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Nani Kore (”What’s This?”) is the name of a Japanese TV show that digs up bizarre things and phenomena observed around the world and explains how they work. In the latest show, they presented a house in central Tokyo that proves solar power can be used in a residential setting without those expensive solar panels and cells.
Just take a set of orbs that look like giant light bulbs, install them on your roof and watch them reflecting the light of the sun into your house. This obviously just works during the day, but if you have buildings around your house that block the sunlight, the orbs might help to light up dark rooms and save electricity costs. And they look kind of cool, too.
Watch this video (clip in Japanese) to see how the roof orbs work:
Medical imaging is an interesting field. There are things like fMRI, PET scans, CAT scans, radioactive dye traces, and a million other different techniques — but they’re usually so limited and specific (as extraordinary as they are) that there’s always a need for a new one. In this case it’s soft X-ray tomography, a variant on the more familiar CAT scan.
Normal X-rays penetrate too effectively for them to be used on individual cells; the amount of interference provided by the cell is simply not enough to detect and create an image from. So they use soft X-rays, which have a slightly longer wavelength than the kind used on a broken arm. A new technique developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has enabled soft X-ray images to be taken quickly and sequentially, and then assembled into a 3D model of the subject.
It’s not “live” like an fMRI, and it doesn’t provide the detail one finds in electron microscopy, but obviously it’s very useful. I doubt any of us will ever run into one of these machines in real life, but it’s cool to know they exist.
Your average “compact” camera today can record 30 frames per second at 640×480. What would you say, then, to a camera so compact it could sit inside one of your cells, so sensitive it can detect a single photon, and record at a million frames per second? Well first, you might say “keep that camera out of my cells, by god!” —But after that, the applications start occurring to you. Want to watch proteins unravel in slow motion? Go for it. Want to watch ATP shed an atom? Sounds good! Just don’t expect to get it in HD: the Megaframe photon detector array, at 128×128 photon wells, is only 16 kilopixels.
Megaframe is an EU-funded project aimed at miniaturizing a CMOS sensor to the smallest possible level. One can only acknowledge they have done to a ridiculous extent. Each well in that picture at the top can detect a single photon, and is capable of doing so up to a million times per second. Now that even puts the D3s’ 102,400 ISO to shame. Its 50-picosecond margin of error may not be short enough for some stuff, but hey, it’s better than anything I’ve got.
This kind of imaging isn’t actually new, and research has been going on for a few years, but they’ve only relatively recently ended its research phase and is now in execution, if I read correctly. That means that there are labs around the world giving this sucker a spin.
Seriously, this technology has the potential to really change the way molecular biology is done, among other things. If it’s interesting to you, visit the project’s page, or the ICT Results summary.
