Hasta La Gadget!

The South American giant short-faced bear was, well, giant. How giant, you ask? Well, let’s just say that it made the North American giant short-faced bear look like the North American moderately-sized short-faced bear, if you catch my drift. The South America giant short-faced bear is the largest bear ever discovered, at 3,500 pounds and at least 11 feet.

The North American giant short-faced bear is the previous record holder, having weighed up to 2,500 pounds. The largest living bear on record, meanwhile, only weighed 2,200 pounds–let’s just say that, in this scenario, its porridge would have been just right.

The South American variety roamed around its eponymous continent roughly 500,000 to two million years ago, and was likely the largest carnivore on land. Palentologist Blaine Schubert told National Geographic, “It just blew my mind how big it was.”

That SLR around your neck might lose the huge lens in the future, thanks to lessons learned from biology. Scientists from the University of Illinois and Northwestern have created a camera with a liquid lens and flexible sensor that can capture images in a method similar to the human eye. Cameras have previously been designed around the same principles that the eye uses, but they have been limited to a single focal length incapable of zooming. This is due to the constraints of using the solid, rigid sensors used in regular cameras, according to a press release. Unlike your eye, this new camera uses silicon photo-detectors connected to a hydraulic system to get a 3.5x zoom, roughly the same as that on high-end compacts like Panasonic’s Lumix LX-5. When water is pumped into the lens to change the thickness, the sensor adjusts accordingly and the image zooms in. 

The big advantage to this technology is the simplicity of the design. Current camera lenses use a number of elements together to create the image that you see on your sensor. The light has to be corrected for a number of aberrations to make the resulting image as sharp as possible. Even the simplest lenses that can’t zoom, like a 50mm f/1.8, can have around six elements. This system uses only one, shaped to correct imperfections using water pumped into it.

Though the tech is still a while off from showing up in your next Canon, the team responsible for it says they see it being used in everything from night-vision to consumer electronics. Maybe in the future, you and your camera phone might be looking at the world through the same kind of lens.

[via University of Illinois, NewScientist]

Dear super creepy people: Great news. We’re one step closer to all getting invisibility cloaks. Scientists have created small cloaking devices capable of bending light around objects. Objects of a similar nature have been created in the laboratory, but they only worked with microwave rays–useless, since we can’t see them anyway.

Last year, scientists managed to cloak nearly visible light, but the affected area was 30 microns–that’s roughly a third the width of a human hair. The current size of the cloaked object is still pretty small–about three-quarters of an inch–but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Scientists managed to cloak that three-dimensional object against white light and red and green laser.

And that’s just the start. As one of the scientists told the press, “”there is actually no limit on the size of the cloak.” The cloaking device was created using calcite prisms with crystals measuring around three-quarters of an inch. Larger prisms can created a larger cloaked area.

The aforementioned scientist again,

The cloaks can be readily scaled up to hide larger objects. It really depends on how large a calcite crystal we can find in nature. According to the literature, the largest calcite crystal has a scale of 7 meters by 7 meters by 2 meters (23 feet by 23 feet by 6.5 feet). Such a crystal would enable the construction of an invisibility cloak that can conceal objects a few meters wide and at least 40 centimeters (16 inches) high.

In the “so-futuristic-it-hurts” category, Princeton engineers have come up with a way to create a laser beam out of thin air. Their method, published in the journal Science yesterday, uses a focused laser pulse which causes another beam to be created from the air, carrying fingerprints of any molecules it encounters to a receiver. The effect comes from the first laser energizing oxygen atoms in a specific area and, as they cool, causing them to release infrared light, exciting more atoms and amplifying the process.