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Engineers at MIT have built a wireless underwater camera that doesn’t need batteries

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According to scientific estimates, more than 95% of Earth’s oceans have never been observed. As SciTechDaily points out, this means that we’ve seen less of our own planet’s oceans than we have the surface of Mars. The biggest challenge in exploring the oceans, though, is powering cameras, particularly for a lengthy amount of time. They typically have to be tethered to research vessels or require regular trips out to swap batteries.

Researchers at MIT, though, have taken a pretty big leap in overcoming this hurdle by developing a battery-free, wireless underwater camera that they say is around 100,000 times more energy-efficient than other underwater cameras. It shoots photos in colour, even in the deep, dark underwater depths and transmits them wirelessly through the water.

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This is how polarized light works and how you can use polarizing filters to see crazy effects in-camera

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polarizing filters are something that pretty much all of us own as photographers. It may not be something we really use all that often, but most of us have at least one somewhere in our pile of camera bags filled with gear. But what exactly is polarized light? And how can we used to go beyond the usual popping of skies and foliage in landscapes?

Well, in this video from The Science Asylum, we take a deeper look into light polarization. We learn about what it is, how it works and how we can utilise it along with polarizing filters in order to see things that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye.

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This cool color-shifting material uses 19th century photography technique

I’ve always been a sucker for color-shifting items. As a kid, I thought there was some magic behind it. And now, as an adult, I bought a bunch of “chameleon” pigments for the jewelry I make. It looks pretty and it makes my inner child happy.

Thanks to a team of researchers at MIT, we now have color-shifting stretchy material. It doesn’t only look cool, but it could have many practical applications too. And you know what makes it extra fun for us photographers? It was made relying on a photography technique from the 19th century!

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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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