Heavy Weather

One of the future-tech toys in Bruce Sterling's excellent Heavy Weather is almost with us: Storm researchers will be remotely flying instrument-laden drone aircraft into hurricanes this season.  In fact, from the story at the BBC, the NOAA (the USA's weather science folks) have a real hardon for drone tech as it's cheaper and can go into more preposterously dangerous situations than a piloted aircraft. 

Punch that core, oh yes.  They're not doing tornadoes yet, and the drones don't feed back full immersive VR, but I think we've all learned by now that immersive VR ain't all that; it's just one visualisation of the data, and a limited one at that.  Plus the drones are great for scut-work like repeat-flying a grid over taking photos and readings; stuff that's very valuable to climate science and very boring and expensive for squishy meat pilots.

It's always nice to see some recent war tech getting a ploughshares trickle-down.