Cutting Edge

No diversion can divert me from the fact that treadmills are boring. Even if the weather is bad, I'm not much of a TV viewer -- on or off the treadmill. And I often find the most energizing music to also be the most annoying. Reading on a treadmill can be downright nauseating.

But thanks to an experimental system out of Purdue University, I soon may be able to catch up on my backlog of New Yorker digital issues while clocking time on the dreaded tread.… Read more

Now that winter has passed, those of us who live in cold climes can once again appreciate the beauty of snowflakes without feeling the urge to curse them for making us dig out the shovel. And if ever snowflakes looked lovely, it's in these images shot by a high-speed camera system developed specifically to photograph them in 3D as they fell.

"Until our device, there was no good instrument for automatically photographing the shapes and sizes of snowflakes in free fall," says Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah and one of the developers of the cam known as MASC, or Multi-Angle Snowflake Camera. "We are photographing these snowflakes completely untouched by any device, as they exist naturally in the air."

MASC -- under development for three years -- takes 9- to 37-micron-resolution stereographic photographs of snowflakes from three angles while simultaneously measuring the speed of their fall, a highly influential factor in the location and lifetime of a storm. … Read more

Lytro, a Silicon Valley startup making an unusual new light-field camera, said today Jason Rosenthal will take over as chief executive on April 15.

Rosenthal previously was an executive at Silver Lake Partners and CEO of social-networking start-up Ning. He also worked at AOL, Hewlett-Packard, Netscape, and OpsWare.

He'll replace interim CEO Charles Chi, who took over when founder Ren Ng stepped aside as CEO in 2012. Ng will remain executive chairman, the company said.

Lytro's light-field camera allows photographers to focus an image after the fact, but also reduces resolution and makes sharing photos less convenient than … Read more

A massive space rock traveling 25,000 miles per hour will get within 1.7 million miles from the Earth tonight. You'll be able to track its path live during a Slooh Space Camera show, starting at 4 p.m. Pacific/7 p.m. Eastern.

The asteroid, called 2012 QG42, will have about the same amount of brightness as the dwarf planet Pluto. Discovered a couple of weeks ago, 2012 QG42 is estimated to be between 625 feet and 1,500 feet in diameter.

The good news: There's no chance of a collision between the asteroid and Earth … Read more

Geeks everywhere are riveted by the new images of Mars the Curiosity rover is beaming back to Earth. What you might be surprised to hear is just how few megapixels are involved in bringing those photos to us.

The rover sports 12 cameras in all, but the main imaging cameras have measly 2MP sensors. Wait, what? Was NASA trying to discourage the rover from taking too many vacation snapshots?… Read more

This weekend is a rare opportunity to see a space rock the size of a city block go for a joyride past the much bigger space rock we call Earth.

The snappily named asteroid 2002 AM31 will cruise by our planet this Sunday, coming within 13.7 lunar distances, or about 3.2 million miles.

If you consider yourself a bit of a NEO (near-Earth object) groupie, you can watch the whole spectacle online at the Web site of the Slooh space camera (really a network of robotic telescopes around the globe). Webcasts are scheduled for 4:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. PT and will feature live commentary and feeds from telescopes in Arizona and the Canary Islands. … Read more

Many of us have relied on rapid diagnostic tests at one time or another, whether it's testing for pregnancy, blood glucose levels, or strep throat.

But while dropping fluid samples on a small strip for near-instantaneous results is affordable and convenient, reading results using the human eye means there is the potential for, well, human error.

So researchers at UCLA have taken the human out of the equation as much as possible and developed a digital "universal" reader for all rapid diagnostic tests, or RDTs, that requires no translation of results.

In the journal Lab on a … Read more

If you want to get more natural with your pics, Japanese researchers are working on a gesture-based mini camera that lets your hands frame the shot.

The group at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) in Gifu Prefecture recently showed off something they call the Ubi-Camera, a play on "ubiquitous" and "yubi" ("finger" in Japanese).

As the vid shows below, the simple prototype attaches to your index finger while your other fingers form a viewfinder around it. Push a button with your thumb to snap the shot.

Instead of a zoom … Read more

Researchers at MIT like what they see so far from a camera that can perform a nifty trick: peer around a corner.

And it captures a 3D image to boot.

The innovative process is called femtophotography, after the incredibly quick laser pulses involved; they're measured in quadrillionths of a second. Those bursts of light bounce around off ordinary doors or walls or floors -- mirrors need not apply -- and make their way back to a picosecond-accurate detector at the camera (picoseconds = trillionths of a second) that records the elapsed time and then does the math on how the light bursts traveled.

The system runs through the drill multiple times in that blink of an eye, with the light bursts traveling several different routes to provide a more complete 3D image.

Or to put it in a more mind-blowing perspective, the camera captures all that target object illumination at the equivalent of roughly 1 trillion frames per second. Much more detail is available at this FAQ on the Camera Culture site.… Read more