Wisconsin is famous for cheese. But it's also the United States' number-one producer of a tart¹, red fruit that's on pretty much every Thanksgiving dinner table.

威斯康星州以奶酪闻名。此外，在美国，它也是一种酸酸的、红红的水果的第一产地，这种水果还是感恩节餐桌上的必备菜品。

"We have this reputation of being the dairy state, but cranberries² outnumber the cows," said Susan Hagness, an electrical engineer at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校的电气工程师苏珊·哈格奈斯称：“虽然威斯康星有着乳制品州的美誉，但这里的蔓越莓其实比奶牛多。”

Cranberries, she says, are big business -- they're the official state fruit! And supply chain managers need estimates of the size of the upcoming harvest. Which can be hard to make.

她表示，蔓越莓是一个很大的产业--因为它们是该州的州果！每到丰收季，蔓越莓的供应商都要估算收成，这项工作十分艰辛。

"The current approach for estimating cranberry³ yield is literally⁴ to go out into the field and hand pick and hand count all the cranberries in a one-square-foot area. This is obviously an inefficient⁵ and laborious⁶ approach. There can be up to 900 berries per square foot."

“目前估算蔓越莓产量的办法就是到地里去，对一平方英尺的蔓越莓进行手工实地采摘和手工计数，很显然，这种方法效率低下，耗时费力，因为一平方英尺内蔓越莓的产量可能高达900个果子。”

So scientists from Ocean Spray asked Hagness for help. And she and her team found in lab tests that zapping cranberry plants with microwaves, and then studying the signal that bounces back, might work.

所以，来自优鲜沛公司的科学家就向哈格奈斯寻求帮助。她和她的团队在实验室试验时发现，用微波对蔓越莓进行刺激，研究反射回来的信号，或许就能算出蔓越莓数量。

Recall that your microwave oven works by exciting water molecules⁷ in whatever you're heating up. Same concept here: microwaves interact differently with plump, juicy cranberries -- which contain lots of water -- than they do with leaves.

回想你用微波炉加热东西时，不管你加热的是什么，都会激发物体里面的水分子。同样的道理，蔓越莓果实鼓胀多汁，比蔓越莓叶含水更多，它们对微波的反射情况也有差异。

The return signal thus provides a good estimate of the number of cranberry clusters in a given plot.

因此，反射回来的信号可以很好地估算出指定土地的蔓越莓的数量。

By the way, the microwaves for this application are very low power -- on par⁸ with the radiation that comes out of a cell phone. "You know we're not cooking the cranberries right there in the field."

顺便说一下，这种应用的微波能量很低--与手机的辐射同等水平。“你知道的，我们毕竟不是去烹饪田里的蔓越莓。”