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Accident Could Lead To Better Digital Cameras
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.'"
...you'll see a niblet of it, dangled in front of you like a carrot, and then another niblet, and then another. Never will you get a product bringing out the "whoa, this is something totally new, and so much better thatn what we used to have!" in you - and it's just plain ol' business, as usual.
Seen any of those "whoa!" 3CCD consumer digicams on the market lately? ;)
Scientific accidents have brought some of the most groundbreaking discoveries - vulcanized rubber, X-rays, penicillin
I like how they compare 3 things that have been unimaginably advantageous to the human race to something that will allow me to view better-quality porn.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
but the assignment was to make a better solar cell. That's an 'F' for you, Chen!
I'm sorry to break the news, but just because you created something photo-conductive, even super-off-the-charts-photo-conductive doesn't mean it will become a digital camera sensor.
My question is, how is it that a UCLA grad student got a whole article out of bad research?
Even worse, the department will smile upon his non-work work because of the press generated more than anything else.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda stepped off the bus and was led into the yard of the Main
State Correctional Institute. He had been given ten years for participating in
a stock fraud. Five with good behavior. Years spent basking in the glow of a
CRT had been hard on him. His body was frail, his skin pallid. He knew he could
never make it through ten years in the general population with his virginity
intact. He had to get into solitary.
As soon as the burly guard unshackled him he made his move. Exhaling a feminine
"hmmph" he weakly slapped the guard. He was quickly taken to the ground,
receiving a swift kick to the ribs before being restrained. As he was dragged
to the solitary confinement cell he felt nothing but relief. "At least in
solitary," he thought "I'll be safe." Unfortunately for Rob he had picked the
wrong guard to mess with.
The next few days were uneventful. The time in his cell he spent evenly between
sleeping, reading a "Perl for Dummies" book he had gotten from the book cart,
and masturbating furiously. His self-flagellation was interrupted on the fourth
day. The burly guard he had attacked earlier stepped into his cell. The gleam
in the guards eye and the mean grin on his face made Rob's pecker quickly
shrivel in his hand. "You fucked with the wrong man when you fucked with
Michael Simms," said the guard. "The inmates here call me The Asshole for a
reason. Now come with me, punk."
The guard led him down the hall to one of several empty shower stalls. He
roughly threw Rob in the stall and locked the door. Rob was petrified. His mind
raced as he imagined the myriad of different tortures that could be in store
for him. His worst fears were confirmed when the guard returned. In his hands
were a short black dress, black stilleto heels, and a curly blonde wig. "Strip
down and put this on, bitch." Rob did as instructed and was pleased to notice
that the dress fit well and the heels gave him a nice slimming effect. The
burly guard admired the drag queen. "The GNAA is gonna love you!"
The guard left the shower stall, only to return minutes later. He opened the
door and led 20 large black men into the stall. "Rob, meet the Gay Nigger
Association of America. GNAA, meet Rob. I'm sure you all will get along fine."
With that the guard slammed the shower door closed and walked away laughing.
The men approached Rob, backing him into a corner. The apparent leader stepped
forward. "No matter what I'm gonna fuck that purdy lil' ass of yours. Now I can
fuck it dry or you can lube it up for me." Rob knew he had no choice. He
kneeled in front of the leader, who began to slap his face with his 10 black
inches. Puss from syphilictic sores quickly covered Rob's cheeks. When the
leader was sufficiently aroused he placed his throbbing cock up to Rob's lips.
As soon as Rob opened his mouth the leader violently shoved his manhood to the
back of Rob's throat and exclaimed "Swallow my shit you cracker bitch!" Rob
gagged as he was violently face fucked.
Just when he was about to pass out the leader pulled out, turned him around and
shoved his cock into Rob's ass. Rob began to scream in agony but his cries were
quickly muffled by one of the other gang member's cocks. They rode him like
that for the better part of an hour. When one man finished another quickly took
his place. Just as Rob was getting used to the throbbing pain in his anus the
men stopped. One man lay down on the floor and Rob was told to get on top of
him and take his dick inside him. Exhausted and humiliated, Rob had no will
left to fight. As soon as he inserted the penis another man came up behind him
and began to force his cock into Rob's already filled anus. Again his screams
of agony were muffled, this time by a smelly black anus.
For another hour he was violated in this way. When the men were finished with
him he couldn't walk and his mouth was filled with dingleberries and ass hairs.
Before they all left the leader had some parting words for Rob: "Thanks for
that sweet piece of ass, punk. We'll see you again tomorrow. Oh by the way, we
all have AIDS." It was going to be a long ten years for Rob.
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
This is fairly old news. We've been seeing the same stuff in our lab for about 8 years (also came across it during Quantum Dot research). It's been very hard to characterize. Cool stuff. Since you have x, y, and z resolution when you're "writing" to the photosensitive material, and these spots can be diffraction limited in size, you can imagine the storage density of read-only optical media for this.
I couldn't find it in the archive because the search tool is down, but Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler once made the observation that great discoveries are less "Eureka!" and more "Hey, that's funny."
There is no indication that this would be beneficial at all to camera design or manufacturing.
We have too many good, cheap, cameras.
Every asshole thinks they can just buy a DSLR and become a photographer (or even worse, a photo journalist).
We don't have enough good, cheap, solar cells.
Hsiang-Yu Chen gets an F-.
UCLA gets a FUCK YOU.
Congrats, but--"Pix, or it didn't happen!"
Set your phasers on "funky"!
1. Dup!
2. We've been doing that for YEARS...nothing special move along.
3. Duh...
4. Unless I invented it myself I don't believe it.
5. Dick Cheney will probably patent this and sit on it.
....it's a feature!
I dunno, it was also an accident, I was a bit drunk and started swinging random stuff around and like "holy hell, this could sell," and called up a marketing executive. She called me crazy, so I started a better company. I didn't actually do this, but I think the principle holds that drinking and silicon DO NOT MIX, and should never be anywhere remotely near each other under any circumstance, unless the silicon is mixed with an appropriate substrate to facilitate the absolution of grinprocessing, and an FPU to correct for the spins.
"But seriously dude, what is that in the radiator?"
Isn't that how all science is done right now ?
How many other "mistakes" like this have scientists just tossed out? Really sad considering how much money gets thrown into projects like these, only seeing it (sometimes) going to waste. But good to see this. One up for observant scientists!
were peer-reviewed and published where?
Given that some labs have already claimed that this is not a new phenomenon to them, it would be nice to see what is actually newsworthy about their "discovery"
"we are already at the point where it's the LENS that's the limiting factor for picture quality"
Not at all - 22mpix is about film resolution, which is just becoming widespread with the 5Dmk2 and D3X. Long way to go before that's on my phone. Similarly there's a long way to go with ISO. The 5Dmk2 has 25000 iso, but its still not perfect. Lots of room for improvement there and that's just two areas.
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
I'm left with the impression that the author of the article is coming to conclusions about this materials success and marketability that are way above his pay grade.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Or is it just this particular approach that failed?
The nanoparticle boost to solar cell efficiency (by slicing photon energies to allow several electron-hole pairs per photon, rather than one, to be formed for photons with energies well above the band gap, and perhaps to additionally combine the undersized "slices" of the photon energies to use them as well) promised a big improvement: A cheap spray-on coating step that would improve the price/performance of photovoltaic panels to finally make them cost-competitive with grid power in suburban areas.
It would be a pity if that didn't work out.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How fortunate to accidentaly learn a new word from a tag. Now just to make shure im not offtopic - I think this photosynthesis thing is cool, and we should try to find more of it.
[anti-slash.org] But suffice it Exploited that. A stagnant. As Linux Keep unnecessary for successful his clash with [amazingkreskin.com] since then. More *BSD is 3ead. Java IRC client intentions and niggerness? And Of the founders of
Like the improbable drive inventor, I wish to accidentally create an accidentator, so that inventors around the world can accidentally something. Science will advance greatly.
Serendipity.
--- You can start modding this down .
PatRIOTically,
Kilgore Trout.
P.S.: Please enable Cyrillic fonts.
I accidentally dropped my camera and now it's broke you insensitive clod!
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
Published in Nature's Nano journal: http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v3/n9/abs/nnano.2008.206.html
-- sigs suck --
Chemical Engineers are fascinating to me. My wife is a ChemE, and got her PhD from one of the labs which did this work, but her specialization is cancer therapeutics and protein modification. To have that scientific breadth in the same lab seems crazy to me.
The actual paper can be found at Nature Nano, it's a few months old at this point. For all of you jealous researchers who claim to have already done this, it has all the usual citations. If you're lucky (and published), maybe you got one!
what a disturbing news, photo-conductivity has been known for ages, what is new here for a graduate student and wired to claim a new discovery!!! You can buy these devices at many surplus stores!!
shame on you
A physicist with 30 year experience
HEAR YE! HEAR YE!
UCLA SCIENTISTS ACCIDENTALLY CREATE AMAZING NEW CAMERA!
Some retard grad student fucked up his solar cell project and made something that has similar properties to part of a camera.
THIS IS THE HOT NEW SHIT.
UCLA HAS THE BEST SCIENTISTS.
GIVE US MONEY.
HEAR YE! HEAR YE!
OF AMERICA) 1s the poor dead last 'I have to kill Was after a long
Well, maybe -1, Flamebait times 5.
I have some karma to burn, and it's sometimes fun to tweak the $WHATEVER_GROUP of the day that pisses me off.
An accidental discovery is often great. I just hope nobody can get a patent for the discovery itself. Since it's an accident...
A higher quality sensor with less noisy gain will allow for better pictures with less light or smaller lens (or faster shutter speed with current lenses and lighting).
we are going to have super-sized 25 megabyte, poorly ...
I suspect with faster cpu's, and denser cheaper faster storage, and so much more data processing. Some of those issues just may be solved in software, and some seemingly minor discovery like this one may be the key.
IE in a few years the camera may be able to model every defect in crappy lenses simply by pointing it towards any reference landmark that a near perfect reference photo exists. Since software already exists to make bracketed photos, etc a fast enough camera that can vary enough parameters on it's own may be able to compare hundreds of varied focuses, lighting, etc in a mS, composing a nearly perfect photo every time, with little more than a cell phone footprint.
Of course if every photo was taken perfectly with a $2 camera, then it would likely ruin the art of photography, making only crappy photos stand out.
Your eye can see down to 6th Magnitude. How bright a star is needed before you can get away with a 1/20th second exposure? -4? That'll be 10,000 times less sensitive.
And that's with a lens diameter ~10-15mm, 4-9 times the light collecting power of the human eye.
"sensitive" my arse. It's sensitive compared to a highly insensitive emulsion.
110 posts and not one mentions that Chen is a smoking hot Asian chick:
http://164.67.192.163:81/faces/Hsiang-Yu%20Chen%20(Fishier).JPG
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/12/gallery_photodetector?slide=2&slideView=2