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MIT Invented A Camera That Can Read Closed Books (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: In a breakthrough that will appeal to both spies and those who work with priceless but frail historical documents, researchers at MIT have developed a camera that uses terahertz radiation to peer at the text on pages of a book, without it having to be open. Terahertz radiation falls somewhere between the microwave and infrared spectrums, and the research team, including Barmak Heshmat, Ramesh Raskar, and Albert Redo Sanchez from MIT, and Justin Romberg and Alireza Aghasi from Georgia Tech, chose that particular flavor of radiation because of how it reacts with different chemicals. Different chemicals produce a distinct frequency as they react with different terahertz frequencies, which can be measured and distinguished. In this instance, it allows the researchers to tell the different between ink and blank paper. Complex algorithms and software is required to translate the frequencies being bounced back to the camera, allowing it to distinguish letters on a page. But it also relies on how far the short bursts of terahertz radiation are traveling, by precisely timing how long it takes to reach the 20-micrometer-thick air gaps between pages of a book, it's able to calculate when it moves from page to page. The report adds, "the researchers feel their system could be a fantastic tool for museums or other facilities who want to explore and catalog historical documents, without actually having to touch or open them, and risk damage."
You just know 13-year old boys are going to use this to look at the magazines in plastic wrappers.
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The real question is how long untl it is $1 to order a set of goggles with this technology out of the back of my vintage comic book without removing it from the plastic.
The summary focuses on being able to see through pages, but how fast can it scan them? Assuming cost/complexity factors don't make it prohibitive, I could see something like this being used to rapidly digitize a printed book without having to pause to turn pages or slice the spine open to feed them individually through a scanner.
Researchers use synchrotron to read ancient, burned scrolls from Rome 3/22/2016
http://arstechnica.com/science...
"But now, a massive X-ray microscope at the European Radiation Synchrotron Facility has allowed researchers to see what was written on these ruined documents."
More at http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc... too.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
MIT has a great PR machine. Dont get me wrong, they do the most amazing things. But they make sure everyone knows what they are working on all the time. This is in its infancy, but this PR will likely help get more funding and interest to help make it into a niche tool, and far down the line a commercial product.
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
This is exactly the machine that started James P. Hogan's Giants trilogy (although in SF it used neutrinos instead of terahertz waves). Now all we need is the lunar colonization program and ... OH SNAP.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
The band commonly refered to as "terahertz radiation" is from 300 GHz to 3 THz. It overlaps the bottom end of the "far infrared" band on the chart you linked, just above EHF microwave - nowhere near the visible spectrum.
"Fry and the Slurm Factory" with one of the great lines of the series:
"Ow, my sperm!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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I'm hoping they made sure all that energy can't do long-term damage to the book they scan.
Still, it does remind me of what they did in Inherit The Stars.
Much of the modern black attitude is based on not being "disrespected". Not by earning respect, but by applying violence to those who "disrespect" you. By being the biggest, baddest (word not allowed for white people) in the 'hood.
That's not how Dr. King taught people to handle adversity, but Dr. King is dead.
Like most underclass minorities, they find it's not nearly as easy to stick it to The Man as it is to each other. So they do. And just for good measure, they fire their anger with a fantasy of "getting even" for generations of slavery.
The slavery thing needs to go away. Slavery has been illegal in the USA for well over 150 years now. Everyone responsible - both offender and victim - are long dead. At the present rate of interracial marriage, even the blackest of families is likely to be partially descended from slaveholders, even the whitest have ancestors who were slaves. And slavery isn't some sort of magical black-only thing anyway. The first slaves of Westerners in the New World were Carib Indians, thank you Christopher Columbus. And on top of that, with the immigration rate we've got, a lot of the people in the USA had ancestors who were nowhere near the American Slavery thing.
Yes, slavery is despicable, but you don't march into the future if you never take your eyes off the past. It's not 1860 or even 1960. There's a black president now and has been for nearly a decade. He may not be the best president we've ever had, but I'd wager that at least 8 people out of 10 would rather vote for him than either of the sad cases we've been offered as his successor.
But slavery is at best an excuse. Ongoing violence is like fire. As long as you feed it, it burns. To stop it, you have to stop dumping fuel on it. There are other, better ways to solve problems.