Imaging

Chemistry isn't about to be left out of the buzz surrounding the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics in London. British chemists have collaborated with IBM Research - Zurich to develop and image a molecule just 1.2 nanometers wide that looks like the five Olympic rings.  Read More

U.S. military uniforms may not be the most fashionable of clothes, but there are a lot of them. Every year, the Pentagon spends US$4 billion on uniforms and over 50,000 people are employed in their production. In an effort to cut costs and increase efficiency, DARPA has awarded a US$1.25 million contract SoftWear Automation, Inc. to develop “complete production facilities that produce garments with zero direct labor is the ultimate goal" - in other words, a robot factory that can make uniforms from beginning to end without human operators.  Read More

Over the last few years, Google's specially-designed cars, trikes, trolleys and snowmobiles have brought interactive Street View technology to the cities and jungles of the world – but why stop there? The search giant recently unveiled the Street View Trekker, a hi-tech backpack-contained system that will bring Street View to those places that can only be reached on foot.  Read More

Have something in a narrow space that you want to inspect? Well, you could do worse than using Olympus’ new iPLEX TX industrial videoscope. With a tip diameter of 2.4 millimeters, it’s one of the world’s thinnest such devices, but its image is also much more clear than those of other “fiberscopes.”  Read More

While breast cancer screening tests are accepted as safe – and we definitely wouldn’t want to scare anyone off from a potentially life-saving test – they do have some risks associated with them. The most obvious being the exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation, which in itself is a risk factor for breast cancer. X-ray mammography can also give false positive and negative results. In the quest for a safer, more accurate alternative, Dutch researchers have provided proof of concept that photoacoustic imaging can be used to detect and visualize breast tumors.  Read More

Those of us who envy Superman for his X-ray vision may soon get that ability - on our cell phones. Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have reported a new approach to harnessing the potential of the terahertz band in portable devices.  Read More

X-ray computed tomography – or CT – scanners are designed with people of an average build in mind. When obese patients require a CT scan, the additional layers of body fat will produce blurry images if the scanner’s regular settings are used. Clinicians typically address this problem by turning up the power of the scanner. Unfortunately, doing so results in overweight patients receiving higher-than-normal doses of radiation. A new computer modeling system developed at New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, however, could help bring those levels down.  Read More

Fans of the classic 1982 science fiction movie Blade Runner will remember the ESPER machine that allows Deckard to zoom in and see around corners in a two-dimensional photograph. While such technology is still some way off, researchers in MIT’s Media Lab have developed a system using a femtosecond laser that can reproduce low-resolution 3D images of objects that lie outside a camera’s line of sight.  Read More

Researchers at the University of Sheffield have created what sounds impossible - even nonsensical: an experimental electron microscope without lenses that not only works, but is orders of magnitude more powerful than current models. By means of a new form of mathematical analysis, scientists can take the meaningless patterns of dots and circles created by the lens-less microscope and create images that are of high resolution and contrast and, potentially, up to 100 times greater magnification.  Read More