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.

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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.

Sound Waves Focused Into Laserlike Beam

We’ve all seen laser beams — narrow and powerful beams of light used in everything from CD players to weapons. Now researchers have found a way to make sound waves that, like light waves in a laser, travel in step. They call it a phaser and it could open up applications as wide-ranging as precision timer circuits and better ultrasound scans.

The researchers from NTT Basic Laboratories in Japan call their device a phaser because it uses phonons, waves of sound that require a medium, such as a gas, liquid or solid, to travel.

To create the beam, they started with a tiny drum just a few nanometers across, and put it inside a cavity, which acted like a resonator. They vibrated the drum, which transmitted energy to the cavity, and created the phonons. The cavity confined the sound waves. At a certain frequency, called the resonant frequency, the material of the cavity relaxed in a very specific way, creating vibrations that transferred energy back into the drum. Those vibrations are at a specific frequency and if one connected the resonator to a solid material those vibrations would travel away in a narrow beam. That traveling wave is the “laser” sound beam. Since the sound waves are all in step with each other, they would go in straight lines and wouldn’t spread out.

Right now the device is confined to a circuit a half an inch on a side. And it can’t send out beams of sound over a distance, like the sonic weapons used in crowd control or against Somali pirates. That’s because in order for phonons to travel, they need the gas, liquid or solid they’re moving through to be consistent that entire way.

Although the word “phaser” is used to mean a laser-like weapon on the science fiction television show and movie Star Trek, it doesn’t mean that here. But like lasers, phasers end up in common use. For example a resonator could translate the beams of phonon vibrations into electrical signals, replacing the quartz crystals currently used in watches and clocks. And the high frequencies mean that it could provide a better picture than current ultrasound systems.

Indoor Clouds: Your New Weather Forecast

I usually reserve about as much excitement for weather forecasts as I do for banging my head against a brick wall. However, here's a whimsical puff of prediction that's literally left my head in the clouds.

It's the Nebula 12, a weather forecasting machine that uses meteorological data to generate indoor clouds as a representation of what to expect when you step outside.

Friction And Static Could Charge Smartphones

Static electricity is good for sticking balloons to walls, but who knew it could be used to prolong the battery life of a smartphone. Sihong Wang and Long Lin, graduate students in Georgia Tech's materials science department have developed a two-layered material that generates power from static electricity and flexing. Nanoprinter Achieves Insane Resolution.

Lens Focuses Light Without Distortion

For centuries, scientists and engineers have pushed the limits of materials to make better lenses. Inventions such as the Fresnel lens made lighthouses visible from further away and plastics made coke-bottle eyeglasses a thing of the past. Now a research team at Harvard has made another leap: a tiny cone-shaped lens that eliminate distortions in everything from cell phone cameras to ligh signals that travel through fiber optic cables.

Ultra-precise lenses are used in telecommunications to focus the beams in fiber-optic systems and in some cell phone cameras. Making them smaller and flatter frees up space and reduces the weight of devices. But existing solid lenses aren't distortion-free, however, and fixing that usually means using multiple lenses, which adds to weight and size.

Tilted 3-D Screens Coming Around The Bend

  

Whether for television or mobile devices, most 3-D displays have used autostereoscopic parallax barriers, such as liquid crystal displays, to give users a three-dimensional viewing experience.

However, a team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, have chosen a different route. They've developed Tilt Displays, a new type of screen composed of nine smaller panels that physically tilt and contort to give the impression of depth.

Laser Beams Shoot from Printer

Lasers are everywhere -- in DVD players, fiber optic communications and even displays. They are so useful it would be great if they were flexible and easy to make, but that hasn't been the case, until now.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. have developed a way to print lasers on a variety of surfaces, using a printer not too far removed from the one on an average desktop.

The team, led by D. J. Gardiner of the Center for Molecular Materials for Photonics, used liquid crystals similar to those used in liquid crystal displays. With the right kind of stimulation, the molecules in liquid crystals emit laser light.