Trying to Make Sense of The Big Bang Discovery? This May Help.

The discovery was made using a special detector installed on the South Pole Telescope.
My photo of the telescope from Amundsen-Scott Station, South Pole, Antarctia.

The discovery that seems to confirm inflation has made word-wide news and for a good reason. It’s likely to result in some Nobel Prizes as well. NATURE made a good video that explains the basics: (see below:)

Want to know more?? Joe Hansen at “It’s OK To be Smart” has a more in-depth summary of why this is such a BIG deal and some links to other posts from some physicists who work in this field. Astrophysicist Ethan Seigel’s is superb and recommended reading. Physics teachers, this is where you send your brightest students who are craving more!

It was a nice summer day at the South Pole when I snapped this pic. -23°F with a wind chill of -50°.

I visited the South Pole Telescope in 2010, and I can tell you it is an amazing machine in a very hostile environment. The South Pole is like another planet, and those working there sometimes have to spend 30 minutes just getting dressed to make the short trip from Amundsen Scott Station to the telescope. The photo above is mine, and was taken from Amundsen Scott Station. In the long polar night (with a temperature of -90°F and winds of hurricane force), that trek can be dangerous and getting lost deadly.

The cold is so intense that your body requires almost double the number calories, and I can tell you the food is good! The telescope is there because the South Pole is at nearly 3,000 meters elevation, and in the middle of one of the driest deserts on Earth. To make infrared images of the cosmos you want cold and dry, and that’s just about the best spot on the planet for it.

ORIGINAL: A.G.U. American Geophysical Union

by Dan Satterfield

Infragram: the Infrared Plant Photography Project

ORIGINAL: KickStarter
by Public Lab
 

A simple, cheap infrared camera which can measure plant health -- for geek gardeners, farmers, and open source DIY scientists.
What could farmers, gardeners, students or environmental activists do with an infrared camera that costs as little as $35?

What is Infragram?

Infragram is a simple, affordable near-infrared camera produced by the Public Laboratory community in a series of collaborative experiments over the last few years. We originally developed this technology to monitor wetlands damages in the wake of the BP oil spill, but its simplicity of use and easy-to-modify open-source hardware & software makes it a useful tool for home gardeners, hikers, makers, farmers, amateur scientists, teachers, artists, and anyone curious about the secret lives of plants.

What can you do with Infragram?

• Take pictures to examine plant health in backyard gardens, farms, parks, and nearby wetlands
• Check on the health of your crops, especially from a balloon or a kite
• Monitor your household plants
• Teach students about plant growth and photosynthesis
• Create exciting science fair projects
• Generate verifiable, open environmental data
• Check progress of environmental restoration projects
• Document unhealthy areas of your local ecology
• Pretend you have super-veg-powers

Near-infrared photography has been a key tool for planning at the industrial and governmental level: it is used on airplanes and satellites by vineyards, large farms, and even NASA for sophisticated agricultural and ecological assessment. In contrast, Infragram allows average people to monitor their environment through verifiable, quantifiable, citizen-generated data. Just as photography was instrumental to the rise of credible print journalism, inexpensive, open-source data-collection technologies democratize and improve reporting about environmental impacts.

Start exploring your world today with Infragram!

How does it work? 

Photosynthesizing plants absorb most visible light (less green than red and blue, which is why they're green to our eyes!) but reflect near-infrared. When you take a picture with the Infragram, you get two separate images -- infrared and regular light -- and a false-color composite that shows you where there are big differences. Bright spots in the composite means lots of photosynthesis! (Learn more here)

We're able to get both channels in one by filtering out the red light, and reading infrared in its place using a piece of carefully chosen "superblue" filter (read more here). The images are later processed online -- combining the blue and infrared channels into an image map of photosynthesis (as shown above).

What you get

DIY Filter Pack: This is just a piece of "superblue" filter which you can use to turn your webcam or cheap point-and-shoot into an infrared camera. The filter allows you to take an infrared photo in the "red" channel of your camera, and a visible image in the "blue" channel. You'll also receive a white balance card and instructions on how install your filter -- it's pretty easy!

Infragram Webcam: This inexpensive but flexible reward is perfect for plugging directly into your laptop or integrating into other projects. It's also ideal for your Raspberry Pi, if you want to take it outdoors, do timelapse photography, or write scripts to control your camera. It ships as a bare circuit board with a USB cable - like an Arduino.

Infragram Point & Shoot: Just want a camera? This is a straightforward, if basic, point-and-shoot: you can simply take photos as you normally would, then upload them to our free and open-source web app to quickly and easily get a variety of composite images and analyses. To accomplish this, we're simply modifying existing cameras which we'll buy in bulk, using the "superblue" filter. This isn't an SLR or even a particularly fully featured camera -- it likely won't have an LCD screen and may be "rebranded" with a Public Lab sticker -- but it's the new filter we've put inside which counts.

The final configuration will depend on the # of backers, but it will likely use AAA batteries and a micro SD card. We're promising a minimum of 2 megapixel resolution, but should be able to do much better, especially if we get a lot of backers. Basically, the more money we raise, the better these cameras will get!

How you’ll develop your images

Whether you’re using our DIY filter with your own camera, the Infragram Webcam, or the Infragram Point & Shoot, you’ll be following the same, easy process to generate composite, infrared + visible images that will reveal new details of plant health and photosynthesis -- like in the photo above, taken out the window of a commercial airline flight!

1. Calibrate. In order to get the most meaningful data possible from your plant images, it’s a good idea to ‘calibrate’ your camera, taking into account the current lighting conditions (sunny vs. cloudy, indoors vs. outdoors) at the time that you’re taking your photos: this makes it much easier to compare ‘plant health’ images taken at different times, in different places, and by different cameras. To make this easy, we’ll likely be providing an additional ‘white balance card’ -- simply, a card that has a standard color -- in our kits. By recording an initial image that includes this card, you’ll be able to use our online software to “standardize” the colors in all of your images. If you don’t have a card, don’t worry -- there will also be opportunities to calibrate your imagery automagically later, using our analysis software, and the results might be just as good.

2. Take your snapshot. “Rhododendrons -- say cheese!” Using your own camera (modded with our DIY filter), the Infragram Webcam, or the Infragram Point & Shoot, you’ll record the scene of your choosing -- ideally, with some vegetation-y life forms in it. Take pictures of household plants, garden vegetables, trees -- we’ve grabbed a lot of useful agricultural imagery from cameras dangling from kites and balloons! The Public Lab website and mailing list are already full of examples and suggestions related to infrared photography, and it’s easy to start a discussion with community members about your ideas, or ask for advice.

3. Upload. After you’ve finished an image capture session, you’ll want to upload your images using the (free, open source) online software our community is developing. This will likely simply involve navigating to a particular URL and dragging-and-dropping your images onto a specified area of a webpage. Easy peasy.

4. Analyze. If you thought the prior steps were fun, this step is fun +1 . We’re planning on providing a suite of image analysis tools online, so that everyone from researchers to geek gardeners can analyze, tweak, modify, and re-analyze their imagery to their heart’s content, extracting useful information about plant health and biomass assessment along the way.

5. Share. And perhaps the most exciting aspect of all: your imagery, your work, and your insights can easily be shared with the rest of the Public Lab community via this online service, the Public Lab mailing lists, and wikis and research notes at http://publiclab.org. Develop a kite-based aerial imagery project with your friends; get advice from NDVI researchers in the community as to the best techniques for yielding useful information from your garden photos; create and collaborate on new methods and protocols around DIY infrared photography. Public Lab’s ‘share and share alike’, ‘open source’ learning community model is not only fun -- it’s a great way to make rapid progress on any project!
Prototypes

The Infragram has been in active development for over a year now; our first prototype was made over 2 years ago and was simply some custom filter material taped to a camera!

Others have used 2 aligned webcams, and many have been tested alongside custom Raspberry Pi controller code which auto-composites the imagery. Read more about the collaborative, open source development of this tool here: http://publiclab.org/tag/near-infrared-camera

The modification to the camera happens inside, out of sight, unlike in some of the above prototypes. The final version will be based on a mass-produced camera like the one below (one of our prototype mods), though we are waiting to see how many backers we get before settling on a final model. If we have enough backers, we'd love to do a fully custom enclosure as well!

Gallery

Here are some photos showing Infragram infrared composite images from various prototypes. You can find more images here.

Who are we?

Public Lab is a community of tinkerers and concerned citizens (supported by a nonprofit) which develops and applies open-source tools for environmental exploration and investigation. Our small nonprofit has run three successful Kickstarters--Grassroots Mapping the BP Oil Spill, Balloon Mapping Kits, and DIY Spectrometry.

Our community of contributors help each other problem solve and trouble shoot through online mailing lists and research notes, organized by region and topic. This allows community members to share research, and for the combined brain power of dozens of people to answer questions and innovate rather than relying on a traditional "customer service" model. Join the Public Lab infrared discussion list today to get started!

On this project, we've collaborated with a range of different groups to meet the diverse needs of gardeners, farmers, environmental activists, conservationists, and more. These include: Gulf Restoration Network, FarmHack, GreenStart, the Design Trust’s Five Borough Farm project, Belize Open Source, and others!

Public Lab Staff in Cocodrie, LA--January 2013

Risks and challenges  
Learn about accountability on Kickstarter

This is Public Lab’s fourth Kickstarter campaign; our experience with the previous three successful ones have taught us lots about everything from production to fulfillment and international shipping. We've already shipped functional prototypes for the camera (which was actually a reward in a previous campaign), and are confident that we’ll be able to turn out a great new design for larger scale production with your support.

Our main unknowns at this point are the final specs on the different cameras we'll produce -- such as maximum resolution, battery life, and housing, which we have plenty of options for, but for which we need to know final order quantities before finalizing design work and choosing a supplier. We're lucky to have a vibrant open source community behind the project at PublicLab.org -- one which you're encouraged to join to help move the project along by contributing your skills!

Night-vision rat becomes first animal with sixth sense

ORIGINAL: New Scientist

Douglas Heaven, reporter

13 February 2013

The latest bionic superhero is a rat: its brain hooked up to an infrared detector, it's become the first animal to be given a sixth sense.

Developed by Miguel Nicolelis and colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, the system connects a head-mounted sensor to a brain region that normally processes touch sensations from whiskers. As shown in this video, the rat's brain is tricked when infrared light is detected, giving it a new sense organ. "Instead of seeing, the rats learned how to touch the light," says Nicolelis.

Even though the touch-processing brain area acquires a new role, the team found that it continues to process touch sensations from whiskers, somehow dividing its time between both types of signal. "The adult brain is a lot more plastic than we thought," says Nicolelis.

The finding could lead to new brain prostheses that restore sight in humans with a damaged visual cortex. By bypassing the damaged part of the brain altogether, it might be possible to wire up a video camera to a part of the brain that processes touch, letting people "touch" what the camera sees.

According to Nicolelis, it could also lead to superhero powers for humans. "It could be X-rays, radio waves, anything," he says. "Superman probably had a prosthetic device that nobody knew of."

If you enjoyed this post,watch a robot and human swap brains to learn teamwork or see a body-sharing robot that lets you experience another place

UCLA's new transparent solar film could be game-changer

ORIGINAL: LATimes

By Dean Kuipers

July 28, 2012, 6:00 a.m.

One of the holy grails of solar cell technology may have been found, with researchers at UCLA announcing they have created a new organic polymer that produces electricity, is nearly transparent and is more durable and malleable than silicon.

The applications are mind-boggling. Windows that produce electricity. Buildings wrapped in transparent solar cells. Laptops and phones – or even cars or planes – whose outer coverings act as chargers. It might even be sprayed on as a liquid. The promise of cheap and easy-to-apply site-generated solar electricity might now be a lot closer to reality.

Of course, the idea of solar films and solar plastics is not new. The breakthrough to making a transparent film, however, came with isolating only one band of light in the spectrum.

“[A solar film] harvests light and turns it into electricity. In our case, we harvest only the infrared part,” says Professor Yang Yang at UCLA’s California Nanosystems Institute, who has headed up the research on the new photovoltaic polymer. Absorbing only the infrared light, he explains, means the material doesn’t have to be dark or black or blue, like most silicon photovoltaic panels. It can be clear. “We have developed a material that absorbs infrared and is all transparent to the visible light.”

“And then we also invented a new electrode, a metal, that is also transparent. So we created a new solar cell,” Yang adds.

Well, the metal is actually not transparent, Yang points out; it’s just so small that you can’t see it. The new polymer incorporates silver nanowires about 0.1 microns thick, about one-thousandth the width of a human hair, and titanium dioxide nonoparticles as an electrode. When in liquid form, it is as clear as a glass of water, and when applied to a hard, flat surface as a film it is meant to be invisible to the eye.

Thin-film PV currently exists that can be applied to windows, but only on windows that can be tinted. Many buildings use tinted windows as a way to cut down infrared radiation and thus keep out excess heat. Because this new transparent film is meant specifically to absorb in the infrared spectrum, it may be able to cut air conditioning bills and generate electricity at the same time, while leaving windows clear. Technically, however, the entire building could be covered with the thin film and not affect colors.

Isolating the infrared spectrum is currently a less-efficient way to make electricity, and Yang says his group’s technology converts about 6% of the sun’s energy into electricity, as opposed to 11% or 12% from commercial PV. But, he says, that can change.

“We have to work hard in the lab to expand the coverage of the infrared,” says Yang. “Because infrared is huge, huge energy there, and we only harvest right now less than one-third of the infrared. Our efficiency could double or almost triple in the future. There are some limitations, but we should be able to go to 10% in the next 3 to 5 years.”

Coincidentally, the company that has launched the most high-profile effort to mass-manufacture photovoltaic polymers, Konarka Technologies, involved Yang’s PhD adviser, the late Sukant Tripathy. That company’s colored plastics use full-spectrum light to create low-cost PV that Tripathy hoped would bring cheap electricity to his home country of India. The company made big news earlier this year when it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Yang says that he will have to carry on his former professor’s dream to bring low-cost electricity to places like India and China, a pursuit that will necessitate a new way of looking at electricity.

“I think that solar has to take a different attitude,” says Yang. “Whenever people think about solar, they think about the big silicon panels that they put on their roof, or the big solar farms that SoCal Edison builds out in the desert. But for the future of energy use, we must think about how to harvest energy whenever and wherever it is possible. If we can change the concept that energy has to come from one source, which is the power company, that the supply should not be subject to the limitations of the power grid, a lot of new things can happen.”