4 LENSES, 3D, 2 EYES: Maybe it's the glasses that are holding back 3D. If so, a new four-camera system for creating 3D you can view without glasses may give it a kick. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute of Telecommunications are combining images from four cameras at once to send appropriate information to each eye. The four cameras must be precisely calibrated though so the images can be correctly aligned. Their system recognises identical objects in the image on all cameras, and even detects remaining anomalies to correct them in real time. Next they need to efficiently encode the video to compress the huge volume of recorded data and allow broadcast over current infrastructure. 3D: still trying. Fraunhofer Institute has more details.
CLOUD BALLOONS: A changing climate provides many opportunities for intervention. A team of British academics plan to tether a hose to the ground and pump particles into the stratosphere. Their goal is to mimic the cooling effect of a volcano. The cloud they create should bounce some of the Sun's energy back into space. In a scaled down test they'll send a balloon to a height of 1 Km to pump water into the air.
And if the water droplets fail, at least the balloon can offer a bit of shade. More at The Guardiandetail the controversial plan and other unusual experiments.
LASER SPLITS: Researchers in the US have created a low-cost laser-powered handheld microscope to quickly detect E. coli and other bacteria. The microscope has a transmission mode, useful for viewing optically transparent things like cells. It also has a reflection mode, where it uses holography to create a 3D image of the sample being studied. By splitting a laser beam and applying some maths they can build a 3D image of the sample. The device uses low-cost digital photo sensors like those found in a smartphone. Images captured can be sent to a full-powered computer for detailed analysis. When's that tricorder going to be ready then? BBC has details.
MINE, YES MINE: There are scifi movies about blasting incoming asteroids out of the Earth's path. But it seems some Chinese scientists hope to drag an asteroid in and capture it. Scientists from Tsinghua University in Beijing have set their eyes on a 10 metre object called 2008EA9 which will naturally come within a million Km or so in 2049. They figure they could nudge it into an orbit twice as far away as the Moon where they could study and mine it. Those slide rules better be utterly accurate, folks. Technology Review has details.
STEAM ERA: Miele's FashionMaster is an ironing board with a built-in steamer, wheels, and an iron that has a honeycombed plate to distribute steam evenly. The whole thing's on wheels so it's easy to move. Ironing? What's that again? DVICE.