MEPION

When GPS was invented for Memory Wave Method navy use, the designers might scarcely have imagined a number of the functions civilians would ultimately give you for the know-how. The worldwide Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-primarily based navigation system, a network of two dozen orbital spacecraft that was put in place between the late 1970s and the mid-nineteen nineties by the U.S. But the Pentagon soon allowed civilians to make the most of the system's ability to pinpoint exact locations. At present, GPS-equipped gadgets -- from those cheery speaking maps mounted on our dashboards to chips in our smartphones that help us to seek out nearby restaurants -- have become part of our on a regular basis lives. The actual transformational power of GPS is evidenced by the myriad offbeat makes use of that folks have dreamed up for it. Listed below are 10 of the extra unconventional uses for GPS know-how. However hopefully it should ease their minds to know that nearly 50 large sharks have been tagged with GPS units, in order that a corporation referred to as OCEARCH can pinpoint each of their places at any given moment.

When the sharks get near shore, an alarm is sent to lifeguards, who then inform folks to get out of the water. But the tagging is also yielding new information concerning the mysterious species' movements and habits. For example, researchers have discovered that sharks do not solely stay in cold water, as expected; some go as far the Gulf of Mexico in the summer. In an effort to thwart drug thieves, New York Metropolis police got here up with a technologically superior variation on exploding dye packs that are attached to cash banks hand to robbers. The police stocked pharmacies with decoy oxycodone bottles concealing GPS monitoring gadgets, which detectives use to trace criminals. The bottles are weighted and rattle when shaken, in order that thieves won't acknowledge that they contain trackers. Paul J. Browne, explained to the brand new York Occasions in 2013. Wallace, who makes use of the nickname WallyGPX, rides around on a bike geared up with a GPS tracker and mapping software program, drawing on the computerized map together with his movements.

He uses the grid structure of city streets in southeast Baltimore, and rides by means of a big local park to create curved traces. A bunch of researchers from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University are desirous to answer that question for you. They're hoping to equip more than 1,000 cats - some within the Charlotte area, others as far away as Australia and Memory Wave Germany - with GPS-enabled transmitters on harnesses, which is able to enable them to trace the movements of outdoor cats in 2014. They're augmenting the GPS knowledge with different info, together with analysis of cat feces that they're encouraging homeowners to collect. The analysis may make clear the extent to which cats pose a menace to birds. However it additionally may yield other surprises. Some Geocaching events are staged in parks, however there additionally are treasures secreted in city neighborhoods as nicely. However how about tracking your own movements on a ship as its plying the seas?

A triathlete and blogger who calls himself DC Rainmaker wrote in 2011 that, while on his honeymoon cruise, he became interested by how his day by day runs on the ship's circular 10-laps-to-a-mile working observe would look on a GPS map, for the reason that ship also would be moving. When he did a 3-mile (5-kilometer) run after which plotted the outcomes on Google Maps, he found that he could see a peculiar wavy pattern, nearly as if he was operating in one direction but veering from aspect to aspect, as an alternative of in a circle. However the ship's forward movement additionally augmented the velocity displayed on his Garmin wrist operating tracker. Google's program to develop driverless automobiles, which started to shift into high gear in 2014, relies upon upon a synergy of GPS, sensors and cameras to perform that feat. The GPS gadget plots the automotive's location, pace and course relative to the destination, while a laser on the roof helps create a digital 3-D model of nearby objects to tag possible hazards.