Cheap infrared cameras for all
Fancy being an infrared detective? Hardware hackers are raising $30,000 on crowdfunding site Kickstarter to cut the cost of infrared cameras, which citizen environmentalists use to spot sewage spills in wetlands, for example. Red light is absorbed by plants during photosynthesis but infrared is not 鈥� so healthy plants should reflect a lot of infrared light. The idea behind the project is to buy cheap digital cameras and fit them with a 鈥渟uperblue鈥� filter. This forces the red channel of the camera鈥檚 image sensor to produce an infrared image. Infragram wants to sell the cameras for around $35.
Quantum dots make TV colours sing
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Your next TV might be a quantum one. Well, sort of. Light-emitting nanoparticles called quantum dots have finally made it out of the lab and into our living rooms, bringing better colour to LCD flat-panel screens. The first TVs with the new technology, Sony鈥檚 Triluminos sets, reached stores this month. Quantum dots are tiny bits of semiconductor that emit light. When illuminated, they produce exceptionally pure colours that can be mixed to display nearly all of the colours the human eye can see. By contrast, mixing the less-pure red, green and blue emissions in LCD displays produces only about two-thirds of the colour range visible to the eye.
Only you can pull the trigger
If it鈥檚 good enough for James Bond鈥� Guns that only work in their owner鈥檚 hands 鈥� as in the 007 film Skyfall 鈥� just won congressional support in the US. John Tierney, a Democrat representing Massachusetts, has a bill that will force gun manufacturers to build biometric technology like fingerprint recognition into all handguns, and calls on the US National Institute of Justice to undertake the necessary research. That鈥檚 good news for , Georgia, which has been researching the idea for over a decade and is now to produce a prototype fingerprint-enabled handgun.
