Tag Archives: Lasers

The Mauna Kea Heavens Timelapse – Lasers

October 9th, 2013 | Space

Mauna Kea Heavens Timelapse

Wow! This is one of the coolest time-lapse videos I’ve ever seen. Sean Goebel, an astronomy graduate student, ascended the 14,000 ft summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii to capture the observatories at work. The footage was filmed over three nights last April, and yes, the lasers are real.

So what do the lasers do?

They function on the principle of adaptive optics. In brief, they are extremely powerful 15-40 watt lasers (1000+ times more powerful than your laser pointer) that track atmospheric turbulence. Winds in the atmosphere can blur out the fine detail of the stars (the reason stars twinkle), and the telescope can use the information from the lasers to make slight adjustments to cancel out the blurring. This ultimately creates a better image of the sky.

What kind of gear was used?

Straight from Sean:

“I shot the montage on a Canon 5D Mk. II and an old-as-dinosaurs Rebel XT. I’m trying to run the XT into the ground (the shutter is rated for 50,000 photos and I’ve taken about 70,000), but it refuses to die, so I keep using it. When the shutter dies, I plan to fill the mirror box with dirt, plant a cactus in it, and then buy an actually decent second body. Anyway, the 5D II was usually paired with either a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 or a Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8, and the Rebel XT was usually used with a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8. Additionally, a Rokinon 14mm f/2.8, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8, Bower 35mm f/1.4, and a Sigma 50mm f/1.4 were each used for one scene. I also used a home-built rotary table to create camera motion in some of the scenes. My timelapse dolly lives in a closet in California, so it wasn’t used in this montage.”

mauna kea timelapse setup

I shot all my images in RAW format (yep, that’s a lot of space). Images were edited in Adobe Camera Raw (part of the Photoshop suite). To add adjustable crops/white balance/etc., I ran the images through a moderately buggy program called LRTimelapse. Images were resized to 1080p in Photoshop and saved as jpgs. A few sequences were run through Virtual Dub with MSU Deflicker (for deflickering) or After Effects (for stabilization). The final video was edited together in Adobe Premiere.”

Well I’m certainly impressed!

Find still shots and more information at Sean’s site.

-RSB

Using Optogenetics to Fight Obesity

October 3rd, 2013 | Brain

Optogenetics

Joshua Jennings and Garret Stuber of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently developed an experiment to “turn off” hunger in a genetically-modified mouse. The process utilizes a technique known as optogenetics (discussed before here). This technology essentially means that you can use a laser to control certain cells in the brain, and afterwards, observe what happens to the behavior of the animal.
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In this case, the researchers successfully manipulated neurons in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), which have been known to regulate hunger through their actions on the lateral hypothalamus.

Limbic System

As you can see in the video above, when the laser activates, the mouse immediately begins to eat, and when the laser inactivates, the mouse stops eating. It’s really quite amazing!

Of course, it would a long time before anything like this could work in humans.
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 A key factor in this sort of experiment is that the mouse has genetically-engineered cells which respond to light, but this research does represent a first step in understanding how to manipulate neurons to control complex urges such as hunger.
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If this sparked your interest, you can read more about the Stuber Lab and its research here, and if you’d like to read the article for yourself (with subscription), head here.

-RSB

Skeleton Car from Li Hui

April 15th, 2013 | Brain, Robot

Skeleton Car 1

Skeleton-Car-2

Skeleton-Car-3

Li Hui is a Chinese Installation artist who works with stainless steel, acrylics and lasers.  The skeleton car above was created in 2006 for a show titled “Who’s afraid of red, amber, and green?” – a direct reference to the painting series “Who’s afraid of red, yellow and blue” by American abstract expressionist Barnett Newman.

The installation (named ‘Amber’) features a full size horse skeleton, which has been etched into the acrylic race car to create a truly ethereal scene.

Jérôme Sans (director of the UCCA) writes that “Li Hui’s works explore questions of life and death, existence and transcendence, materiality and spirituality, technology and humanity. But it is his penchant for melding the organic and the inorganic that foreshadows a world in which mortal and machine have become one, making people indistinguishable from their tools.”

Here are the other two pieces from the show, “Reincarnation” and “Cage”:

Reincarnation-Li-Hui

Ausstellung "Cage"

Light is not a usual medium in artwork, but artists such as James Turrell have shown that it can be mastered.

In Li Hui’s own words… “Light doesn’t seem like a material that can be used in art – if you do not handle it well, the outcome will be awful. Everyone can use light in their work, but light may not always be a good material to help them express what they want to express.”

I’ll look forward to more futuristic works from Li Hui.

-RSB

[via My Amp Goes to 11]