There’s a rumour afoot suggesting that Canon will be ditching CCD and adopting CMOS chips for a new pro-level camcorder. Digital cameras and camcorders have never been so indistinguishable.
Forensic specialists can now pinpoint the exact make and model of a camera simply by analysing the pixels in digital photos. This technique would be useful in the future for tracking down criminals, such as kidnappers who’ve leaked photos of their hostages to the media. Read on to find out how it works.
A lot can be learned from simply counting the cells found in a sample of blood or water; the rub is that it requires either a lengthy and complex manual process with an expensive microscope or a quicker process with an even more expensive flow cytometer. Now, UCLA researchers have devised a compact system that scans samples with a cheap CCD digicam sensor to quickly spot and count 100,000 different kinds of cells in a sample. Please note my resistance here to the general tendency to call any type of advanced portable medical scanner a real-life tricorder, but that’s kind of what it’s like.
