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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.'"
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.
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.)
Or, to quote Asimov:
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new ...'
discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Isn't that just like slashdot?
Everybody's aiming for +5 Insightful but it's even better when you get +5 Funny!