Hubble going deep into space to look back at history.
(Credit: NASA)The Hubble Space Telescope has taken the deepest near-infrared image of the universe in history, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced on Tuesday.
The image, which was taken in August by the "HUDF09" team, features galaxies that formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang. NASA said that not only are those the oldest galaxies ever seen, but the data that can be extracted from the image will provide "insights into how galaxies grew in their formative years early in the universe's history."
Hubble was able to capture such detail, thanks to the Wide Field Camera 3, which was installed earlier this year. The camera captures light from "near-infrared wavelengths," allowing it to peer deeper into the galaxy than its predecessors. "The light from very distant galaxies is stretched out of the ultraviolet and visible regions of the spectrum into near-infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the universe," NASA said.
Although the image might just look like a series of lights to the untrained eye, NASA said 12 scientific papers have already been submitted by those who studied the data contained in the image. It's entirely possible that this discovery will shed more light on galaxy formation and the universe's history.
But that Hubble shot is only the beginning. NASA wrote that the Hubble observations are "trailblazing a path for Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, which will look even farther into the universe than Hubble, at infrared wavelengths." NASA said the James Webb Space Telescope should be launched in 2014.
Until then, we can feast our eyes on the astounding image returned from Hubble. Note the detail. Even more amazing: this image was taken of just a small slice of the universe. Imagine what else is out there.
If you'd like to learn a little more about Hubble's discovery, click here.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
The content fill tool can replace a complicated background when objects are erased. This example shows the removal of a U-shaped white hair.
(Credit: Adobe Systems)
The content fill tool can be applied with a paintbrush-like tool, in this case for removing line across a building.
(Credit: Adobe Systems)It looks as if Photoshop, already famous for its ability to make people look thinner and skies look bluer, could take digital erasure of unsightly objects to an entirely new level.
A feature called "content-aware fill" described in an Adobe video published Tuesday shows the technology used to remove buffalo, telephone wires, and a tree from various images and to clean up stray hairs from an imperfect scan of a print. Photoshop's existing cloning and spot-healing tools can take care of this to some extent, but the new version adds a lot of smarts to the process.
Specifically, instead of using one nearby patch of the image to fill the area that's being erased, it draws on multiple areas--and it uses image analysis to make informed guesses about how to reproduce complicated background. For example, the technology can reproduce the window frames, architectural patterns, a river shoreline, and clouds.
"What this algorithm is doing is copying multiple patches from the surrounding background to try to fit them inside the hole, unlike the old spot healing proximity match that was trying to find one match for each of these holes," said Dan Goldman, researcher in Adobe's Creative Technologies Lab, in the video. "This generally results in a very convincing fill for these holes."
Adobe developed the technology in collaboration with Princeton University and the University of Washington.
Adobe is showing new warping and bending options.
(Credit: Adobe Systems)Every time Photoshop gets something like this, some folks--not without some reason in my opinion--get concerned that we can't trust the veracity of the images we see. But let's be clear: although the ease and sophistication of editing is increasing, photo manipulation has been going on for more than a century. And the way I see it, the profusion of digital cameras and ease of posting photos online probably means reality is being documented in unretouched form more comprehensively than ever.
Adobe touted other Photoshop features from the labs, too, in an earlier video released after the recent Photoshop World conference.
One of those new features aims to bring some realism to painting processes. Paint can be spread out and blended, and 3D models of various brushes simulate the behavior of actual brushes with different bristle configurations.
The other was a more sophisticated warping technology in which anchor points determine what parts of the image is fixed and other movable points are used to bend and stretch other parts of the image.
In addition, hinge points can make it possible to anchor the point of a person's elbow, for example, while moving the forearm.
Want more lifelike painting? Adobe is simulating actual brushes and paint behavior.
(Credit: Adobe Systems)
This cross section shows two rings of light-sensitive semiconductor material in the fiber. The eight thicker parts are electrodes to carry signals.
(Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology)And you thought it was a problem when folks went into the locker room toting cell phones with cameras.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a fabric made of a mesh of light-sensitive fibers that collectively act like a rudimentary camera. The fibers, which each can detect two frequencies of light, produced signals that when amplified and processed by a computer reproduced an image of a smiley face near the mesh.
"This is the first time that anybody has demonstrated that a single plane of fibers, or 'fabric,' can collect images just like a camera but without a lens," said Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science, who along with colleagues described the approach in a the journal Nano Letters.
MIT suggested that the technology, if developed further, could give a soldier a uniform that would help him see threats in all directions. Optical fiber webs, by distributing the chore across a large area, would be less susceptible to damage in one area.
The technology uses fibers less than a millimeter in diameter, stretched into thin form from a thicker cylinder. Within the fibers are two cylindrical shells of semiconductor material, each connected to the outside world with four built-in metal electrodes.
This image shows the inauguration scene from more than 400 miles in space. You can see the dark clusters of ant-like people gathered around the Capitol and in front of JumboTrons along the National Mall.
(Credit: GeoEye Satellite Image)U.S. President Barack Obama was sworn in on Tuesday in Washington. But the number of people who braved the frigid D.C. weather to watch the historic event could have been anywhere between 800,000 and 3 million, depending on who you talk to.
Researchers have projected widely varying figures for the event's attendance, based on satellites circling above the clouds, aerostat balloons tethered blocks away, television coverage of the crowd, and good old-fashioned mathematics calculations.
Steve Doig, a journalism professor at Arizona State University who specializes in crowd counting, said he is estimating there were 800,000 people in attendance, based on a satellite image taken by GeoEye about 40 minutes before the swearing-in ceremony.
"The space-based image is fascinating because all the low-level shots make you think the crowd is much larger. (In the satellite images), you see the very dense clots of people in front of the JumboTrons, but then the wide open spaces elsewhere," Doig said. "I'd still suspect this crowd was larger than the Lyndon Johnson one, which wasn't estimated with the benefit of an image from this excellent viewpoint."
Estimates have put Johnson's inauguration attendance at 1.2 million, but Doig said he thinks that figure is inflated.
With the images, Doig tries to figure out how many people there might be per square foot and then factors in the surface area.
"It's actually fairly simple math, getting the square footage and dividing that by some number of feet per person," he said. "A scary mosh pit is 2.5 square feet per person. That's about as tight as you can pack people, where they can't move--elevator tight."
If people up and down the Mall were crammed that tight, there could have been 2 million, he said.
GeoEye collected a high-resolution image of Washington, D.C., at 11:19 a.m. EST from 423 miles in space, said Mark Brender, GeoEye vice president of marketing and communications.
"There were high, wispy light clouds, but one could clearly see throngs of people, especially gathered around the large JumboTron televisions spread along the National Mall," he said. "The satellite collects imagery at 41 centimeter ground resolution, so one is able to see an object the size of home plate on a baseball diamond."
Satellites owned by Digital Globe also took shots, from 300 miles up following the polar orbit at a speed of about 17,000 miles per hour, said company spokesman Chuck Herring.
This shot was taken from a satellite 300 miles high.
(Credit: Digital Globe)Others made estimates based on video images.
"I just watched the event in the American embassy in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates!!" Farouk El-Baz, a Boston University professor who is considered the leading authority on providing crowd estimates, wrote in an e-mail. "I do not have the pictures yet, but the video images show nearly 3 million people!"
El-Baz explained how he arrived at his figure this way: The area between the steps of the Capitol Building and the Lincoln Memorial is 2.2 miles. The width of the National Mall is half a mile and there is another one mile along the western greens, he said. "If this area is nearly full it can accommodate at least 3 million people," he said.
"Crowd counting is an art," said Curt Westergard, president of Digital Design and Imaging Service, which took photos of the event with 360-degree spherical panoramic cameras attached to balloons bobbing 500 feet above and a few blocks away from the White House. Fiber-optic cables tethered the balloons to a special launch trailer, which transmitted live shots to CNN.
"We're trying to contribute some of the oblique-angle photos of the scene that might see things under trees that satellite photos might miss (or) people standing in alcoves," he said.
The cameras took the shots between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. EST, when they were forced to shut down due to air space regulations. The balloons, which measure about 12.5 feet in diameter, only rose to 500 feet instead of 800 feet because of issues with President Bush's helicopter, according to Westergard.
Fixed-wing planes and even helicopters usually can be used, but were prohibited from coming near the event for security reasons.
The U.S. National Park Service, threatened with a lawsuit over its crowd estimate for the Million Man March in 1995, stopped doing crowd projections as a matter of policy. But the agency changed its mind for the Obama inauguration, although it won't release a figure until later in the week, according to USA Today.
Imaging technology also was being used to help the U.S. Department of Interior keep track of crowds for security, public safety, and traffic purposes, according to the GIS Cafe Web site. The Interior Department uses a wall-sized display of high-resolution flat-screen, tiled LCD monitors called the "OptIPortal" that displays 35-megapixel aerial imagery, the report said.
An image of the inauguration crowd shot by a camera attached to a balloon 500 feet above the ground.
(Credit: AirPhotosLIVE)(See more satellite images from GeoEye here.)
According to IBM Research: 'An ultrasensitive silicon cantilever detects the tiny magnetic force between a nanoscale magnetic tip--green--and the hydrogen nuclei present in the virus particles placed at the end of the cantilever--blue, seen in the reflection. Nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging is achieved by manipulating the hydrogen nuclei in the sample with a radiofrequency magnetic field generated by a 'microwire'--red.''
(Credit: IBM Research)IBM Research has built a new nanoscale microscope capable of creating images with 100 million times finer resolution than existing MRI technology.
The breakthrough, announced Monday, was made possible through a process called magnetic resonance force microscopy, which, according to IBM, detects "ultra-small magnetic forces." The technique is said to be able to "see" beneath surfaces and be safe for sensitive biological materials.
IBM said that it ran a test using the new system that established for the first time, magnetic resonance imaging on nanometer-scale items. By running it on a tobacco mosaic virus that is 18 nanometers across--18 billionths of a meter--the new system achieved resolution down to 4 nanometers.
Here is a link to a YouTube video about the technology.
Fiber-optic technology has long helped doctors get at problems in a patient's body without having to resort to major surgery. But for all the technological wonder of being able to see deep inside the body through a tiny tube, the view has been largely limited to the typical two-dimensional rendering of a TV or computer screen.
Now, however, surgeons are able to make use of 3D imaging--best known as a sometime Hollywood special effect--for delicate procedures such as removing tumors from the brain. One such surgeon is Dr. Theodore Schwartz of the Weill-Cornell Medical Center in New York, who can get a vivid look at the brain he's working on via 3D goggles.
Those goggles deliver the lifelike images because the other end of the fiber-optic system has "an array of about a thousand lenses" on a 3-millimeter chip, inserted into the patient through the sinuses. Electrodes on the patient's face help to generate the images.
In the video here, CBS News medical correspondent Dr. John LaPook talks to Dr. Schwartz about the technology and how it helped him tackle a tumor at the base of the brain of 44-year-old Larry Perkins, a New York City detective.
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