基本信息
even plant can run a fever, especially when they’re under attack by insects or diseas e. but unlike human, plants can have their temperature taken from 3, 000 feet away straight up. a decade ago, adopting the infrared（红外线）scanning technology developed for military purposes and other satellites, physicist stephen paley came up with a quick way to take the temperature of crops to determine which ones are under stress. the goal was to let farmers precisely target pesticide （杀虫剂）spraying rather than rain poison on a whole field, which invariably includes plants that don’t have pest （害虫）problems. even better, paley’s remote scanning services company could detect crop problems before they became visible to the eye. mounted on a plane flown at 3, 000 feet at night, an infrared scanner measured the heat emitted by crops. the data were transformed into a color-coded map showing where plants were running“fevers”. farmers could then spot -spray, using 50 to 70 percent less pesticide than they otherwise would.[来源:学。科。网] the bad news is that paley’s company closed down in 1984, after only three years.
