One Of The Many Data-driven Projects To Make The World A Better Place Over At DataKind.

Artificial optical materials could allow cheaper, flatter, more efficient detectors for night vision and other uses

A new way of taking images in the mid-infrared part of the spectrum, developed by researchers at MIT and elsewhere, could enable a wide variety of applications, including thermal imaging, biomedical sensing, and free-space communication.

The mid-infrared (mid-IR) band of electromagnetic radiation is a particularly useful part of the spectrum; it can provide imaging in the dark, trace heat signatures, and provide sensitive detection of many biomolecular and chemical signals. But optical systems for this band of frequencies have been hard to make, and devices using them are highly specialized and expensive. Now, the researchers say they have found a highly efficient and mass-manufacturable approach to controlling and detecting these waves.

The findings are reported in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper by MIT researchers Tian Gu and Juejun Hu, University of Massachusetts at Lowell researcher Hualiang Zhang, and 13 others at MIT, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and the East China Normal University.

The new approach uses a flat, artificial material composed of nanostructured optical elements, instead of the usual thick, curved-glass lenses used in conventional optics. These elements provide on-demand electromagnetic responses and are made using techniques similar to those used for computer chips. “This kind of metasurface can be made using standard microfabrication techniques,” Gu says. “The manufacturing is scalable.”

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The Norwegian Secret To Enjoying A Long Winter

Residents of Norway view their long dark winters as something to celebrate. How it's possible to be cheerful for the next four months.

Now that is pure adaptation!

As the days get darker and colder in much of the northern hemisphere, it’s easy to indulge in gloom. For the next few months, you’ll be shivering. You’ll be battling foul weather. Thanks to daylight saving time there will be no chance to see the sun after work.

The gloom leads to a common question: What can I do to cope with the dark and cold?

If you truly want to be happy during winter, though, this is the wrong approach to the season. Changing your mindset can do more than distracting yourself from the weather.

At first, she was asking “Why aren’t people here more depressed?” and if there were lessons that could be taken elsewhere. But once she was there, “I sort of realized that that was the wrong question to be asking,” she says. When she asked people “Why don’t you have seasonal depression?” the answer was “Why would we?”

It turns out that in northern Norway, “people view winter as something to be enjoyed, not something to be endured,” says Leibowitz, and that makes all the difference.

Lessons From The Far North

To be sure, there are some aspects of the near-polar culture that might be hard to emulate elsewhere. Small Norwegian communities are tightly knit, and strong social ties increase well-being everywhere. That said, there are lessons that can help anyone think differently about cold weather.

New book on the Halley VI Research Center. Halley VI is a string of 8 modules located on the Brunt Ice Shelf floating on the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. These sexy buildings are built on skis to help them move around. Check out the book, here.

Pew Research Center analyzed 1,041,336 apps in the Google Play Store as of September 2014 to determine the specific permissions requested by each app. We found that across all Android apps, 165 permissions allowed access to device hardware and 70 allowed access to various types of user information.

Apps Permissions in the Google Play Store

Biologists at the University of Rhode Island were studying the nitrogen content of streams and noticed something odd: whenever there were beaver ponds upstream, nitrogen levels dropped. Beaver ponds slow down river water, and they mix it with organic matter, which must have an effect on river chemistry, but scientists didn’t know exactly what was happening in that murky water. So they made soda-bottle-sized “ponds” that let them study variations on the conditions the beavers set up in their real-life ponds. And they found a kind of reverse nitrogen fixation process was occurring — call it “denitrification.” Bacteria in the dirt and the plant debris turned nitrates into nitrogen gas. The gas bubbled up to the surface and mixed with the atmosphere once more. In some cases, the level of nitrogen in the water dropped 45%.

(via Scientists Acquire More Proof That Only Beavers Can Save the World)

NASA is training space robots using virtual reality

 NASA and Sony have teamed up to use Playstation VR to train humanoids, or robot like humans, which would work in space. The project called Mighty Morphenaut sees a VR app allow a human to see through the eyes of the robot and control the robots movements using the Playstation VR system.

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The Moon Parka - A jacket made of synthetic spider silk

Remember the Japanese biomaterials company Spiber? In 2013, they presented a cocktail dress made of Qmonos (from the Japanese word kumonosu meaning ‘spider web’), their present 11-year-10-design-iterations-and-656-gene-synthesis synthetic version of stronger than steel and more flexible than nylon lightweight spider silk.

Snip from geek.com:

The end result of all that research is a method for producing artificial spider silk through a fermentation process using bioengineered microorganisms to produce the silk proteins. A real spider can only produce so much silk, but an engineered cell that does nothing but spit out silk proteins can be used to scale production up quickly.

Now they presented in collaboration with The North Face a new prototype called The Moon Parka, which is currently touring North Face stores across Japan. It’s intended to show that practical applications of spider silk are possible (cost is now 1/53,000 of what it was in 2008). Spiber aims to deliver the final product next year. Presumably only in Japan. But fingers crossed for a worldwide rollout at reasonable prices.

Watch their promo-launch video below:

[North Face x Spiber] [Spiber] [picture by North Face]

Meet the architect who wants to return Mexico City to its ancient lakes

“The pre-Hispanic civilizations built a system of dams, in order to control the salt water and to bring clean water. But then the Spaniards, in order to conquer the city, broke the dams … They started to follow a European scheme, which didn’t match the geography. And we have followed that inherited inertia for the last 500 years.” || Read more in The Guardian

YouTube Wants Everyone To Watch This New Movie About Girls Who Code

“Codegirl” will stream for free on YouTube from Nov. 1 - 6.

Both were filled at the same time with the same water, only one had oysters.