Brent Chun, a scientist at Intel Research Laboratory in Berkeley, has been testing a program, Netbait, that was designed to spot potential worms.
"Why can't radar be designed to spot something as big as a flock of birds?" he asked.
The old system used the agency's own radars, which were designed to spot planes, not precipitation, and sometimes found storms where there were none, which led controllers to detour planes around imagined hazards, experts said.
Freedom of Information requests revealed that 24 councils had used or were thinking about using "voice risk analysis" (VRA) software, which is designed to spot signs of stress as people talk during phone calls.
KamLAND is designed to spot antineutrinos that are created by nuclear reactors that dot the Japanese and Korean landscape.
The AMS detector is designed to spot antimatter by magnetically bending particles and antiparticles--which have opposite charges--in different directions.
The 2-year-old Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) satellite is designed to spot those gamma and x-rays, which reveal how charged particles in a flare behave.
The tests were designed to spot what are called "super recognisers", individuals who can recognise the face of a person they have barely looked at, and those who might be suffering from a rare condition called prosopagnosia, or face-blindness.
This led to intrusion detection systems that were designed to spot attempted attacks on the network, and then to intrusion prevention systems that would take things a stage further and automatically block the intrusion.
Kepler was designed to spot exoplanets by noticing the telltale brightness dips they cause when crossing the face of, or transiting, their host stars' faces from the telescope's perspective.
