Category Archives: Gadgets

Starlight, star bright, first shot I snap tonight

Infrared photo of Webster's Falls
Photo: Marcus Qwertyus/Wiki Commons

Photography is all about light; it’s right there in the name: photo (“light”) + graph (“means of recording”). So how do you shoot in the gloom between the golden hours? Well, you have a few options. You can pop in a flashbulb. You can try your hand at painting with light – that is, fiddling with f-stops and shutter speeds to let more light in over a longer period. Unfortunately, flashbulbs tend to wash out photos, and setting up longer exposures tends to limit your photographic freedom.

Night-vision cameras and attachments get around these problems, either by amplifying existing light or working with a different kind of ambient “light” – aka infrared radiation, either from body heat (thermal IR) or from an active IR illuminator attached to the camera. Today, infrared and ultraviolet cameras also make useful tools for inspections and field work. But how do they work, and what is their history?

How Night-vision Cameras Work

Big Mouth Billy Bass sings all the way to the bank

Eddie hops aboard a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, along with Iraqi security forces and Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division.
Photo courtesy U.S. Army.

Some inventions save people’s lives, others improve them and still others end up as the white elephant gift no one wants to take home. Sometimes the question isn’t, “Why didn’t I think of that?” it’s, “Why would anyone think of that?”

Well, if benefit to humankind were the only means of making a profit, there would be no reality TV. In that spirit, here’s a list of ten kooky creations that made a mint, including one that turned out to fill a legitimate need.

10 Weird Inventions That Made Millions

It’s the pictures that got small

When televisions first entered the marketplace, directors were faced with a challenge: How to develop a visual language that would translate to a tiny black-and-white screen. They couldn’t just borrow from film: When concentrated down to 3 – 12 inches (or, after World War II, 19 – 20), the compositions, symbols and set dressing of massive silver screen productions reduced to a muddle. The effect has only grown more pronounced in the smash-cut, hyper-kinetic summer blockbusters of today.

It would no doubt strike many movie directors as strange to see us with our heads down, staring at our hands and enjoying their bigger-than-life productions on smaller-than-your palm devices. Nevertheless, people want their movies, and they want them on their iPhones, Androids and other portable devices. Here are some of the best apps available for downloading, collecting, experiencing, sharing and playing games about your favorite movies.

10 Mobile Apps for Film Buffs

Putting the green in nanomachines

Carbon nanotubes
Carbon nanotubes. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

We tend to think of nanotechnology as the stuff of the future, but it’s already here, in hundreds of consumer products and industrial applications. As progress in this minuscule world has accelerated, concern for the environment and for public health has led to a call for green nanotechnology—approaches that accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. In this article, we’ll take a tour of how these many approaches are playing out.

How is green nanotechnology being used?

Under pressure: Pascal’s many places in the sun

The Pascaline, an early digital calculator invented by Blaise Pascal
The Pascaline, an early digital calculator invented by Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was the quintessential Renaissance man. After all, how many people have a computer language, a religious argument, a triangle, a mathematical theorem, a law of physics and a unit of pressure named after them? Here was a man who could not only pose a philosophical wager, but also invent the system for calculating its odds and a digital calculator with which to tally the results.

It is unusual for a prodigy to stray so widely and successfully from their first area of excellence, but, as Pascal put it, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.”

What were the famous Blaise Pascal inventions?