Rube Goldberg: The beautiful and timeless appeal of complex, useless contraptions
Beyond their entertainment values, these complex machines offer a unique insight into physics and human engineering.
Tag: optics
Ultra-thin night vision filter could make bulky goggles a thing of the past
New ultra-thin night vision filters could one day turn regular glasses into night-vision devices.
Side stepping Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle isn’t easy
The uncertainty principle provides a constant hindrance to the sensitivity of equipment such as LIGO's interferometer and new research shows, ...
These spiders have super-black patches to help their other parts vibrant and colorful
Birds of Paradise have similar structures.
What Can Quartz Crystals Really Do?
Quartz is cherished for its properties, but I'm not talking about magic.
Ultra-thin flat lens leads to smaller, better, cheaper optical devices: from telescopes to VR goggles
Flat lenses could revolutionize optics, researchers say.
Teleportation is possible, and is already a reality at the quantum scale
A myriad of optical elements employed by the dutch researchers.Photo: TUDelft When people think of teleportation, inevitably a Star Trek ...
World record wireless transmission of 100 Gbit/s achieved
German researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have achieved a new world record for wireless data transmission after they ...
What Light tells us about the Universe
I’ve written about our incredible biological ability to gather information about our environment by sensing electromagnetic radiation. As complex as ...
Imaging in 3D using a single camera lens
This is a typical camera used for shooting 3-D images and movies. The equipment is very expensive and thus accessible ...
Researchers create contact lenses with telescopic abilities
It's the world of science fiction come alive - Swiss researchers have developed contact lenses which, when paired with special ...
Infrared holographic imaging allows firefighters to see through flames
Two images of a live human subject as seen through flames. When viewed in infrared or white light, the man ...
Microwave metamaterial camera images in real time. It’s only a fraction of the size current devices are
Scientists at Duke University have devised a metamaterial that uses microwaves to image objects or scenes in real time, all ...
Nanodevice lets light waves travel infinitely fast. Theory of Relativity still in place
A team of international physicists have made a nano-sized device which can allow the phase velocities of certain wave of ...
Smallest laser is so tiny you can’t see it with the naked eye
Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with colleagues in Taiwan and China, have developed what's considered ...
Are you ready for the Gigapixel age? Researchers build 50 Gigapixel camera
If you feel very proud of your iPhone's 8Megapixel camera or your high resolution DSLR, you might want to consider ...
Ultra-speed camera developed at MIT can “see” around corners
Researchers at MIT have developed a new revolutionary technique, in which they re-purposed the trillion frames/second camera we told you ...
Scientists cloak 3D object in microwave spectrum
The much dreamed off invisibility cloak is just a few tiny steps away, after remarkable research in the field, many ...
‘Time Cloaking’ remarkable experiment hides event in time
Cloaking used to be one of my favorite SciFi themes. James Bond supercars that would show up or disappear instantly ...
Digital contact lens grants Terminator-vision
A group of ophthalmologists and optoelectronics scientists are currently working on contact lens that can display information directly to the retina. So ...
Sunstone viking “magical compass” proved by science
A very intriguing theory says that the Vikings used to navigate through traitorous Arctic waters, and possibly even through the ...
Beam me up Scotty – NASA researches tractor beam technology
Trekkies might rejoice at the news that NASA has recently decided to fund a research group employed to study how ...
Light gets dragged after getting slowed down to speed of sound
At 300,000 kilometers/second, the speed of light is constant in vacuum, such as space, when it encounters a different medium, ...
Bionic glasses aim to replace guide dogs for the visually impaired
On display at one of the featured stands at this year’s Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition is a pair of ...
Tomorrow’s camera is flash free, regardless of light conditions
As any amateur photographer can tell you, in order to take a clear picture, you require a good light source; ...
