Top TechTop Tech #127: Most Powerful Camera, Mouth Monitor, 3D Brain Surgery
Important innovations in science and technology
By Paul Worthington
Tuesday’s Top Tech:
• Construction starting on “world’s most powerful camera”
• Mouth guard health monitor
• Brain surgery via 3D camera
Construction starting on “world’s most powerful camera”
The world’s biggest camera will be the eye of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, “revealing unprecedented details of the universe and helping unravel some of its greatest mysteries.”
The Department of Energy approved construction of the 3.2-gigapixel camera, and it will be assembled at its SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The camera is “the size of a small car,” Stanford reports, and weighs more than three tons. The high-resolution images “would take 1,500 high-definition television screens to display just one.”
In 2022, the full LSAT telescope will rest atop Cerro Pachón mountain in Chile. “It will produce a wide, deep and fast survey of the night sky, cataloguing by far the largest number of stars and galaxies ever observed.”
Mouth guard health monitor
It’s another new-fangled personal health monitor — but this one offers an easy and reliable way to monitor lactate, cortisol and uric acid levels.
The mouth guard developed at the University of California, San Diego, Phys Org reports. It could monitor patients health, athletes’ performance, or stress levels in soldiers and pilots.
A key benefit: its non-invasive. Uric acid, for example, is a marker related to diabetes and to gout — but the only way to monitor levels is to draw blood.
Brain surgery via 3D camera
A prototype 3D camera may be the world’s smallest — which is good, as it’ll go inside your brain.
The Multi Angle Rear Viewing Endoscopic tooL is an endoscope being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The 3D camera “is designed for minimally invasive brain surgery,” JPL says. It’s 4 millimeters in diameter, and 15 millimeters long.
Benefit: operations that might not require open craniotomy, i.e., cutting out large parts of your skull.
There’s more information here and here.
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