Tiny video cameras mounted on the end of long thin fiber optic cables, commonly known as endoscopes, have proven invaluable to doctors and researchers wishing to peer inside the human body. Endoscopes can be rather pricey, however, and like anything else that gets put inside peoples’ bodies, need to be sanitized after each use. A newly-developed type of endoscope is claimed to address those drawbacks by being so inexpensive to produce that it can be thrown away after each use. Not only that, but it also features what is likely the world’s smallest complete video camera, which is just one cubic millimeter in size.

The prototype endoscope was designed at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration, in collaboration with Awaiba GmbH and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering.

Ordinarily, digital video cameras consist of a lens, a sensor, and electrical contacts that relay the data from the sensor. Up to 28,000 sensors are cut out from a silicon disc known as a wafer, after which each one must be individually wired up with contacts and mounted to a lens.

In Fraunhofer’s system, contacts are added to one side of the sensor wafer while it’s still all in one piece. That wafer can then be joined face-to-face with a lens wafer, after which complete grain-of-salt-sized cameras can be cut out from the two joined wafers. Not only is this approach reportedly much more cost-effective, but it also allows the cameras to be smaller and more self-contained – usually, endoscopic cameras consist of a lens at one end of the cable, with a sensor at the other.

The new camera has a resolution of 62,500 pixels, and it transmits its images via an electrical cable, as opposed to an optical fiber. Its creators believe it could be used not only in medicine, but also in fields such as automotive design, where it could act as an aerodynamic replacement for side mirrors, or be used to monitor drivers for signs of fatigue.

They hope to bring the device to market next year.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

world’s smallest video camera

Medigus has developed the world’s smallest video camera at just 0.039-inches (0.99 mm) in diameter. The Israeli company’s second-gen model (a 1.2 mm / 0.047-inch diameter camera was unveiled in 2009) has a dedicated 0.66×0.66 mm CMOS sensor from TowerJazz that captures images at 45K resolution (approximately 220 x 220 pixels) and no, it’s not destined for use in tiny mobile phones or covert surveillance devices, instead the camera is designed for medical endoscopic procedures in hard to reach regions of the human anatomy.

The miniature cameras are made with bio-compatible compnents and are suitable for diagnostic and surgical procedures. Potential applications include cardiology, bronchoscopy, gastroenterology, gynecology, and orthopedic and robotic surgery.

“Medical procedures that have not been possible until now become possible with the world’s smallest camera,” said Dr. Elazar Sonnenschein, CEO for Medigus Ltd.

The camera will be integrated into Medigus’ own disposable endoscopic devices as well as sold to third-party manufacturers.

Medigus says it will begin supplying camera samples to US and Japanese manufacturers in coming weeks.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

It’s hard to say whether this sort of product will unleash a stream of creativity or a gushing torrent of poor taste. Dutch printing company ixxi has come up with an innovative, inexpensive and very nifty way to print and hang large scale artworks. By breaking the photo or design up into lots of smaller cards, which are later joined together for presentation using funky little plastic x and i shaped connectors, ixxi avoids the prohibitive expense of larger scale printing, as well as making it easy to package a wall-sized piece of art up into a small box. In fact, the same technology lets you visit an art gallery, and take a life size, photorealistic replica of your favorite wall fresco home with you, ready to reassemble and hang.

Just quietly, dear readers, I occasionally fancy myself as a bit of a photographer. In fact, just last week I pulled out a bunch of my favorite snaps (including this one, which really nails the spirit of a mate and his wife) and got them printed on big 100 x 50 cm (39 x 19.7 in) canvas boards to hang on walls around the house.

Canvas prints and photo prints look great, but they’re fairly expensive – a problem that gets exponentially bigger with size. So on a reasonable budget, you might be able to get a couple of boards printed, but you’re up for quite a lot of money if you want to create a whole feature wall.

That’s where ixxi comes in – this Dutch company has created a very simple, classy system that lets you print any number of smallish cards, on a variety of media, then join them together to form larger artworks using i and x shaped connectors.

That lets you break a photograph up into 50 smaller squares and present it on a large scale … or, you can experiment with the form, creating photomosaics or even pixel art.

Once the cards are linked together, you can choose to hang them on a wall, or even dangle them from a roof to make a bespoke room divider or temporary wall. That looks even cooler when you use semi-translucent card material to print on, like they have in the Design Academy Eindhoven – see below.

The results are impressive enough that if you visit the Rijkmuseum Amsterdam, you can buy a number of the museum’s famous artworks in ixxi format – and take them home with you in a small gift box, full size and ready to assemble.

The best part is the price – because you’re only printing on small squares, generally below A4 size, the printing process is uncomplicated and inexpensive … to the point where a gigantic 2 x 2 meter (6.6 x 6.6 foot) print with whatever you want on it comes out at a measly EUR 125.00 – or just US$178 for a mega print that will transform an entire wall in your house. Try pricing one of those up on canvas … and heck, try transporting the thing!

Now, if I could only learn to take a photo or create a pixel artwork worthy of that kind of presentation!

More at the ixxi website.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

NASA has released a trove of data from its sky-mapping mission, allowing scientists and anyone with access to the Internet to peruse millions of galaxies, stars, asteroids and other hard-to-see objects.

Many of the targets in the celestial catalog released online this week have been previously observed, but there are significant new discoveries. The mission’s finds include more than 33,000 new asteroids floating between Mars and Jupiter and 20 comets.

NASA launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which carried an infrared telescope, in December 2009 to scan the cosmos in finer detail than previous missions. The spacecraft, known as WISE, mapped the sky one and a half times during its 14-month mission, snapping more than 2.5 million images from its polar orbit.

The spacecraft’s ability to detect heat glow helps it find dusty, cold and distant objects that are often invisible to regular telescopes.

The batch of images made available represents a little over half of what’s been observed in the all-sky survey. The full cosmic census is scheduled for release next (northern) spring.

“The spectacular new data just released remind us that we have many new neighbours,” said Pete Schultz, a space scientist at Brown University, who had no role in the project.

University of Alabama astronomer William Keel has already started mining the database for quasars – compact, bright objects powered by super-massive black holes.

“If I see a galaxy with highly ionized gas clouds in its outskirts and no infrared evidence of a hidden quasar, that’s a sign that the quasar has essentially shut down in the last 30,000 to 50,000 years,” Keel said.

WISE ran out of coolant in October, making it unable to chill its heat-sensitive instruments. So it spent its last few months searching for near-Earth asteroids and comets that should help scientists better calculate whether any are potentially threatening.

The mission, managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was hundreds of times more sensitive than its predecessor, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, which launched in 1983 and made the first all-sky map in infrared wavelength.

AP - Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

On October 26, 2006, NASA launched two STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) spacecraft. Using the Moon’s gravity for a gravitational slingshot, the two nearly identical spacecraft, STEREO-A and STEREO-B, split up with one pulling ahead of the Earth and the other gradually falling behind. It’s taken over four years but on February 6, 2011, the two spacecraft finally moved into position on opposite sides of the Sun, each looking down on a different hemisphere. The probes are now sending back images of the star, front and back, allowing scientists for the first time to view the entire Sun in 3D.

Each of the probes captures images of half of the Sun and beams them back to Earth where researchers combine the two opposing views to create a sphere. To track key aspects of solar activity such as flares, tsunamis and magnetic filaments, STEREO’s telescopes are tuned to four wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet radiation.

Space weather forecasting

The resultant 3D images will allow researchers to improve space weather forecasts to provide earlier and more accurate warnings for potentially damaging coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that can impact aircraft navigation systems, power grids and satellites. Previously, an active sunspot could emerge on the far side of the Sun before the Sun’s rotation turned that region toward Earth, spitting flares and clouds of plasma with little warning.

“Not anymore,” says Bill Murtagh, a senior forecaster at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. “Farside active regions can no longer take us by surprise. Thanks to STEREO, we know they’re coming.”

As part of NASA’s ‘Solar Shield’ project, the NOAA is already using 3D STEREO models of CME’s to improve space weather forecasts, but the full Sun view should improve these forecasts even more. And the forecasting benefits aren’t just limited to Earth. The global 3D model of the Sun also allows researchers to track solar storms heading for other planets, which is important for NASA missions to Mercury, Mars and even asteroids.

“With data like these, we can fly around the Sun to see what’s happening over the horizon—without ever leaving our desks,” says STEREO program scientist Lika Guhathakurta at NASA headquarters. “I expect great advances in theoretical solar physics and space weather forecasting.”

More answers

NASA also expects the 3D images of the Sun to shed light on previously overlooked connections. For instance, researchers have long suspected that solar activity can “go global,” with eruptions on opposite sides of the Sun triggering and feeding off each other. The global images will allow them to actually study the phenomenon.

In conjunction with NASA’s Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, the STEREO-A and STEREO-B probes should be able to image the entire globe of the Sun for the next eight years. Therefore, these initial images are just the beginning of what should be some truly stellar images and movies that NASA says will be released in the weeks ahead as more of the data from the STEREO probes is processed.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

It may not be a jet powered car, but it’s definitely one we’ve seen in sci-fi movies before – the ability to converse with a life-size holographic image of another person in real time. 3d movies are just the start of it and ther’s more to come.

The futurists at IBM point to recent advances in 3D cameras and movies, predicting that holography chat (aka 3D telepresence) can’t be all that far behind. Already, the University of Arizona has unveiled a system that can transmit holographic images in near-real-time.

It is also predicted that 3D visualization could be applied to data, allowing researchers to “step inside” software programs (wasn’t that just in a movie?), computer models, or pretty much anything else that is limited by a simple 2D screen. IBM compares it to the way in which the Earth appears undistorted when we experience it first-hand in three dimensions, yet it appears pinched at the top and bottom when we see it on a two-dimensional world map.

Maybe travelling inside the blood vessels of the human body is not so silly after all.We will see….

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

over Barbie doll with hidden camera

Barbie… now with built-in camera, casing privacy concerns.

The FBI has issued a cybercrime alert on a new Barbie doll that comes with a hidden video camera.

Mattel’s Barbie Video Girl has a video camera lens built into its necklace that can record up to 30 minutes of footage to be downloaded on a computer.

Officials warn that it could possibly be used to produce child pornography, but say they don’t have any reported crimes. 

The FBI’s Sacramento office issued a report with the warning on the doll last month.

FBI spokesman Steve Dupre says the alert was inadvertently sent to the media but was meant for law enforcement agencies advising them not to overlook the doll during any searches.

A Mattel spokeswoman says the FBI has confirmed no reported incidents of using the doll for criminal activity.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

5. The TSA needs a Barry White theme song

It’s unlikely that John Pistole, the Transportation Security Agency’s dour chief who once warned that terrorism must “always be considered imminent,” expected such public vilification over his agency’s new airport screening procedures.

But a protest that began with a few bloggers has, since Pistole announced the pat-down or body-scan policy in a one-paragraph note on TSA.gov a few weeks ago, become something closer to public execration. TSA screeners have been twitted by Saturday Night Live, Grammy-winning musician Steve Vaus, and cartoonist Tom Tomorrow. The agency itself has been rebuked by some of the same politicians who voted unanimously to create it a decade ago.

The surprise is that, beyond exempting flight attendants and pilots, the TSA has remained unyielding and impenitent. All Pistole would tell CBS News this week is that he’ll continue asking: “How can we be better informed if we modify our screening? Then, what are the risks that we deal with?” That’s Washington-ese for “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby.”

Photo by TSA

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/2300-1001_3-10005691-7.html?tag=mncol#ixzz17JchrIzJ

Software removes pedestrians from Google Street View

Google Street View, while very useful, fascinating, and full of wonderful bloopers, does rub some privacy advocates the wrong way. Should people on public streets have a reasonable expectation of not ending up with their photo on the Internet? There’s a whole other article in that, but in any case… for all the folks who do have a problem with it, a computer science graduate student is working on a solution: software that digitally removes pedestrians from Street View images. One of the byproducts of the current version of the system is somewhat unsettling, however – areas where people were in images are sometimes marked by ghost-like shapes, or even by disembodied shoes and feet. Read More

Received & published by Henry Sapiecha