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Scientists Work Out Way to Capture 3D Texture Info in a Flash
Posted by Kit Eaton at 12:00 AM on August 28, 2008
Some scientists at University of Manchester in the UK and Dolby Canada in Vancouver have worked out a way to capture 3D info of complex-textured objects really simply with a camera flash. You should care about this because it's likely to make the textures applied to characters and objects in computer games way more realistic: normally texture capturing needs expensive devices like laser scanners. Instead this technique uses something a bit like high dynamic-range photography, with two photos taken of a real-life texture: one with flash, one without. After some nifty image processing later, working out where the light and shade come from on the object for each pixel in both the illuminated and unilluminated shots, and they reproduce 3D depth and colour info for the texture. It covers the whole field of the frame, and since it's 3D it lets you change the angle of illumination and shadowing when the texture is re-rendered in 3D graphics. Though it's still a work in progress, it's pretty impressive, and apparently fooled a test group of viewers who couldn't distinguish images made with the flash technique from laser-scanned imagery. It was demoed at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles recently. [New Scientist]
Jason Wells got to toy around with a few blocks of Aerogel, the fantastically light (
Want to build the most complex machine human kind has ever produced? All you'll need is €6 billion, enough real estate to hold your 17-mile-long ring, a staff of international geniuses, and 
On the list of ways to go, having your lungs explode is definitely on the gnarlier side. Too bad for bats in treehugging locales, though, because that's 
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the last of the space agency's 
Ah, where would science be if not for the contributions of the humble microscope? Did you know that the development of the world's first microscope began in 11th century Iraq, when scientist and polymath Ibn al-Haytham recorded all sorts of data about lenses, binocular vision, mirrors and observable properties of light his The Book of Optics? That would make this pioneering technology more than a thousand years old. BibliOdyssey has amassed a great collection of drawings of pre-20th century microscopes and some of them look more like art pieces than instruments of science. Check out my favourites: [
MIT Researchers are working on virus-based microbatteries that are about half the size of a human cell. Using a combination of virus cultivation (which assembles itself) an soft lithography, Paula Hammond and team were able manufacture the battery, which consists of a cathode, anode and electrolyte. They hope the breakthrough will allow for applications like implantable medical sensors and labs that fit on a computer chip. [
An Australian PhD student has found a cheap way to make solar cells with nail polish, a pizza oven and an ink jet printer. 23-year-old Nicole Kuepper's invention, named iJET, doesn't require the pricey clean rooms and high-temperature ovens of traditional solar panel manufacturing plants, thus dramatically lowering the cost of solar and paving the road for introducing the technology to third-world countries.
A team at the Autonomous University of Madrid have created what they're calling the smoothest mirror surface ever made. It's flat down to the size scales of individual lead atoms, and was made by depositing lead onto silicon crystal at freakish temperatures of -173 to -133°C. This messes with the quantum properties of electrons in the lead and lets it settle without bunching up as it's warmed up. It's not shiny, or for checking out your hair-do though: the intention is to bend the compound mirror into a convex shape for use in a helium ion microscope. This'll work in similar ways and with similar magnification to an electron microscope, focusing helium ions instead of electrons, which don't damage delicate biological samples. The team's next task is to tackle the bending part. Smooth work, guys. [
2050. That's the year that you'll plug your brain into a toaster. Intel doesn't know how, precisely, but according to Intel CTO Justin Rattner's recent keynote at the Intel Developer Forum, they're working on it. From Intel's summary of the event:
After a test satellite launch (Iran: success! USA: failure!) this past weekend carried out with one of their 
Wireless power for charging gadgets has been among the more vapourous of developments we've been hearing promises of for years. While there are a 
Wired has 
The Inmarsat-4, or I4-F3 broadband satellite to its friends, is a big satellite. Almost as big as a double decker bus and with an unfurled solar wingspan as wide as a football field, it needed an appropriately big ride into space. And so it hitched onto a Proton Rocket, a 58m-high, 700-ton monster used for sat positioning since 1996, but before that, used in the 1960's to visit planets for scientific research and deliver parts of the International Space Station and Mir Space Station. The flight was perfect. [
This isn't the first time we have seen a 
Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies have launched the the Bio Energy Discovery Kit, a product that they are calling "the fuel cell industry's first direct ethanol product." The kit directly converts alcohol into electricity and can run non-stop for days on end. The purpose of the kit is to introduce fuel cell technology to students, scientists, teachers and engineers using a simple gadget that is easy to understand.
Kite surfing is a fun sport that involves using a large kite and a surfboard to get a lot of speed up on the water. It's like wakeboarding without a boat. Naturally, you need a decent amount of wind for it to work properly. There's a limit to how much wind you should use, however, as a dimwitted kite surfer discovered when he tried to unleash his kite during a tropical storm in Fort Lauderdale and ended up getting flung across the beach and into the side of a building right in front of local news cameras.
Some medical students have come up with a handy replacement for the EpiPen called the EpiCard. It's roughly the size of a credit card and has built-in audio instructions on its use to help the patient self-administer the treatment if needed. Those of us with hardcore life threatening allergies have to keep a treatment like the EpiPen around, but they can be cumbersome. Having something like this that you can take anywhere is just what we need. [
Warp drives, those vague constants of science fiction movies, might actually become real, allowing for travel faster than the speed of light. According to two physicists from Baylor, they've come up with a concept for a warp drive that would shrink space, allowing for a craft to jump ahead vast distances without breaking any laws of physics.
The Buenos Aires government would have done the late Owen Lars proud with their newly installed US$5 million Intelligent Monitoring Towers. Designed to collect information about the city's air and noise quality, we can easily see these 42 towers being at home 
Furukawa, a Tokyo-based tech company, has developed a thermoelectric conversion material that's said to be able to boost the fuel efficiency of cars by 2% by converting about 7% of exhaust heat into electricity. Unlike conventional thermoelectric conversion materials, which warm up as a whole when one side is exposed to heat, this new material generates energy via the difference in temperature between its two sides. Apparently, that makes it much more efficient. They're currently working to improve the system, but they hope to have it ready for mass production by 2011, at which point that 2% will solve the petrol crisis single-handedly. Just hang in there for a few more years! [
The Air Force's Office of Scientific Research has funded a study that's found a novel waterproofing technique that could prevent ice formation and corrosion from damaging parts of an aircraft, like optical sensors. The transparent coating has a nanoporous surface that is superhydrophobic, which makes water droplets form and roll or bounce-off the aircraft's skin rather than collecting, which is how ice formations happen. Better still it can be crafted to send the droplets in particular pathways across the coating, meaning it may also work as a cheap and simple water-collection system for desert environments: this was inspired by the way the Namib Desert beetle gathers moisture. We wonder though... is it as good as 
Scientists at Northwestern University have demonstrated a new nano-printing technology by printing the Beijing Olympics emblem 15,000 times, each logo so small the whole print run fits inside one square centimeter. 2,500 of the images, made 20,000 90-nanometer dots, would fit on a grain of rice. The polymer pen lithography uses an array of millions of tiny flexible polymer "pens" that can be used to make marks on various different nano-scales, and in this case deposit "ink" made of 16-mercaptohexadecanoic acid onto a gold substrate (what else would do, in Olympic season?) The team thinks that the technique, which can print out tiny dot-matrix imagery, will find uses in computational tools, medical diagnostics and the pharmaceutical industry. The study is published today in Science Express. [
With US$4 million from the US Army, scientists at UC Irvine will study synthetic telepathy, otherwise known as sending and receiving messages using your mind. The scientists believe that this amazing new form of communication could benefit stroke victims who can't speak—but also aid soldiers in the battlefield. If it becomes popular enough, it will of course be abused by middle-school gossips and guys hoping to be like Mel Gibson in that crappy movie, too. Here's how the eggheads plan to make it work: