By Patricia Daukantas
No one is immune from the possibility of heart disease. A team of scientists working in Japan has demonstrated a femtosecond laser technique that could help medical researchers test anti-fibrillation medicines on heart cells in the laboratory.
The group at Osaka University has used high-power 780-nm laser pulses to force heart tissue samples to change their beating frequency. This “optical pacemaker,” reported in Optics Express, would not work outside of the laboratory because of long-term complications, but it could test new drugs that might eventually lessen the need for pacemakers.
Read more about the research on OSA's Web site and check out the full Optics Express article here.
By Patricia Daukantas
We know Mars as the Red Planet, but what color is its sky? Early Viking lander photos from 1976 seemed to show a light blue sky, but a recalibration—and subsequent images from the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997—changed the atmosphere to a light pink and then to a butterscotch color.
Such calibration depends on having a handy color-reference target in the field of view of the lander camera. Viking used an American flag, a symbol of the U.S. bicentennial celebration in 1976 (remember that?) and a small color grid, all posted on the outside of the spacecraft. NASA’s Phoenix lander, which touched down successfully on May 25, uses two color-calibration targets specially designed for the mission by scientists at the University of Central Florida.
UCF physics and astronomy professor Dan Britt and two of his students made the color chips, which range from white to royal blue (but no red), to aid spectroscopists in figuring out the true colors and composition of the Martian soil. The targets have built-in magnets to help keep them free of dust buildup, which was a problem on earlier missions.
The UCF team collaborated with a University of Florida chemistry professor and a group from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. For more information and a photo of the color-calibration target, check the UCF Web site.
By Patricia Daukantas
Imagine standing in New York and being able to peep through a telescope at people walking down the street in London. Or the other way around.
Nonsense, you say. The magnification required for such a ground-based telescope would be daunting. And then there’s the little matter of the curvature of the Earth over the 5,580-km distance.
However, a British artist has been able to build such a “telescope”—and even to make his creation look like a giant tube that was drilled through the Earth from one coast of the Atlantic Ocean to the other.
On May 20, the public-art project emerged from the banks of the East River in Brooklyn as a giant metal drill bit. By Thursday, the art installation looked like the end of a giant brass and wood telescope poking out of the ground. This “Telectroscope” is Paul St George’s conception of a 19th-century idea that started when a reporter misspelled the word “electroscope” (a classic device for measuring static electricity) and writers such as Mark Twain spun tales of pictures that could be sent around by telegraph wires.
Although the “story” on St George’s Web site, telectroscope.net, implies that a giant straight-line hole was drilled through the Earth, the gizmo really relies on high-definition cameras linked by undersea fiber-optic cables, courtesy of the European Internet provider Tiscali.
Still, the Telectroscope gives passersby the illusion that they are looking through a giant Victorian spyglass—and they can actually wave at their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic.
CNN and the New York Times are among the media outlets sorting out the colorful facts and fiction about this artwork, which will be in operation in both London and New York until June 15. The Telectroscope fits in well with other “steampunk” movies, novels and fashions that have gained popularity in recent years.
By Patricia Daukantas
Polaroid lovers, you’re not alone.
Ever since the venerable Polaroid Corp. announced earlier this year that it will discontinue its remaining instant-film products, aficionados of the self-developing, one-of-a-kind prints have been banding together in cyberspace to celebrate the Polaroid as an artistic medium and share photos and tips.
A few days ago, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver (U.S.A.) paid tribute to Polaroids. Art writer Mary Voelz Chandler reminded readers of the many ways artists have used Polaroid film. In the same issue of that newspaper, a self-taught Polaroid photographer/artist ponders her technological future. The paper’s photography staff went out for one day with their old instant-film cameras and assembled the results into a video that includes a classic American television commercial for instant photography.
The New York-based blog Gothamist.com found a fellow Big Apple resident who has offered to send anybody, for a modest fee, an original Polaroid photo of something in New York City. Joe Howansky is also interested in trading his instant photos for Polaroids of exotic locales around the world.
The popular social-networking site LiveJournal has a community called the polaroids. More than 5,400 people have signed up to post their instant photos, old and new.
Another online community, Polanoid.net, was started by several Europeans who were, as they put it, “hungry for real analog, good smelling pictures in a digital world.” Users have uploaded more than 150,000 scanned, and sometimes manipulated, instant photos to that Web site.
Even CNN has gotten into the act. iReport.com—the cable news network’s beta site for “citizen journalism”—has a forum for sharing readers' favorite Polaroid snapshots. The photos that have already been uploaded include this poignant image of someone standing in front of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain 40 years ago. A floral wreath on the upstairs balcony marks the spot.
Finally, in case you’re wondering how much longer Polaroid instant film will be around, the company has provided this list of projected availabilities of film types, plus the expiration dates of the last batches of products.
By Patricia Daukantas
Once again, it’s time for CLEO/QELS and PhAST. These three conferences, taking place this week in California’s Silicon Valley, are just a few miles from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the site of the National Ignition Facility, where the world’s largest laser system is being built.
NIF is just one of the big, cool new projects highlighted at the 2008 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics and Quantum Electronics and Laser Science. Plenary speaker David Reitze of the University of Florida, who is featured in the current issue of OPN, awed the audience with a description of gravitational waves and the amazing precision that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) needs to detect such waves.
Several representatives from the solar and solid-state lighting industries treated the CLEO/QELS media contingent to an exclusive discussion of new technologies for energy efficiency. Environmentally friendly technology is here to stay, according to Scott Clavenna, president and CEO of Greentech Media, because governments worldwide have accepted climate change as a fact and businesses and consumers are demanding green solutions. Fossil fuel prices will remain highly volatile for the foreseeable future and may eventually be subject to a carbon tax. Optoelectronics intersects with green technology in a number of areas, from closed-loop energy-control systems to solid-state lighting modules and telecom applications.
Richard Sandberg of JILA and the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA) has been chosen the winner of the annual OSA-New Focus/Bookham Student Award, which recognizes excellence in research by students. Sandberg used curvature correction and high-numerical-aperture imaging to demonstrate a soft-x-ray diffraction microscope with near-diffraction-limited resolution of 70 to 90 nm. Sandberg received the top prize of $5,000, while six other finalists from universities in the United States and United Kingdom garnered $1,500 each.
Coherent Inc. won this year’s PhAST/Laser Focus World Innovation Award for its optically pumped semiconductor laser technology, which has improved the treatment of one type of age-related macular degeneration. The 2008 Photonic Applications, Systems and Technologies conference had a large number of tracks on organic and inorganic LEDs, high-power lasers and solar-power technology.
We’ve got other technical highlights from CLEO/QELS and PhAST on the Web, and Susan Curtis of Optics.org has been blogging about the conferences.
Plenary speaker David Reitze of the University of Florida.