facts and Stacey Abbott was our audio engineer. I'm a little Ozo. And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shorewave from NPR.