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This new technology makes f/1.4 lenses at almost zero cost

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Researchers at Technion Israel Institute of Technology have developed a new way of making lenses with a curable liquid polymer that allows for faster prototyping of new and custom optics. It’s designed primarily for applications such as corrective lenses, augmented and virtual reality, medical imaging and astronomy, but could potentially become a new manufacturing method (or at least allow faster development) of photographic lenses.

According to a press release, the researchers began to develop the new method after realising that there were around 2.5 billion people around the planet who don’t have access to corrective eyewear. Their goal was to create “a simple method for fabricating high-quality optical components that does not rely on mechanical processing or complex and expensive infrastructure”.

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Engineers at MIT & UMass Lowell have created a completely flat 1mm thick fisheye lens

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Love them or hate them (and many people hate them), we all know what fisheye lenses are. They look sort of like regular lenses, except they have a great big round bulbous element on the front that lets your camera’s sensor see in a super-wide field of view – typically around the 180° degree mark.

Well, not anymore. Now a team at MIT and University of Massachusetts Lowell have developed a new fisheye lens that’s completely flat. Its design is a type of “metalens” – a wafer-thin material with microscopic features to manipulate light in a way that traditional optics don’t. And it lets the lens shoot a 180° field of view with perfect sharpness.

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High speed, high sensitivity cameras and laser beams show how viruses can spread via microdroplets

As more evidence and guidance is released about how the coronavirus and other viruses may spread from one person to another, scientists in Japan have released a video which uses high speed, high sensitivity cameras and laser beams to detect microdroplets measuring as small as 100 nanometres (1/10,000th of a millimetre) expelled from humans during the acts of sneezing or simply sitting to have a conversation.

The video was produced by Japan’s NHK broadcasting organisation in collaboration with the Japanese Association for Infectious Diseases. It shows footage from the high sensitivity camera, in which droplets in the air show up as white dots. Larger ones fall to the ground more quickly, but the smaller and lighter microdroplets linger around in the air, being carried around by its currents.

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Winning photos of Royal Society Publishing contest show us the astonishing beauty of scientific phenomena

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Royal Society Publishing is a photography contest that celebrates the beauty of science. The 2019 winners have been announced, and they show us natural and scientific phenomena that are astounding, but also truly beautiful and photogenic.

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This is the first-ever photo of quantum entanglement

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When science and photography join forces, they usually end up with breathtaking results. Last week, physicists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland captured and shared a photo of quantum entanglement. It’s the first actual photo of this phenomenon ever taken, and it’s absolutely awe-inspiring.

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Researchers at Harvard have created a tiny polarisation camera for a Shrimp’s eye view of the world

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Weird cameras are just the best, aren’t they? And they don’t get much weirder than this. Researchers at Harvard University’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have published a paper detailing a tiny camera that sees the world the way a shrimp and some insects see it. That is, in polarised light.

Polarisation is essentially the directions in which light waves travel. And this polarisation camera shows us those directions in a rainbow of colours, with the visible light removed. The technology’s been around for a while, although not at this sort of small scale. It opens up a lot of new applications for using such cameras.

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This camera can photograph a subject from 28 miles away

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Computational imaging has given us some interesting and useful inventions so far, from fake bokeh to capturing the movement of light. This time, scientists have figured out how to take a clear image from as far as 28 miles (45km), regardless of the Earth’s curvature and the amount of smog in the air.

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How to see heat and shockwaves using a regular camera and Photoshop

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Making cameras see things that our eyes cannot is something that’s always really fascinated me about photography. Whether it’s super extreme macro, infrared & ultraviolet or, as is the case here, heat and shockwaves.

In this video, Kelly Hoffer at Theory of Curiosity talks us through Background-Oriented Schlieren (BOS). It’s a technique that lets you see heat and other atmospheric distortions in photographs. Here, Kelly shows it off using just a regular camera and Photoshop.

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NASA just released the first photograph shot inside the Sun’s corona

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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe’s goal is to help us answer some of the big questions we have about the Sun. In order to do that, it has to get very close to it. Inside its atmosphere, basically. More commonly known as the corona.

The probe has come closer to the sun than any human-made craft before it, and NASA has just shared this incredible photo of a coronal streamer. This is the first photo ever to have been shot inside the Sun’s corona.

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