Compared to 25 years ago, the climbing sport itself has changed dramatically. From a rock climbing modification to a separation in three independent disciplines, the requirements to athletes and trainers increased rapidly. To ensure continuous improvement of the sport itself, the usage of measurement and sensor technology is unavoidable. Especially in the field of the discipline speed climbing, which will be performed as a single discipline at the Olympic Games 2024 in Paris, the current state of the art of movement analysis only consists of video analysis and the benefit of the experience of trainers. Therefore, this paper presents a novel method, which supports trainers and athletes and enables analysis of motion sequences and techniques. Prerecorded video footage is combined with existing feature and human body keypoint detection algorithms and standardized boundary conditions. Therefore, several image processing steps are necessary to convert the recorded movement of different speed climbing athletes to significant parameters for detailed analysis. By studying climbing trials of professional athletes and the used techniques in different sections of the speed climbing wall, the aim among others is to get comparable results and detect mistakes. As a conclusion, the presented method enables powerful analysis of speed climbing training and competition and serves with the aid of a user-friendly designed interface as a support for trainers and athletes for the evaluation of motion sequences.

Singing in birds is accompanied by beak, head and throat movements. The role of these visual cues has long been hypothesised to be an important facilitator in vocal communication, including social interactions and song acquisition, but has seen little experimental study. To address whether audio‐visual cues are relevant for birdsong we used high‐speed video recording, 3D scanning, 3D printing technology and colour‐realistic painting to create RoboFinch, an open source adult‐mimicking robot which matches temporal and chromatic properties of songbird vision. We exposed several groups of juvenile zebra finches during their song developmental phase to one of six singing robots that moved their beaks synchronised to their song and compared them with birds in a non‐synchronised and two control treatments. Juveniles in the synchronised treatment approached the robot setup from the start of the experiment and progressively increased the time they spent singing, contra to the other treatment groups. Interestingly, birds in the synchronised group seemed to actively listen during tutor song playback, as they sung less during the actual song playback compared to the birds in the asynchronous and audio‐only control treatments. Our open source RoboFinch setup thus provides an unprecedented tool for systematic study of the functionality and integration of audio‐visual cues associated with song behaviour. Realistic head and beak movements aligned to specific song elements may allow future studies to assess the importance of multisensory cues during song development, sexual signalling and social behaviour. All software and assembly instructions are open source, and the robot can be easily adapted to other species. Experimental manipulations of stimulus combinations and synchronisation can further elucidate how audio‐visual cues are integrated by receivers and how they may enhance signal detection, recognition, learning and memory.

We introduce a multi-sensor array consisting of multiple microphones and a stereo-vision system that enables to track three-dimensional flight paths of bats. Field applicability is a major design factor which led to a portable battery powered system. Eight microphones form the acoustic array that allows the detection and localization of ultrasonic echolocation calls. Two near infrared sensitive cameras provide a visual identification of the three dimensional flight path. We minimized costs of this multi-sensor arrays by developing the system from ground up including a novel acoustic signal recording and processing hardware. Our acoustic data acquisition system is the first to sample eight microphones simultaneously at 1MS/s/CH with 16 Bit resolution without the necessity of computers or laptops. All channels are processed in real time in the frequency and time domain to evaluate the occurrence of echolocation calls. Hereby, long term deployments of the system are achieved since only relevant signals are recorded. Parallel to the acoustic acquisition the system records images of two near infrared (IR) sensitive cameras at 12Hz frame rate each. Combined with IR illumination 3D flight paths can be extracted in post-processing. In addition, the system is able to log several environmental parameters such as temperature and humidity. Recorded datasets can be associated with a global position and time-stamp through a GPS module and transformed to GPS coordinates with a three-axis accelerometer to determine the angle. The overall system (microphones, cameras and sensors) was designed to be affordable, user-friendly, battery powered and without the necessity of an additional laptop.

Carbon−carbon bond formation by dual Iridium‐Nickel photoredox catalysis has gained a lot of attention for late‐stage cross‐couplings of alkyls with aryls. However, the scalability of such reactions is greatly impeded by the poor light penetration depth into the strongly absorbing reaction media. Wireless internal illumination is a novel technique which circumvents the light penetration issue efficiently and therefore allows to scale photon‐driven reactions by conventional methods. Here we demonstrate that industrially relevant photoredox C−C couplings can be scaled seamlessly to different volumes, achieving qualitatively and quantitatively the same results at all scales. The use of conventional reactor types allows stirred, bubble column or fixed‐bed operation mode and is fully compatible with heterogeneous reaction mixtures. By minimizing reflection losses, we could also show a significant advantage in the reaction rate over an externally illuminated setup at the same light intensity.