DOWN LOW: James Cameron spent three hours almost 11 km down in the deepest part of the ocean the other day when his specially constructed capsule dived to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest point of the Mariana Trench. While the descent took 2.5 hours, the ride back up was only 70 minutes long. That dive proved the technology, and should mark the beginning of many future dives. The enormous pressures at that depth caused the capsule to physically contract by around seven cm. So the walls really were pushing in. National Geographic has more, and there's video here.
HIGHS AND LOWS: Apollo 11 was one of the most famous expeditions to the moon. Five F-1 rocket engines sent the Apollo 11 mission on its way and then fell into the Atlantic when they were spent. Jeff Bezos used state-of-the-art deep sea sonar to find the rockets 4 Km below the surface. Bezos Expeditions aims to raise at least one of the engines from the sea floor, and hope that although NASA own the equipment they'll make it available to the Smithsonian Museum. It
seems undersea's all the rage. Bezos Expeditions has details.
LIGHT FROM THE PAST: You may think that ancient settlements are gone without trace. That's not so, as human activity leaves its marks on soil, which may have higher levels of organic materials, a finer texture and lighter appearance. That difference can be seen by satellites as areas that reflect more light. A researcher from Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained software to recognise these lighter areas in satellite images already recorded in the last 50 years. The satellite imagery provided evidence of 14,000 settlement sites spanning eight millennia in 23,000 square kilometres of northeastern Syria. In conjunction with digital elevation data collected in 2000 by the space shuttle the researcher was able to estimate the volume of larger sites, suggesting their longevity. That's a clever way to re-use old images. More into at Nature.
LIGHT TOUCH: Take a very special camera that can fire pulses of laser light and then record with extreme accuracy how long the photons take to bounce back. By applying an algorithm to those time differences the software can reconstruct items that are hidden by intervening objects from the camera's view. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have used this technique to see around corners. The camera fires 60 laser pulses, each to a slightly different position and each only 50 quadrillionths of a second long. The reconstruction algorithm then takes all the data and creates an image of what the camera can't see. The camera can record images every 2 picoseconds, the time it takes light to travel just 0.6 mm. At the moment it takes several minutes to construct an image, but researchers hope to reduce that to just a few seconds. Clever. Very clever. Details are at Nature News and there's video here.
TINGLY TAT: Nokia have filed a patent for a tattoo using ferromagnetic inks that vibrate based on commands from your phone. The ink material would first be demagnetised, then applied to your body. Then the ink needs to be magnetised again so it's sensitive to magnetic fields. Then your phone could send out a specific magnetic field that makes your tattoo vibrate. You want to be very careful about where to apply that tat. Unwired View has more here.
