Planes Kill Huge Numbers of Birds. LEDs Could Save Their Lives

Each year thousands of birds collide with airplanes, dying in the process. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to figure out an effective way to help the animals survive alongside humans in the not-so-friendly skies. That may be changing, though. A team from Purdue University has uncovered a simple solution to the problem of bird collisions, at least for one species: adding red or blue LEDs to planes. The Purdue team described their experiment in a study published in the journal PeerJ.