prosthetic knowledge

First animated GIF sent into Deep Space

Contribution by Kim Asendorf for the Lone Signal METI (Messaging Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) experiment, entitled ‘Humans watching Digital Art’:

My message will be part of the first beam into deep space on Tuesday 18th June and will consist of an animated GIF.

Lone Signal’s first interstellar target is Gliese 526 and is 17.6 light years from the Earth. Gliese 526 is identified as a potentially habitable solar system in The Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems. This system’s position in the sky, as well as its relatively close proximity to the Earth, makes it an ideal choice as Lone Signal’s first target.

People from Gliese 526 will be able to see “Humans watching Digital Art” in 17.6 years.

Link

What Google’s Self-Driving Car ‘Sees’ 

Google’s Self-Driving Car gathers almost 1 GB per SECOND. Here’s what it “sees” making a left turn: twitter.com/Bill_Gross/sta…

— Bill Gross (@Bill_Gross) April 30, 2013

HD Microscopic Zoomable Photo Of Weathered Euro Coin 

An interactive photo at New Scientist lets you intimately examine the wear and scratches of an average coin - by Sumit Paul-Choudhury:

The euro has taken a bit of a battering of late - and not just in the financial markets. As you can see for yourself above, the surface of a 1-cent coin, while smooth to the naked eye, is pitted and scarred when viewed through a powerful microscope.

To create this image, artist Martin John Callanan, a fellow at University College London based in the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art, worked with Ken Mingard, Petra Mildeova and Eric Bennett at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory in London. The team used an optical microscope to create images of the lowest-denomination coins used in Australia, Burma, Swaziland and Chile, as well as the transnational euro. They took standard coins that had been in circulation and left the microscope to make 4000 tiny exposures overnight. It then took three days of processing to stitch these images together to create each final, 400-million-pixel version …

The coin images are part of an ongoing series called The Fundamental Units in which Callanan explores “the atoms that shape the global economy”. Ultimately, the series will encompass all 166 of the world’s active currencies that use coins. The first five are on display as 1.2-by-1.2-metre prints, along with more of Callanan’s works, at the Galleria Horrach Moyà in Mallorca, Spain, until 17 January 2013.

You can explore the interactive photo over at New Scientist here

Slow Motion Footage of Mosquitoes Shot Down With Laser 

The video below runs slower than the GIFs above suggest:

Intellectual Ventures’ Mosquito Laser Shootdown Sequence, demonstrated at TED 2010.

PaR-PaR 

A programming language devised to control robotic biology science equipment - via Berkeley Lab:

Teaching a robot a new trick is a challenge. You can’t reward it with treats and it doesn’t respond to approval or disappointment in your voice. For researchers in the biological sciences, however, the future training of robots has been made much easier thanks to a new program called “PaR-PaR.”

Nathan Hillson, a biochemist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), led the development of PaR-PaR, which stands for Programming a Robot. PaR-PaR is a simple high-level, biology-friendly, robot-programming language that allows researchers to make better use of liquid-handling robots and thereby make possible experiments that otherwise might not have been considered.

“The syntax and compiler for PaR-PaR are based on computer science principles and a deep understanding of biological workflows,” Hillson says. “After minimal training, a biologist should be able to independently write complicated protocols for a robot within an hour. With the adoption of PaR-PaR as a standard cross-platform language, hand-written or software-generated robotic protocols could easily be shared across laboratories.”

More Here

Genome Compiler

Software that approaches synthetic engineering with biology as an information technology which is codable. Embedded below is a talk by the CEO of the company that makes the software, explaining the ideas around it:

Life may be the software that makes its own hardware, but where is the compiler? If we plan to start programming life itself, we are going to need a radically different and better tool kit than the one available to geneticists today. Omri lays out a concrete vision for how such a tool would work and for how it would be used to create the bio-products our future needs so badly.

More about the software can be found here

Experimental 3D Mapping of Cities with a Webcam, Sunlight, and Time 

Clever and inventive approach to large scale 3D modelling, using sunlight and shadow to calculate form (called ‘Heliocentric Stereo’) - from Austin Abrams:

In this work, we present a method to uncover shape from webcams “in the wild.” We present a variant of photometric stereo which uses the sun as a distant light source, so that lighting direction can be computed from known GPS and timestamps. We propose an iterative, non-linear optimization process that optimizes the error in reproducing all images from an extended time-lapse with an image formation model that accounts for ambient lighting, shadows, changing light color, dense surface normal maps, radiometric calibration, and exposure. Unlike many approaches to uncalibrated outdoor image analysis, this procedure is automatic, and we report quantitative results by comparing extracted surface normals to Google Earth 3D models. We evaluate this procedure on data from a varied set of scenes and emphasize the advantages of including imagery from many months.

More Here and at New Scientist Here

Bacteriogoraphy

Zachary Copfer has producing a series images from radiation and bacteria in a petri dish, portraits of famous scientists and artists:

As a former microbiologist recently turned visual artist, I seek to create work that is less of an intersection of art and science and more of a genuine fusion of the two. During my graduate research I invented a new medium that combines photographic process with microbiological practices. The process is very similar to darkroom photography only the enlarger has been replaced by a radiation source and instead of photographic paper this process uses a petri dish coated with a living bacterial emulsion. I believe that great beauty and poetry reside within the theories woven by scientists. And that it is through the unification of art and science that these treasures can be fully explored and made accessible to the world at large. 

More Here

Inside Insides 

Creative blog uses MRI scanner to look into objects such as vegetables, often with pleasurable results. These captures into animated gifs (as you can see above).

You can check out more at the blog here

[Note - I am not responsible for the above Gifs - they were made by Andy Ellison who runs the blog - the only alteration I have made of them is to optimize and reduce the original file sizes so they can run here. Higher resolution versions can be found at the blog itself]

Computer IDs Culprits with Tattoo Recognition 

Computer visual recognition software in development to identify people by their unique marks - via Live Science:

The face might be the obvious place to start for Facebook, homeland security and other groups interested in automatically identifying people in photos. Indeed, face recognition is one of the biggest areas of research in identification and security. Adding in tattoos and other marks, however, gives law enforcement an edge in using evidence where the suspect’s face isn’t clear.

“Let’s talk about standard police-type action,” said Terrance Boult, a computer science professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and a co-founder of a security startup, Securics Inc. In many police investigations, officers have to contend with grainy, low-quality photos that a bystander might have taken on his phone, or that a store camera captured, he said. “Those photos are often so bad that face recognition wouldn’t come even close” to finding a match in a photo database, such as the FBI’s, he said. 

To help with these difficult matches, Boult and his colleagues wrote a computer program that examines the tattoos, scars, moles or other skin markings in a new photo, then finds likely matches in a photo database. The program is able to find similar tattoos that are not exactly the same, but which might help identify gang members who get coordinating ink. And it is able to make matches based on eyewitness descriptions that a cop might type into the program.

More Here

Kinect@Home 

Cloud 3D modelling service allows you to create 3D object files with video taken with a Kinect camera - watch the video embedded below:

Kinect@Home is a place where you can help robotics and computer vision researchers around the world and get 3D models of your room, office or whatever you want in return, right in your browser!

Kinect@Home aims to use your powers to make robots more awesome than ever. Robotics and computer vision researchers need vast amount of images from everyday environments such as homes and offices to improve their algorithms.

As well as being able to help science, you can download the 3D object file to do whatever you want with it. As a bonus, you can also embed your 3D capture on webpages, like below:

You can find the project’s website here

Vincent Van Gogh - Colourblind? 

Japanese scientist posts a theory on his Tumblr blog, asada0, tests an idea that came from a stimulated colourblind experience with the artist’s work:

The other day, I experienced the “Color Vision Experience Room” at the event of the Hokkaido Color Universal Design Organization (HCUDO), where I had invited to speak. The event’s main objective was to educate the public about the diversity of color vision which exists in our society. The event also sought to promote the idea that any time we make choices about colors, we should take this diversity into account.

The “Color Vision Experience Room” uses illumination filtered by an optical filter - providing a modified spectrum of light. In this room,  the person who has normal color vision sees color the same as the person who has protan or deutan color vision. These types of color deficiency mean that certain color combinations are difficult to differentiate. I was impressed by the effort and thought that had made this room a reality.

I was able to view various items in the room, and it turned out that experiencing modified color vision by the naked eye had a stronger impact than experiencing it on a computer display in simulation. This was a revelation to me.

There were prints of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings in the room. Under the filtered light, I found that these paintings looked different from the van Gogh which I had always seen. I love van Gogh’s paintings and have been fortunate to view a number of the originals in various art museums. This painter has a somewhat strange way to use color. Although the use of color is rich, lines of different colors run concurrently, or a point of different color suddenly appears. I’ve heard it conjectured that van Gogh had color vision deficiency.

However, in the van Gogh images seen in the color vision experience room, to me the incongruity of color and roughness of line had quietly disappeared. And each picture had changed into one of brilliance with very delicate lines and shades. This was truly wonderful experience.

It goes on to experiment and examine the idea, (above, the images on the right are the originals) and the author insists that this is purely a theory.

You can read more of the essay here

Photografting Shapes with Laser Light and Molecules

Similar to 3D printing, but using laser light to create forms at a molecular level - via Science Daily:

With laser beams, molecules can be fixed at exactly the right position in a three dimensional material. The new method developed at the Vienna University of Technology can be used to grow biological tissue or to create micro sensors.

There are many ways to create three dimensional objects on a micrometer scale. But how can the chemical properties of a material be tuned at micrometer precision? Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology developed a method to attach molecules at exactly the right place. When biological tissue is grown, this method can allow the positioning of chemical signals, telling living cells where to attach. The new technique also holds promise for sensor technology: A tiny three dimensional “lab on a chip” could be created, in which accurately positioned molecules react with substances from the environment.

“3-D-photografting” is the name of the new method.

More Here

Insane in the Chromatophores 

Cypress Squid? Close examinations of the colour-changing skin of a Cephalopod, reacting to ‘Insane In The Membrane’ by Cypress Hill - video embedded below:

Via Backyard Brains:

During experiments on the giant axons of the Longfin Inshore Squid (loligo pealei) at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA; we were fascinated by the fast color-changing nature of the squid’s skin. Squids (like many other cephalopods) can quickly control pigmented cells called chromatophores to reflect light. The Longfin Inshore has 3 different chromatophore colors: Brown, Red, and Yellow. Each chromatophore has tiny muscles along the circumference of the cell that can contract to reveal the pigment underneath.

We tested our cockroach leg stimulus protocol on the squid’s chromatophores. We used a suction electrode to attach to the squid’s fin nerve, then connected the electrode to an iPod nano as our stimulator. The results were both interesting and beautiful. The video below is a view through an 8x microscope zoomed in on the dorsal side of the fin.

More Here