Hasta La Gadget!

After taking a few shadowy pictures for the scientific world’s paparazzi, the atom is now ready for its closeup. Today, a team of IBM scientists are bypassing the big screen to unveil what they call the “world’s smallest movie.” This atomic motion picture was created with the help of a two-ton IBM-made microscope that operates at a bone-chilling negative 268 degrees Celsius. This hardware was used to control a probe that pulled and arranged atoms for stop-motion shots used in the 242-frame film. A playful spin on microcomputing, the short was made by the same team of IBM eggheads who recently developed the world’s smallest magnetic bit. Now that the atom’s gone Hollywood, what’s next, a molecular entourage?

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“There’s an app for that…”, or so the saying goes, and we are quite sure that iPhone as well as Android owners have far more installed apps than stock apps on their respective handsets. While Apple might seem to be on the backpedal when it comes to their iPhone at this point in time in terms of market share compared to the expanding Android footprint, do bear in mind that Apple’s App Store is a well respected cash cow for the Cupertino firm, so to speak, as the App Store still outsells Google’s Play Store by a rather hefty ratio in comparison – and we all know that there is money at the end of the apps rainbow. What happens when you take into account hardware accessories as well? This is where this unique iPhone microscope accessory would come in handy for the medical field.

An international team of researchers recently reported in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene that they managed to make use of a very simple microscope which was self-constructed, where thanks to a lens that costs just $8, it has been placed over the iPhone 4S’s camera and held in place with some sticky tape, and it was successfully used to detect the eggs of soil-transmitted parasitic worms, otherwise known as helminths, if you want to get technical about it. When compared to the results shown by a proper microscope when diagnosing children in rural Tanzania, it was discovered that for some nematodes, the iPhone microscope is more than capable of detecting worm eggs.

Well, what can we say about that? It would be nice if this makeshift solution was able to measure up to the kind of performance found in actual microscopes, but I guess that further refinements need to be made to ensure that this will happen sometime down the road.

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[ iPhone microscope helps out the naked eye copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

3D render? The latest submission to deviantART? No, that’s a microscopic photo of the blood-brain barrier in a live zebrafish embryo taken by Dr. Jennifer Peters and Dr. Michael Taylor at 20X magnification, and it’s the latest winner of Nikon’s annual Small World Photomicrography Competition. Not surprisingly, the runners-up in the contest (drawn from some 2,000 submissions) are just as impressive — hit the links below for a look at all of them. Those interested in having themselves featured next year (and taking home up to $3,000 in Nikon gear) have until April 30th to get their submissions in for the next competition.

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Visualized: Nikon’s Small World microscope photography contest winners originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Oct 2012 13:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This might just look like a microscope image of some strange, small life-form. But actually its a view of a massive 281-gigapixel image of a zebrafish embryo, which can be zoomed in on to show sub-cellular levels of detail. More »

Us humans have been quick to embrace digital technology for preserving our memories, but we’ve forgotten that most of our storage won’t last for more than a few decades; when a hard drive loses its magnetism or an optical disc rots, it’s useless. French nuclear waste manager ANDRA wants to make sure that at least some information can survive even if humanity itself is gone — a million or more years, to be exact. By using two fused disk platters made from sapphire with data written in a microscope-readable platinum, the agency hopes to have drives that will keep humming along short of a catastrophe. The current technology wouldn’t hold reams of data — about 80,000 minuscule pages’ worth on two platters — but it could be vital for ANDRA, which wants to warn successive generations (and species) of radioactivity that might last for eons. Even if the institution mostly has that pragmatic purpose in mind, though, it’s acutely aware of the archeological role these €25,000 ($30,598) drives could serve once leaders settle on the final languages and below-ground locations at an unspecified point in the considerably nearer future. We’re just crossing our fingers that our archived internet rants can survive when the inevitable bloody war wipes out humanity and the apes take over.

[Image credit: SKB]

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France’s ANDRA developing a million-year hard drive, we hope our badly-written blogs live in perpetuity originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 15 Jul 2012 13:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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