If you’ve been stressing out or if you’re getting swamped at work or if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed, here’s how you fix it: by watching this lovely time lapse of fireflies by Vincent Brady. Just put it on full screen, zone out and watch fireflies (or lightning bugs if that’s what you call them) paint the world with light and create mesmerizing art.
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Beautiful. You see them glow blue one second and then they turn invisible the next. You’re never sure if these Sapphirina copepods are real until you see them light up like a stunning firefly but for the ocean. And then they disappear just quick enough to make you question what you just saw.
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Canon impressed us back in March when it unveiled its 35mm full frame CMOS sensor, which is capable of recording footage in extremely low-light situations. This time around, the company set its sights on the Yaeyama-hime fireflies on Ishigaki Island off the coast of Japan. Shortly after sundown, the Canon team managed to capture a forest full of lightning bugs in full HD in near-dark settings. To watch the video in all its bioluminescent glory, mosey on past the break.
Via: Gizmodo
Source: Canon
Scientists who evidently spend too much time with fireflies have managed to put all that bug-watching to good use: developing brighter LEDs. One problem with that tech is that a lot of the light gets reflected back into the device due to the way photons travel through LED materials, causing them to lose efficiency. But researchers from the University of Namur in Belgium noticed that the misshapen abdominal scales on fireflies act to prevent reflection, letting more light from the luminous insect’s “lantern” shine out. Scientists in Canada took it a step further by doping standard gallium-nitride LEDs with a similar material, and found that light transmission increased by 55 percent. They claimed that such a process could be done to “nearly every commercially available LED,” which could one day bring insect-inspired energy savings to commercial products.
Source: MIT Technology Review
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