Published Aug 15, 2023 by Dawn M.K. Zoldi (Colonel, USAF, Retired)

According to Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, who kicked off Alaska’s inaugural Global Autonomous Systems Conference here last week, the state has three key ingredients to skyrocket it to drone domination: its people, the place and the policy.

The multi-day event attracted close to 200 attendees, most of whom traveled from afar to the 49th state with hopes of doing business there. These highlights from the event showcase what make Alaska uniquely situated to propel the drone industry.

Whereas Alaska may be flush with natural beauty and resources, at the same time it lacks infrastructure and capacity. Because of Alaska’s enormous and complex landscape, about 80% of its communities lack road systems. These communities rely on a short tugboat season for delivery of materials and bulk fuel. The only other means to connect them to the rest of the world is by way of expensive charter aviation. Alaska’s aviation community, which comprises only 1% of the total U.S. aviation population, accounts for 40% of the collisions.

But Alaska’s leaders view these challenges as opportunities. Dr. Cathy Cahill, director of the Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration (ACUASI) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), emphasized that Alaska’s remoteness, physical infrastructure and other challenges lend themselves to deploying autonomous technology “almost anywhere.”

The combination of such a difficult environment and limited resources sparked the state’s innovation in uncrewed aircraft systems and autonomy. The UAF successfully bid to become one of the original six FAA test sites. It also became one of the first seven lead participants in both the FAA’s original UAS Integration Pilot Program (IPP) and the Alliance For System Safety Of UAS Through Research Excellence (ASSURE). It now holds steady as a lead participant in the agency’s current BEYOND program, successor to the IPP.

This ability to enter into research and development at the inception of the drone industry has enabled Alaska to rack up a significant list of policy and “firsts,” which have enabled historic feats. Ranked high among these, last year, the UAF conducted the first remotely controlled operation of a civilian large drone (a 280 pound Sentry with a 13-foot wingspan), to fly on a general aviation runway into controlled airspace, at an international airport. A culmination of years of coordination with the FAA and the airport, this mission successfully demonstrated the potential of large drone missions for cargo delivery and other essential Alaska missions.

Published Aug 15, 2023 by Rachael Funnell

Alaska’s largest dinosaur track site has been discovered in Denali National Park, and researchers are calling it a “dinosaur coliseum”. If the epic nickname isn’t enough to convince you that this is a big deal, a new study has described how the coliseum contains a record number of species' footprints across many generations in the form of tracks preserved layer upon layer.

The vertical lasagne of footprints is made up of a combination of hardened impressions left in ancient mud by the footfall of heavy dinosaurs, and the casts created by sediment that fell into those impressions and hardened. They are many, from a diverse cast of dinosaurs, and they're remarkably detailed.

“They are beautiful,” said Pat Druckenmiller, senior author of the paper and director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North, in a statement. “You can see the shape of the toes and the texture of the skin.”

According to the footprint lasagne, the site was popular with large plant-eating duck-billed and horned dinosaurs, as well as some of the rarer carnivores like raptors, tyrannosaurs, and a few small wading birds.

“It was forested and it was teeming with dinosaurs,” said Druckenmiller. “There was a tyrannosaur running around Denali that was many times the size of the biggest brown bear there today. There were raptors. There were flying reptiles. There were birds. It was an amazing ecosystem.”

Now that the setting Sun has enabled scientists to shed light on the significance of this popular dinosaur site, the plan is to continue research while collaborating with the National Park Service to preserve its remarkable geology.

Published Aug 15, 2023 by https://fm.kuac.org/people/robyne

Hibernation scientists at University of Alaska Fairbanks have invited colleagues and students from around the world to a workshop in Fairbanks. They reviewed each others’ findings indoors last week, and will head up to Toolik Lake Research Station in the Brooks Range this week for outdoor lab work.

Hibernation occurs across the world, so how has Fairbanks, and UAF specifically, become an international center for hibernation research? Credit the Arctic Ground Squirrel, which was discovered in 1989 to lower its body temperature to below freezing, and survive.

That discovery, by Dr. Brian Barnes, rocked Science. It also seeded subsequent research in cryogenics that could benefit emergency medicine and space travel.

This week the workshop heads up to UAF’s Toolik Lake research station for lab work on arctic animals.