Tag: video

No Passport Required Queens

In “Queens, NYC” host Marcus Samuelsson heads to the New York borough to learn more about the Indo-Guyanese community’s culture, history, and food. In Queens’s Richmond Hill neighborhood, Samuelsson visits roti shops and bakeries like Singh’s Roti Shop to make and eat classic Guyanese treats like pine tarts, pepperpot, doubles, and plait bread. He visits the temple canteen inside a neighborhood mandir, makes Caribbean-style roti at home with a Guyanese family, and plays in a cricket match, followed by a meal of bake and saltfish, coconut pastries called salara, and more.

Punking Dick Cheney

Sacha Baron Cohen, the man behind Ali G and Borat, is back with a new show which premieres this weekend. In the promo for the satirical half-hour series, called Who is America?, the British comedian can be heard asking, “Dick Cheney, is it possible to sign my waterboard kit?” The former Vice President answers, “Sure!” and is then shown autographing an empty plastic water jug. It then cuts to him, “That’s the first time I’ve ever signed a waterboard.” Troll level: expert.

Salvation

Salvation is a terrific series about what could happen if the world learned an extinction-event sized asteroid was on a collision course with Earth. It does a great job researching how governments, the public, and hacktivist groups might respond to such news. (For instance, one government might try to send up something that would cause the asteroid to change course just enough to make it crash into a spot on the other side of the planet in order to minimize the damage in their country. This could cause world powers to consider nuclear warfare to stop that from happening.)

Underwater surfing

a duo using squirt boats surfs the underwater current in the New River Gorge. Squirt boats are low-volume flat kayaks optimized for performing tricks…sort of a cross between a kayak and a surfboard that you sit inside of.

Carbon Nanotube Production

Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered a technique to cost-effectively convert carbon dioxide from the air into a type of carbon nanotubes that is “more valuable than any other material ever made.” Carbon nanotubes are super-materials that can be stronger than steel and more conductive than copper. So despite much research, why aren’t they used in applications ranging from batteries to tires? Answer: The high manufacturing costs and extremely expensive price.
The price ranges from $100–200 per kilogram for the “economy class” carbon nanotubes with larger diameters and poorer properties, up to $100K per kilogram and above for the “first class” carbon nanotubes — ones with a single wall, the smallest diameters, and the most amazing properties.

Nanocomp Technologies is producing sheets of carbon nanotubes that measure 1m by 2m and promising slabs 10m2 in area. The first applications will probably be as electrical conductors in planes and satellites to replace copper wire and save weight. Saving weight would save fuel. Nanocomp’s materials possess a unique combination of high strength-to-weight ratio, electrical and thermal conductivity, as well as flame resistance that exceeds those of many other advanced materials by orders of magnitude.

2022-10-28: Behold Carbon Nano Onions

By microwaving fish waste, you can quickly and efficiently create carbon nano-onions (CNOs)—a unique nanoform of carbon that has applications in energy storage and medicine. CNOs are nanostructures with spherical carbon shells in a concentric layered structure similar to an onion. They have “drawn extensive attention worldwide in terms of energy storage and conversion” because of their “exceptionally high electrical and thermal conductivity, as well as large external surface area”
Though CNOs were first reported in the 1980s, conventional methods of manufacturing them have required high temperatures, a vacuum and a lot of time and energy. Other techniques are expensive and call for complex catalysts or dangerous acidic or basic conditions. The newly discovered method requires only 1 step—microwave pyrolysis of fish scales extracted from fish waste—and can be done within 10 seconds.

How exactly the fish scales are converted into CNOs is unclear, though the team thinks it has to do with how collagen in the fish scales can absorb enough microwave radiation to quickly increase in temperature. This leads to pyrolysis, or thermal decomposition, which causes the collagen to break down into gasses. These gasses then support the creation of CNOs.

Low-light image enhancement

Imaging in low light is challenging due to low photon count and low SNR. Short-exposure images suffer from noise, while long exposure can induce blur and is often impractical. A variety of denoising, deblurring, and enhancement techniques have been proposed, but their effectiveness is limited in extreme conditions, such as video-rate imaging at night. To support the development of learning-based pipelines for low-light image processing, we introduce a dataset of raw short-exposure low-light images, with corresponding long-exposure reference images. Using the presented dataset, we develop a pipeline for processing low-light images, based on end-to-end training of a fully-convolutional network. The network operates directly on raw sensor data and replaces much of the traditional image processing pipeline, which tends to perform poorly on such data. We report promising results on the new dataset, analyze factors that affect performance, and highlight opportunities for future work.