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The Professor: Cellphone mind control, robotic fly eyes, lab-on-a-chip meets papercraft
The Professor rounds up a handful of interesting and informative gadget-related science stories from the week and presents them in an easily digestible liquid form. Having trouble keeping your fingers, thumbs, or eyeballs on the pulse of modern science? Do you find yourself in the throes of panic due to misunderstandings in molecular goings-on? Did the latest aircar, split atom, or robotic insectoid go buzzing over your head before you had time to ready a response? Don't worry friends, The Professor is here to help. Though not an actual scientist, professor, or even a college graduate, he can help guide you through the cascading, complicated, and spasmodic visionary vistas of human invention and achievement as smoothly as a hot knife descending into softened butter.
Researchers develop "fly-vision" to brighten dark videos
Researchers at Adelaide University in Australia have developed a new way for cameras to perform better in cases of extreme light and dark, turning to the way a fly sees for inspiration. The researchers first monitored the activity of fly brain cells to see how they processed image information, finding that the little critters were able to extract a great deal of detail even in dark areas of a scene. They then reproduced the effect themselves by fine tuning the brightness of an image down to the individual pixel level, adjusting each pixel based on the amount of light it receives. That's opposed to a regular camera, which uses a single brightness setting for an entire image, resulting in a loss of detail in dark areas of a high contrast picture. Obviously, one of the main applications the researchers see for the technology is in surveillance, although it's apparently too costly to be practical for anything else besides military applications. Well, that's what they said about Darpanet too, and look where we are today...
