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Mantis shrimp seem to have 12 types of photo-receptive sensors - but this does not really improve their ability to discriminate between colors. Speculation is that they serve as a form of pre-processing for visual information: the brain does not need to decode full color information from just a few channels which would would allow for a smaller brain. I guess technologically the two extremes of light detection would be RGB cameras which are like our eyes and offer good spatial resolution, and spectrometers which have a large amount of color channels but at the cost of spatial resolution. It seems the mantis shrimp uses something that is somewhere between RGB cameras and spectrometers. Could there be a use for this in space?

> RGB cameras which are like our eyes ...apart from the fact that the spectral response of the eyes is completely different from "RGB" cameras (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cones_SMJ2_E.svg) ... and that the eyes have 4 types of light-sensitive cells, not three (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cone-response.svg) ... and that, unlike cameras, human eye is precise only in a very narrow centre region (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea) ...hmm, apart from relying on tri-stimulus colour perception it seems human eyes are in fact completely different from "RGB cameras" :-) OK sorry for picking on this - that's just the colour science geek in me :-) Now seriously, on one hand the article abstract sounds very interesting, but on the other the statement "Why use 12 color channels when three or four are sufficient for fine color discrimination?" reveals so much ignorance to the very basics of colour science that I'm completely puzzled - in the end, it's a Science article so it should be reasonably scientifically sound, right? Pity I can't access full text... the interesting thing is that more channels mean more information and therefore should require *more* power to process - which is exactly opposite to their theory (as far as I can tell it from the abstract...). So the key is to understand *what* information about light these mantises are collecting and why - definitely it's not "colour" in the sense of human perceptual experience. But in any case - yes, spectrometry has its uses in space :-)

Rings of excited atoms that harness a quantum effect to absorb light at an enhanced rate could be used in future technologies such as highly sensitive cameras, solar cells and systems for optical power transmission.

Nice work of an insect-like zoom camera without moving parts.

"In contrast to conventional multipixel cameras, single-pixel cameras capture images using a single detector that measures the correlations between the scene and a set of patterns. However, these systems typically exhibit low frame rates, because to fully sample a scene in this way requires at least the same number of correlation measurements as the number of pixels in the reconstructed image."

Is that the same method Andrej and Jai use in their super-telescope Ariadna?

A somewhat eclectic paper about events collected with an event camera onboard the ISS, courtesy of Western Sydney University and...the US AirForce Academy.

"The metamaterial aperature is only 40 centimeters long and it doesn't move. It's a circuit-board-like structure consisting of two copper plates separated by a piece of plastic. One of the plates is etched with repeating boxy structures, units about 2 millimeters long that permit different lengths of microwaves to pass through. Scanning the scene at various microwave frequencies allows the computer to capture all the information necessary to reproduce a scene."

where is Luzi's comment when one needs it ???

The International Space Apps Challenge is now over, it is interesting to have a look at the solutions ...

what sort of "app" is this e.g. http://spaceappschallenge.org/challenge/brightest-night/solution/132 "We started of by trying to set our camera in raw mode, howsoever this can't be done for current logitech modules and without a high risk of permanently destroying the camera (reflashing the EEPROM). we use a logitech c920 and captured a raw image from it using guvcview on ArchLinux we then wrote some python code to calculate the average BGR value of our Image. We are currently workin on automiztion, but this will take much longer as there will be a lot of reverse engineering of the USB-Protocol needed."

c'mon really! To name a few: - Tour of the Solar System ... that is one of the numerous specialities of the ACT. - Satellite data correlation tool ... solution is flawed, but I really like the idea. Lot of added value. I definitely think are interestung stuffs to do there for cheap. - Aurora project: Model & Data ... space weather not interesting?! - Kepler ... a classic Do not expect the solutions to be tremendous just after 3 days of work, but the proposed list of challenges are "seeds" for innovation to me.

"It works by emitting a burst of light from a femtosecond laser that reflects off visible surfaces - such as an opaque wall - onto objects that are hidden from the camera's direct view. The light then bounces off the object before ultimately making its way back to a detector. This process is repeated a number of times with the laser targeted at different areas of the reflecting surface." nice video

Check the landing video from the onboard camera - Guido: how well would our optical flow algorithm cope with such images? Looks quite complicated to me....

Note that videos there are said to be "thumbnail" quality, so I think videos with higher resolution (and possibly frame rate) have been acquired, just that they were not downloaded yet.

Boh....

I think you should do something like this with your Botiful Johannes :)

Seems like drones are quite in this day when studying wildife: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CoApUAZFf8

Demand for drones is exploding! Dupin wants to aggregate aerial imagery from around the globle at Dronestagr.am. In the near future we could experience something close to google maps, made with aerial pictures.

Remember that drones have top-view camera and front-view camera which gives more possibilities in terms of what you can do with collected data. With such a huge database and a little bit of 3D geometry we could get e.g. a 3D map of the world... I guess google can derive something like that already from their streetview images however obviously street view covers some relatively small part of the globe and also can not access places that UAV can.

Here there's an example of a 3D picture of Tokyo (in high resolution). It is not made by drones, but I think it is something we can use them for. http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/

During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route - by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks - the thumb drive and the first amendment - had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred - with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won't do it in London. The seizure of Miranda's laptop, phones, hard drives and camera will similarly have no effect on Greenwald's work.

The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood

Sarah Harrison is a lawyer that has been staying with Snowden in Hong Kong and Moscow. She is a UK citizen and her family is there. After the miranda case where the boyfriend of the reporter was detained at the airport, can Sarah return safely home? Will her family be pressured by the secret service? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23759834

the whole trans-siberian journey recorded from a camera, a bit too long to watch everything nevertheless

What about a 3D picture of our office? - LS: nice! should I bring my camera tomorrow? who is volunteering?

"As sensors in digital cameras fast approach the 127 megapixels of the human eye, clinical trials are under way to implant this technology directly into the retina".

Wow

Good to solve the Landing problem!!!! No skew due to perspective and gimballed by definition

Very very nice idea! Unfortunately samples show they still have quite some work to do on the image processing side... which is interesting because there are very good open-source solutions for stitching.