Cameras Could Take Night Photos Without a Flash

A team of scientists led by Andras Kis at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have found a material that could make cameras five times more sensitive to light, reducing or even eliminating the need for a flash or a long exposure. The material — made from a mix of molybdenum and sulfur — was used to make a single-pixel prototype sensor that only needed 1/25th of a second to expose a nighttime streetscape that other cameras would require 1/5th of a second. The sensitivity of the new sensor is fast enough that moving people didn’t get blurred.

It works because molybdenite is much more sensitive to light than silicon, the other material other digital sensors in cameras are made from.

Besides sensitivity, there’s another plus to molybdenite: it’s cheap. Unlike other exotic technologies or semiconducting materials, there’s lots of it around and factories making image sensors out of it won’t need re-tooling.

World's Thinnest Camera Sees a Single Cell

The endoscope radically changed medicine; doctors were able to use a tiny camera at the end of a thread-thin wire to look into a patient’s body without major surgery. Engineers at Stanford University have taken the endoscope a step further: they’ve built the thinnest one ever and it see individual cells.

The Stanford is

Their needle-thin endoscope has the potential to image single cancer cells and peer into organs where larger endoscopes could do more damage than good, like in the brain. And the super thin endoscope would create a much smaller scar than a laparoscope, the instrument typically used to do knee surgery.

Conventional endoscopes are built with multiple optical fibers, some of which illuminate the area and others which record the image and carry it back to the viewer. The more fibers inside the endoscope, the better the resolution of the image. But more fibers also translates into a bulkier endoscope.

Kahn’s team built a endoscope using just one multimode fiber. Multimode fibers are capable of carrying light along many different paths — in fact, a “mode” is a path that light takes. The team’s idea was to use a single fiber to both illuminate an object as well as carry data from the image. The challenge is the information gets scrambled on the way, since the light is moving along different paths.

To make it work, Kahn’s team built a device called a spatial light modulator. The modulator sent a continuous beam of laser light down the fiber in random paths. Because of the random path, once the light exited the fiber it made a speckled pattern. Some of that light bounced back up the fiber.

A computer program created by Kahn’s team analyzed the speckled pattern returning up the fiber and used that to build an image. Their technique pushed the resolution of the image even further than what they had expected, and enabled them to see object that were sizes of individual cells.

Kahn said in a press release that he sees most of the new applications in imaging, to study in detail cells as they operate inside the body.

Mini Camera Gets A Big Brain

Cameras are mounted everywhere in sports these days. During the Olympics we had underwater cams for swimmers and athlete's-eye views for bikes. Now there's a camera that could be mounted on a helmet to record not just the athlete's view but her heart rate, acceleration and loction, too.

Called the INCA, the camera has a processor as powerful as any PC, which allows a lot of functionality crammed into a space less than  three inches on a side. The INCA was designed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS.

4K resolution

4K is a resolution standard in digital cinematography and computer graphics. The name is derived from the horizontal resolution, which is approximately 4,000 pixels (this designation is different from those used in the digital television industry, which are represented by the vertical pixel count). There are several different resolutions that qualify as 4K. YouTube is the only video hosting service that allows 4K videos to be streamed as it allows a resolution of up to 4096 x 3072 (12.6 megapixels).

4K resolution movie sample -

Crystals You Drink Every Morning: Big Pic

July 19, 2012 -- Almost everyone in the United States drinks some kind of caffeinated beverage daily. Whether it's coffee, tea, a soft drink or an energy drink, you're consuming caffeine, and that means you're consuming these crystalline xanthine alkaloids. This photo is a false-colored image of caffeine crystals taken with a scanning electron micrograph.

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The image was one of 16 winners of the annual Wellcome Image Awards, which were announced on 20 June 2012. Wellcome Images, based in the U.K., is a source for images of medicine, biomedical science and clinical medicine.

HOWSTUFFWORKS: How Scanning Electron Microscopes Work

The image was chosen as a winner because, "It's a bright, intricate image of something that most of us experience every day," said James Cutmore, Picture Editor at BBC Focus Magazine. He explained his decision on the Wellcome website, saying, "What interests me in my professional role is showing our readers images of everyday things from a different, at first unrecognisable, perspective. For that reason, this image really grabbed my attention.