Top Tech

Top Tech #48: Glasses detect emotions, Phone Scans DNA, a Trillion frames per second

Posted April 29th, 2015 @ 10:07pm

Highlighting interesting or important innovations with long-term promise.

By Paul Worthington

Today’s Top Tech:

• Microsoft glasses detect wearer’s emotions

• DNA-scanning Phone

• A Trillion frames per second

Microsoft glasses detect wearer’s emotions

“Wearable emotion detection and feedback system.” Or in other words, glass that detect emotions.

But not just the feelings of what you’re looking at: They’ll instead primarily detect what the wearer is feeling, and the reactions they show to what they are seeing. (Although it can also work the other way, noting the posture and expression of whomever the glasses see in front of the wearer.)

The United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Microsoft a patent for just that this week, Venture Beat reports.

Here is the full story.

 DNA-scanning Phone

There have been plenty of add-ons for phones that grant new imaging abilities for scientific and medical use — but this one may take the prize: it can see DNA.

The microscope attachment “can image and size DNA molecules 50,000 times thinner than a human hair,” reports UCLA.

Researchers at the university claim they “can turn any smartphone into a DNA-scanning fluorescent microscope.”

A single DNA molecule, once stretched, is about two nanometers in width. Currently, imaging single DNA molecules requires bulky, expensive optical microscopy tools, which are mostly confined to advanced laboratory settings. In comparison, the components for the new device are significantly less expensive.

The smartphone attachment has an external lens, thin-film interference filter, miniature dovetail stage mount for making fine alignments, and a laser diode — all enclosed in a small, 3D-printed case.

Here’s more information.

 A Trillion frames per second

A new high-speed imaging technique can record events at a rate of more than 1-trillion-frames-per-second.

That’s more than one thousand times faster than conventional high-speed cameras.

The Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography (STAMP) technology “holds great promise for studying a diverse range of previously unexplored complex ultrafast phenomena,” says the researcher at University of Tokyo who developed the camera.

Why’d he make it? Because when a crystal lattice is excited by a laser pulse, waves of jostling atoms travel through the material at close to one-sixth the speed of light, approximately 28,000 miles/second — and there wasn’t anything fast enough to capture that. “Since there was no suitable technique, I decided to develop a new high-speed imaging technique in my doctoral program.”

Here’s more information.

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