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Universal Surface Scanner Detected
mcgrew writes to tell us that scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have created a new system that can test any surface for just about anything. "Their idea uses a thin layer of metal drilled with nanoscale holes, laid onto the surface being tested. When the perforated plate is zapped with laser light, the surface plasmons that form emit light with a frequency related to the materials touching the plate. A sensitive light detector is needed to measure the frequency of light given off. The team says devices using this approach can be small and portable, will work on very low power, and could detect everything from explosives to bacteria. All that needs to be done now is build a system able to decode the light signatures."
R&D: We have this awesome device! And it can tell you everything about anything!
Boss: That sounds great, so what does it say about, say, this test material?
R&D: ....
R&D: We don't know yet. We don't know how to read it yet.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
Maybe now we will be able to determine what can be found McDonald's hamburger patty.
decode the light signatures
Decode: signatures that are light verses heavy or
/. for any!
Decode: signatures of the light being emitted?
Never did have a heavy signature and they sure didn't check
--
Oh well, Bad Karma and all . . .
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Now where can I get some dilithium crystals?
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
Would this type of detector be able to differentiate between species of bacteria?
The computer prints the following:
1. Your tap water is too hard. Get a water softener.
2. Your dog has ringworm. Bathe him with anti-fungal shampoo.
3. Your daughter has a cocaine habit. Get her into rehab.
4. Your wife is pregnant...twin girls. They aren't yours. Get a lawyer.
5. If you don't stop playing with yourself, your elbow will never get better.
Professor Frink:
Brace yourselves gentlemen. According to the gas chromatograph, the secret ingredient is... Love!? Who's been screwing with this thing?
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
And the optical sensor, while being non-trivial, doens't just sense magically everything from explosives to bacteria. You have to chemically engineer receptors . That's also very non-trivial.
I'll start.
It's called a transporter, it dematerializes and re-materializes anything placed on a raised platform. I have built the platform, all that needs to be done now is to figure out how to de/re-materialize objects.
I've also invented a portable fusion reactor. The concept is that I can fuse everyday objects - garbage - to make unlimited energy. I've got a bunch of garbage, all that needs to be done is figure out how to fuse at room temperatures.
Ok, now you guys come up with amazing inventions. You know, just like the guy in the article did.
After all, Google scans lots of books for posterity and what not. Considering that something like only FOUR IPOs happened this year, relative to some SIXTY in some of the previous years, getting investor money is hard these days.
BUT, if Google wants to enhance or add to their "image", they can fund the hiring of scanning employees, the purchase of optical sensors and databases, and then maybe ask the DOD or some university labs for samples of any and all non-military specimens that would be scanned for for purposes of protecting transit systems, large enclosed gathering areas, hospitals, and so on. Eventually, if the database is large enough, the sensors small enough, and the samples of good enough quality, some sort of Star Trek "Tricorder" could be built feasibly, more than previous claims of the recent past.
Probably a lot of the "scanning" might be like:
-- bombard the target molecule/isotope/material/sample with one or more beams (of appropriate type)
-- scan the reflection
-- compare to known signatures
-- identify
-- report
-- clear or sound alarm
Google might even disperse unclassified results to that anyone interested could be globally involved and could contribute their own samples for verification. This could enhance all sorts of safety-related checking...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
... by putting a piece of material with nanoscopic holes in it directly on the explosive and zapping it with a laser strongly enough for it to emit light?
I'd expect there to be no problem detecting explosives that way - except for having any explosive left after you detect it. B-(
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It does seem humorous that the scientist claimed he built a multi-surface detector which actually doesn't detect anything in particular. However, even if a few surfaces can be detected, this invention could be extremely useful in several fields. For instance, you might be able to use it to differentiate between very similar minerals or metals, or possibly even determine what combination of materials exist in a single surface. This could save a significant amount of time in testing and traditional analysis.
A Universal Surface Scanner Detected? Did it show up on radar suddenly or something?
Radar Operator: Chief, we have detected something on radar!
Chief: What is it?
Radar Operator: It appears to be some sort of Universal Surface Scanner.....
Universal Surface Scanner Detected
I wasn't aware that a universal surface scanner existed, nor that there was a detector built to detect universal surface scanners. Now that I know that such a detector exists, and that it has detected a universal surface scanner, I am wondering: was there some sort of SETI-like project - a vast array of detectors just searching for signs of a universal surface scanner? I don't recall anything like this coming up on Slashdot before. How do we know that the detectors haven't registered a false positive. Maybe this isn't a universal surface scanner, but merely a universal surface sensor. Maybe it isn't a universal surface scanner, but one of those surface scanners that can scan the surface of most things, but has problems when it comes to surfaces that are shiney.
Where is this universal surface scanner? Is it something that we can duplicate, now that we know it exists? Is it something that we can retrieve from wherever it is and start scanning surfaces?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
if it's just down to detecting the frequency of the light emitted, couldn't some sort of photovoltaic or photoelectric sensor be designed so that you wouldn't have to chemically engineer receptors for different kinds of surfaces, but rather just program the software to identify the surface material?
Right Next to the Hottest Furnace, and it's reserved for people who utter the phrase "All you gotta do now is write the software"
From the summary - "All that needs to be done now is build a system able to decode the light signatures.""
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
For calibration reference, i'm certain that scanning his research paper will match bullshit.
Whenever an article about an amazing new breakthrough contains the words all that needs to be done I deflate my expectations and walk quietly away. All that needs to be done here is to actually get it working. Who knows, the scanner plate is small, but it may require a computer the size of a major city's sports arena to handle the results.
Move along, there's nothing to see here yet.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Now we just need to find the surface of the Universe, and we'll be able to scan it.
I'm so excited I just made water in my pantaloons!
Shooting lasers at objects to get their light signature is nothing new.
It's called LIBS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIBS).
The light is just sent through a spectrograph and an ICCD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensified_charge-coupled_device) is used to image a precise moment in time to see the spectra.
if it's just down to detecting the frequency of the light emitted, couldn't some sort of photovoltaic or photoelectric sensor be designed so that you wouldn't have to chemically engineer receptors for different kinds of surfaces, but rather just program the software to identify the surface material?
Yes, what you're describing is effectively using a vector of many pieces of information to distinguish between various samples as opposed to relying on a binary receptor. Many detection mechanisms work that way; in fact, I did my graduate work on sensors that work in that manner. While it can work, there's still a lot of trickery in the way of algorithms used in the software. There's also a matter of sensitivity/selectivity: given a pair of samples and their measurements, can the difference in signatures be detected outside the noise?
In general, with systems like these, the more things you're trying to mutually distinguish, the more pieces of information you need, and the more sensitive you need the measurements to be. That's tough since they're claiming it can (in theory) sense *everything*. Unfortunately, simply detecting something is useless - the interesting part would be how many things they can recognize while distinguishing them from false alarms.
Methinks we have some folks that understand the physics, but aren't as far along when it comes to the algorithms. I've been down this road, and it's nowhere near as simple as they seem to think.
For a virtual product.
Have they've been reading MicroSoft's playbook or something?
Note that the submitter merely quotes the article. The submitter may not be able to evaluate the article properly. The source, New Scientist, should know better. They've either knowingly passed along crap out of sheer laziness, or the they assigned it to someone completely unable to spot the fatal flaws in the press release that serves as their sole source.
"All that needs to be done now is build a system able to decode the light signatures."
If there is as yet no decoder, there is no evidence the device does anything at all, much less what's asserted. As for "test any surface for just about anything", what TFA actually says is it can test pretty much any surface for contamination. That begs the question that of the surface being examined is completely covered with a layer of contamination, how would the device know that the surface being tested is contamination rather than the surface meant to be tested? It can't without being told what it's supposed to detect. This requires pre-knowledge by the operator. The device cannot test any surface, it can only test those surfaces for which the operator can give an accurate accounting of what's supposed to be there.
It is almost axiomatic that when someone says "all you need to do is" with respect to something that hasn't yet been done, they have no idea how and so have no valid reason to say that, and it is either far more difficult than they imagine or impossible. There is not enough information presented (it probably doesn't exist any more than the "decoder") to determine how the proposed device improves on existing spectrography.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Simply a matter of programming!
Gattaca.
Surface Plasmon based sensing has been around for a long long time. From what I've read, it doesn't seem that this method/technique is anything revolutionary, nor is it ever going to magically determine what bacteria/explosives are on a surface. As someone mentioned in a previous post, you need to chemically engineer probe molecules for any bio-target that you are trying to specifically detect. All the device is going to tell you is that you have some shift in frequency due to some sort of binding/contamination on the surface of the material you are probing (as compared to a pristine surface).
However, in most cases it cannot give you any more information about the actual material/molecules that are causing this frequency shift. Usually SPR based sensors are sensitive to refractive index variations at the surface of the metal surface (where the plasmons oscillate) much like most optical sensor technologies. While these technologies can all tell you if you have some binding/contamination on a surface due to "stuff getting on", they can't really identify this material unless coupled with some other identification techniques or by modifying the surface to make sure that whatever binds is infact specific to the surface.
So, basically, we have tricorders that spit out pure gibberish that sounds important. Just like real Star Trek!
My project will involve searching for alternative nomenclature for these categories, and generating a taxonomic vocabulary that may be searched and combined using genetic algorithms to synergistically coalesce a hyperbolic trans-categorical acronym. This as-yet-undiscovered acronym will be marketed via extensive cross-licensing and open-source profit redirection to instill a public sense of faith in the project, and a private sense of wealth in the originator.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
It's a surface detector because the receptors are immobilized on a surface (this is typical of surface plasmon resonance sensors, where the surface belongs with the plasmon, not with the sensor), not because it analyzes surfaces. If you read the patent, it actually analyzes stuff in solution that flows past the surface.
Maybe now we will be able to determine what can be found McDonald's hamburger patty.
You laugh, but what I'd like to do with such a thing ain't so far off the mark from that...
Basically, my wife has Celiac disease - if she eats food that has wheat flour or bread crumbs in it (even in very small quantities) it makes her sick. Long-term consequences from repeated poisonings include a higher risk of intestinal cancer...
So the problem is, eating out, it's often hard to know what's safe to eat. If I could get some kind of scanner that could detect gluten in food... that would be awesome.
Of course, from the way this thing works it sounds like the gluten would have to be somewhere near the surface of the food... So I guess it's way too early to get excited...
Bow-ties are cool.
Its kinda like how bomb squads blow suspicious devices up to check if they are explosives.
2007-1-31: Never Forget...
Bow-ties are cool.
Great - just let me know when I can pick up the finished tricorder product
Thanks
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a reference to Godwin's Law approaches 1
You have to chemically engineer receptors. That's also very non-trivial.
What kinds of receptors are needed for these kinds of devices? TFA describes possibilities for "small and portable" devices, which would be nice for field testing work, if the cost is low. I'm assuming small and portable equate with 'low-cost' which may be a bad assumption.
News articles about the melamine problem in China say there's not routine testing for melamine because it's expensive, so cheap generic sensors would be a great advancement.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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Just file the patent, wait for someone else to get it working, then sue them.
"...now is build a system able to decode the light signatures."
Yea, and I can travel through time. The only thing I need is to build a time machine.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
How do they clean the thing after using it?
Yes, that's a serious question.
Finally we know what goes between:
1. Shine a laser on a surface full of nanoscale holes. ...and...
3. Profit!
I have this AWESOME tool that can examine the surface of any material through a grid of holes!
All I need now is the examining part!
AH Hahahahahah...
I'm going to be frigging RICH!
AH Hahahahahah...
I have loads of capacitors, I just need to work out how to flux them.
Macguyver already did this with an old coke can, a pin and a flashlight!
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.