No, this isn’t a closeup of a Cosby Sweater. Nor is it the result of those shrooms you ingested 20 minutes ago. It’s actually science’s newest means of mapping one of the Earth’s wildest and most remote regions.
A new measurement tool that uses light detection and ranging (or LiDAR) can show how earthquakes have changed the landscape down to a few inches — and that can help us prepare for difficult-to-predict earthquakes.
New York is fairly forward-thinking when it comes to energy innovation, but it’s pretty terrible when it comes to solar. City College of New York wants to change that, so they created an interactive solar map of the city using laser airplanes.
Google’s Street View team famously photographs all kinds of weird stuff as they drive the world, but Navteq, who basically invented this stuff, just built a mount with seven cameras and 64 lasers to see everything better, in 3D.