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UCL East featured on BBC Radio 4: The Baffled Bat

21 December 2017

 

"Why don't thousands of bats in a cave get confused? How do they differentiate their own location echoes from those of other bats?" This puzzling problem was sent in to BBC Radio 4's 'The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry' by Tim Beard from Hamburg in Germany.

The presenters of the Curious Cases have turned bat detectives to try and track down these elusive creatures at The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in East London. This is where UCL's Professor Kate Jones is using a network of smart sensors to find, identify and track wild bats. As part of this radio episode, Kate explains to presenters Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry how bats echolocate and interact with each other.

The sensors are the result of a project called Nature Smart Cities, which has brought environmental, statistical, and computing researchers together with technologists to develop this pilot of the world's first end-to-end open source system for monitoring bats. Nature Smart Cities will find its home in the Future Living Institute in UCL East from 2021.

Listen to the full programme on the BBC Radio 4 website.