Scanners are a bit of a running joke around the Giz office. “If you post a scanner, you’re probably fired,” our editors demi-joke. So it’s sorta distressing news that HP’s got a cheap 3D scanner that’s actually kind of awesome.
They say that if you truly love something, you press it up against a flatbed scanner and share it online. A lot of people must love their cats, because The Cat Scan exists. It’s as great as it sounds.
Police in England will soon deploy 3D laser scanners to the scene of car crashes, saving time and allowing wreckage to be cleared from roadways more quickly. The 3D accident reconstruction will also be more accurate than human-generated reports.
Cornell is the place to go if you like looking at small things with expensive machinery. The University recently made its $US500,000 micro-CT scanner available for public as well as academic usage.
Since soccer refs obviously have such difficulty discerning a player being tripped from a player taking a dive, these anti-diving shin guards were an inevitability. They use both proximity and impact sensors to determine a trip: when both sensors are activated, a foul is called — but not otherwise. IEEE has a collection of this and other game-changing surveillance technologies here.
I got my fingerprints done the other day (no, I wasn’t in trouble), and I was surprised at how stone-aged the whole process was. The FbF MobileOne actually smartens up fingerprintin’—it uses an iPod Touch to grab ‘em.
The venerable Star Trek tricorder, often imitated but never actually shown 100% emulating the one demonstrated in science fiction, could net an inventor $US10 million if they’re able to produce the real thing.
Although the brick and concrete-penetrating Prism 200c can’t see through clothes like the perv-preferred Midnight Shot NV-1, it’s still pretty neat! The backpack-mounted scanner uses ultra-wideband radio waves to scan a room for baddies before they know you’re there.
Crime Magazine has a great excerpt from the upcoming book Wanted: Gentleman Bank Robber, recounting the time when infamous bank robber Leslie Ibsen Rogge knocked off two spots in a single day, making use of police scanners and smoke bombs in the process.
The US forces who killed Osama bin Laden in his Abbottabad compound were more than expert marksmen. Some of them were forensics experts as well, using sophisticated tools to ensure that they got the right man.
