Glasses-free 3-D TV looks nearer (w/ Video)

A new glasses-free 3-D video system uses three layered LCD panels displaying bizarre patterns (top three images) that collectively produce a coherent, high-resolution, multiperspective 3-D image. The bottom image illustrates, roughly, the composite image that would reach one eye at one viewing angle. Images courtesy of the Camera Culture group

Despite impressive recent advances, holographic television, which would present images that vary with varying perspectives, probably remains some distance in the future. But in a new paper featured as a research highlight at this summer’s Siggraph computer-graphics conference, the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group offers a new approach to multiple-perspective, glasses-free 3-D that could prove much more practical in the short term.

Instead of the complex hardware required to produce holograms, the Media Lab system, dubbed a Tensor Display, uses several layers of liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), the technology currently found in most flat-panel TVs. To produce a convincing 3-D illusion, the LCDs would need to refresh at a rate of about 360 times a second, or 360 hertz. Such displays may not be far off: LCD TVs that boast 240-hertz refresh rates have already appeared on the market, just a few years after 120-hertz TVs made their debut.

“Holography works, it’s beautiful, nothing can touch its quality,” says Douglas Lanman, a postdoc at the Media Lab and one of the new paper’s co-authors. “The problem, of course, is that holograms don’t move. To make them move, you need to create a hologram in real time, and to do that, you need … little tiny pixels, smaller than anything we can build at large volume at low cost. So the question is, what do we have now? We have LCDs. They’re incredibly mature, and they’re cheap.”

Dark galaxies of the early Universe spotted for the first time

New nanodevice builds electricity from tiny pieces

Dark matter underpinnings of cosmic web found

THE skeleton of dark matter that undergirds the cosmic web of matter in the universe has been clearly detected for first time.

We know that matter in the cosmos forms a web, with galaxies and clusterslinked by filaments across mostly empty space. Filaments are made of normal matter and dark matter - the unseen stuff that makes up about 85 per cent of the universe's mass. Recent observations have seen the normal matter in such filaments.

Now Jörg Dietrich at the University Observatory in Munich, Germany, and his team have detected the dark matter component in a filament in a supercluster about 2.7 billion light years from us, called Abell 222/223.

The massive filament's gravity focuses the light travelling towards Earth from more distant background galaxies. The team used this light to calculate the filament's mass and shape. X-rays from the hot gas of normal matter in the vicinity showed that this matter lined up with the filament but made up only about 10 per cent of its mass. The rest must be dark matter (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11224). This shows that the filament is "part of a network of dark matter that connects galaxy clusters throughout the universe", says Dietrich.

 source   NEW SCIENTIST

Confirmed: the Higgs boson does exist

A Rare Look at Quantum Mechanics in Action

In a world where seeing is believing, one of the chief disadvantages of quantum physics, unlike Newtonian physics, is that it’s largely invisible. The wonderfully bizarre rules that allow a vanishingly small particle to exist in two places simultaneously, or two seemingly isolated particles to influence each other across space—what Einstein called spooky action at distance—usually apply at scales too small to be seen by the naked eye. But not always. Here, physicist Boaz Almog of Israeli’s Tel Aviv University gives audience members of the 5th Annual World Science Festival Gala Celebration—and now the rest of us—a rare macroscopic view of the magical properties of quantum mechanics. Sharing the stage with fellow physicist Brian Green, Almog conducts the first public demonstration of an ethereal phenomenon he calls quantum levitation, sending a thin wafer super-chilled below -301 degrees F zipping around a circular track like a miniature flying saucer. Boaz also makes the wafer hover in midair, frozen as though trapped in a vat of invisible glue. How? Watch as Greene explains.

            


source  world science festival

Is Death An Illusion? Evidence Suggests Death Isn’t the End