Amazing Science

The Royal Society just uploaded every article older than 70 years, and the entire collection is searchable online. Along with Newton’s first research paper, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society contain roughly 69,000 articles, including original research by Robert Boyle, William Herschel, Joseph Lister, Michael Faraday and others; Benjamin Franklin’s famous kite-lightning experiment; bizarre accounts of students hit by lightning; and ruminations on what Moon Citizens would glimpse as they looked at Earth, among many other tales.

For decades our options for interacting with the digital world have been limited to keyboards, mice, and joysticks. Now with a new generation of exciting new interfaces in the pipeline our interaction with the digital world will be forever changed. In this post we will look at some amazing demonstrations, mostly videos, that showcase new ways of interacting with the digital world.

A new ultrafast, nanoscale light-emitting diode (LED) device developed at Stanford’s School of Engineering transmits data at ultrafast rates while using 2,000 times less energy than laser-based systems in use today,” The nanophotonic device is a major step forward for on-chip data transmission, the researchers say.

The device can transmit data at 10 gigabits per second. The researchers say it is a major step forward in providing a practical ultrafast, low-power, room-temperature light source for on-chip data transmission.

NASA software that calculates optical aberrations will sharpen images from space and could redefine perfect vision for humans.

The general idea is simple. We're taking advantage of the fact that our future telescopes will include flexible mirrors that bend and move upon command. By understanding the deficiencies in an image, we can compensate for them by remote control—no astronauts needed. The power of this method lies in its ability to use an optical system's existing camera as a sensor to detect its own error, without installing any separate devices. This software-based approach has already extended our telescopes' ability to peer into the darkness of the universe. On Earth, we believe the software could enable vision scientists to enhance human eyesight beyond "perfect" 20/20 vision, opening up the possibility of "superhuman" vision. 

Most adults don't have 20/20 vision. Imperfect vision is caused by aberrations in the way the lens of the eye transmits light to the retina. Those deviations occur in an important aspect of light called the wavefront, a set of points that are all in the same phase. You might be familiar with the term from ads for LASIK eye surgery. The vision-correcting procedure uses a beam of laser light that penetrates the eye, reflects off the retina, and travels back through the eye, capturing and mapping the errors in the way the wavefront strikes the eye.

What causes the wavefront to become distorted? Objects emit or reflect light in spherical waves. Our eyes intercept a small portion of that wave surface, and at great distances this surface is considered basically flat. To form a perfect image on your retina, your eye forces these flat waves to curve inward, so that the waves converge at one point on the focal plane behind your eye's lens. If the converging waves are not perfectly curved, not all of the light will come into focus at a single point on your retina. The result is a blurry or distorted image. All the points of deviation from the perfect spherical wave shape are called wavefront error. Plotted on a 2-D map, the error would look like mountainous terrain, with peaks and valleys corresponding to each deviation from the ideal flat surface.