Accident Could Lead To Better Digital Cameras

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday December 1, 2008 @08:35AM from the digital-chamagne dept.

Dave Bullock (eecue) writes "Scientists at UCLA have accidentally created a material that will some day give us better, faster, cheaper, more flexible digital cameras. I toured their lab and shot a photo essay for Wired. Personally I'm looking forward to a quantum-dot embedded camera sensor someday soon. 'Graduate student Hsiang-Yu Chen was working on a new formula for solar cells when something went wrong. Instead of creating electricity when hit with light, the conductivity of the material she was working with changed. "The original purpose [was] to make a solar cell more efficient," says Chen. "However, during the research we found the solar cell phenomenon [had] disappeared." Instead, the test material showed high gain photoconductivity, indicating potential use as a photo sensor.'"

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Re:That's great... by Bearpaw · 2008-12-01 08:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

Funny, though she was smart enough to not just toss the mistake away as worthless. That's the trick with accidental discoveries -- recognizing that the result is valuable even if it isn't the result you were looking for.
(And the lab is still working on better solar cells.)
Re:That's great... by Kent+Recal · 2008-12-01 10:02 · Score: 5, Insightful

Isn't that just like slashdot?
Everybody's aiming for +5 Insightful but it's even better when you get +5 Funny!