The unimaginable journey of the digital plastic bottle

The incredible journey of the electronic plastic bottle

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Somebody residing alongside the Ganges River in India just lately acquired a present that we are able to safely say nobody on Earth had ever gotten earlier than. At first, it will need to have appeared like an unusual plastic bottle floating down the river, save for the rod poking out of its prime, like a sailboat with a mast however no sail. The giftee, who stays nameless, will need to have gotten curious and ripped open the 500-milliliter bottle, discovering that it was in actual fact full of electronics. These included a SIM card, which the particular person popped right into a cellular gadget after which logged into Fb.

“The explanation we knew it was in use was after we received the invoice,” says Alasdair Davies, a technical specialist on the Zoological Society of London. You see, Davies, together with conservation scientist Emily Duncan of the College of Exeter and different researchers, had not lengthy earlier than launched the bottle and 9 others into the Ganges as a part of a intelligent experiment to indicate how plastic air pollution strikes by means of rivers and ultimately out to sea. SIM playing cards allowed the ill-fated bottle and its companions to hook up with cell towers each three hours as they journeyed down the river, recording in nice element how far and how briskly the units traveled. One sailed 380 miles over 51 days.

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