calmond writes:
"Researchers from the University of Michigan have created a super-thin light detector that can pick up the entire infrared spectrum in addition to visible and ultraviolet light. The heat vision technology is made of graphene, which is considered to be the world's strongest material, and is small enough to fit on a contact lens.
Its developers say the technology could one day give people super-human vision and is particularly relevant for use by the military. Other, non-military uses, such as checking power distribution cables or search-and-rescue tasks are also possible.
A news release from the University team is to be found here, while a technical abstract is here. Unfortunately, the full technical paper is only viewable by payment or membership.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kilo110 on Thursday March 20 2014, @03:12PM
"Its developers say the technology could one day give people super-human vision and is particularly relevant for use by the military"
Great, another way to help kill others. Exactly what this world needs.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mhajicek on Thursday March 20 2014, @03:24PM
It seems that's what humans are best at.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Funny) by davester666 on Thursday March 20 2014, @05:45PM
Well, you only gain skill at something by practice, practice and more practice.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Tork on Thursday March 20 2014, @08:20PM
Yeah... yeah, we all saw Terminator 2. If you need karma, here are a few other cliches:
"...the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
"...life finds a way."
"...if it is just us... seems like an awful waste of space."
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Funny) by ikanreed on Thursday March 20 2014, @05:23PM
Or more optimistically: a way to help make sure you're killing the right people, when you are in the military.
(Score: 2, Funny) by TK on Thursday March 20 2014, @06:47PM
Aim for the ones with body heat. Don't bother shooting the dead ones again.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday March 20 2014, @07:01PM
Well, I was thinking don't aim for the 2' 6" children that you can now distinguish from just motion in the distance, but, sure.
(Score: 3, Informative) by etherscythe on Thursday March 20 2014, @08:07PM
Too many video games? No, body heat takes some time to dissipate after the metabolic reactors shut down. Unless you're in a battle that goes on for many hours, telling a live body from a dead one is not going to be done by IR emissions.
Also, a lot of actual battles are happening in rather hot parts of the world right now. Thus, even a long-dead body may appear to be (or actually be) about the right temperature.
And finally, it's only listed as working into the mid-infrared, which " is known as thermal infrared, but it detects only temperatures somewhat above body temperature [wikipedia.org]", unlike Far Infrared.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 3, Funny) by SlimmPickens on Friday March 21 2014, @08:15AM
Current IR cameras are already surprisingly good. I reckon these fancy graphene ones (with a lot of CPU behind it) would spot the surface temperate dropping in seconds.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Taibhsear on Thursday March 20 2014, @03:20PM
I get that this could be used when connected to a computer or other electrical device to be used for detection but the graphene doesn't filter the infrared light and convert it into visible spectrum to be picked up by your retina. It just converts the photon strike into an electrical potential to be analyzed by the detector software. How do you put all that plus an emitter (in the visible spectrum) onto the contact lens to send your eye a signal it can actually interpret? Or do they plan on wiring it straight to your brain somehow? I can see it being a replacement for night vision goggles or what have you, but for contacts... I'll need a more in depth explanation before I'll believe that.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MrGuy on Thursday March 20 2014, @03:56PM
Right. How do you power a magical on-the-eye device that detects, processes, and outputs images and is STILL thin enough to be worn comfortably.
A less sci-fi proposal would be to integrate this with something like Google Glass to allow someone to overlay visible images with infrared/UV picked up by a small imaging sensor...
That we can build a working sensor small enough and thermally stable enough to be used in such a scenario is still a pretty big advance, as I understand it (at least for IR spectrum - don't know about UV).
(Score: -1, Troll) by DrRJonesDC on Thursday March 20 2014, @03:21PM
People wearing these contacts would have epileptic seizures when seeing the flashing of infrared remote controls. There are ways to reduce the number and/or intensity of seizures through intensive chiropractic care, but this might just overload the body's nervous system.
The Spine Whisperer
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 20 2014, @03:24PM
Lol, pseudoscience.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 20 2014, @03:39PM
+1
Ran out of mod points...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 20 2014, @04:03PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Thursday March 20 2014, @09:57PM
On the other hand, back pain therapies from conventional medicine are generally guesses at best. The surgery routes seem to be about as effective as placebo (but with far more probability of making things much worse). Nobody has yet figured out how to distinguish the MRI of a person with debilitating back pain from that of a healthy person.
That doesn't legitimize the far fringes of Chiropracty, of course, but I know first hand that carefully popping the back can greatly relieve pain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @12:54AM
physiotherapy lies in the same category then. Physiotherapy made my wife's sciatica worse and it was finally chiropractic professionals that finally helped her to regain some mobility and gain some relief from the two herniated discs she had. Likewise, the hospital could not even diagnose my wrists which took a shock when I had jump off my bicycle onto a road bunker. X-rays indicated no fractures and they shooed me away even though I keep telling them that I cannot do a full rotation without pain nor make full use of them. Again it was another form of chiropractic treatment (Chinese "bone-setters") that came to my rescue and I am happy to say that I also do not have any arthritis issues with my wrists after twenty years.
It comes down to if you get a good doctor in these areas, it does not matter which particular training and instruction they learnt. However, if you are talking about on average, physiotherapy and surgery is highly likely going to make you worse when they mess with your spine or whatever. They interfere with your body's ability to heal itself just like a lot of the 'medicines' available interfere with body processes designed to remove pathogens. We have gone from tonsils and the appendix are useless and should be removed to unless absolutely necessary, they should not be cut out. Likewise, the medical industry has gone from blood is the gift of life to blood transfusions are dangerous practice and the cause of many after-surgery complications, extended hospital stay and even death. Then there is the matter of antibiotics. True, there are quacks out there but if you want to call a certain field of alternative medicine quackery, the history of modern medicine has its share of field-wide quackery. Modern medicine, despite all its advancements, does not have a monopoly on good medical care.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 20 2014, @06:21PM
A quick google yielded this:
"Between 3-30 hertz (flashes per second) are the common rates to trigger seizures"
Infrared remotes have a carrier of ~38KHz and the signal is then pulsed on and off at intervals of ~1-3ms to encode the commands on the carrier:n als [adafruit.com]
http://learn.adafruit.com/ir-sensor/ir-remote-sig
IR remotes don't seem to be a plausible source for epileptic seizures given those facts.
(Score: 1) by Blackmoore on Friday March 21 2014, @12:18PM
good.
(Score: 5, Informative) by hubie on Thursday March 20 2014, @03:43PM
Ok, so that is what a press release is supposed to do, but I've looked at the full paper and there are a few disconnects between the paper and the press release. There is mention of covering the full IR spectrum, but the paper only went out to the mid-IR. Graphene can potentially be used as a detector for the far-IR, but I didn't see any mention as to how well it would perform. What was disappointing for me is that the PR and paper mention broadband, but I didn't see any figure that shows the spectral response, or quantum efficiency [wikipedia.org] (QE) curve. This tells you how well it responds over its operating spectrum, and thus lets you know whether it is useful for what you want to use it for. Maybe one can pull it out of the figures in the paper, but it wasn't obvious what the signal to noise would be.
The PR mentioned possibly implanting this on the cornea, but that makes no sense to me. This wouldn't allow you to directly see in that sense, you would still need to have readout circuitry to make you an image; this would be like saying if you mounted a CCD sensor to your eye, it would allow you to see what the sensor sees. However you fix the sensor, you'd still need to project its image onto some kind of heads-up display for you to see it.
(Score: 2, Informative) by JohnnyComputer on Thursday March 20 2014, @05:12PM
Very typical, i.e. so so true.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bd on Thursday March 20 2014, @05:15PM
Well, they do explicitly give you the responsivity at 1300 nm, 2100 nm and 3200 nm in the paper. From that, you can easily calculate the responsivity from R=\eta\frac{e}{h\nu}
I get:
1300 nm: \eta=3.8
2100 nm: \eta=1.12
3200 nm: \eta=0.43
So this device doesn't really have internal amplification after 2100 nm. What I am puzzled by is the time response curve in figure 2. That looks like some _slow_ dynamics going on there.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hubie on Thursday March 20 2014, @06:53PM
I'm still having a hard time getting my head wrapped around this. It looks like the visible data in Figure 2 use a Ta2O5 tunneling barrier, but the IR data in Figure 4 use a silicon barrier. I'm trying to put this in the context of what would the response be for a single broadband device (as hinted at in the press release), and I don't think you can get there from the paper. Also, unless there is some dramatic rise in the QE, it is dropping pretty fast by the time you get to 3200 nm, and so I wouldn't expect it to be too great at 5000 nm for the MWIR, and it would be awfully small out in the LWIR.
I don't know anything about growing graphene layers so I also wonder what the limitations are on making pixelated detectors. Can you make an array of these with unit cells comparable to what you can with silicon and InGaAs?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bd on Thursday March 20 2014, @09:24PM
Yeah, I am a bit disappointed with the quality of the paper. Especially that they did not go below 1300 nm in the device with the Si barrier. I guess below 1100 nm the photons are above the band gap of the barrier and something funny happens with the device. Maybe not, but if they don't demonstrate it, I'm not convinced. That would leave us with a slow photo-detector that is not that impressive at all...
The press release really reads like a bad peace of science fiction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @05:02AM
I loved the part where the IB Times article said:
"The heat vision technology is made of graphene, which is considered to be the world's strongest material, and is small enough to fit on a contact lens."
That's a priceless non-sequitur. It's like saying "plastic is small enough to fit on a contact lens."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Boxzy on Thursday March 20 2014, @09:58PM
You mean like looking and seeing? Perhaps there are more non-military uses than military ones. Obviously those won't provide such instant and vast funding, right?
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @06:40AM
non-military uses
Did anyone else flash back to 1978 and Margot Kidder? [google.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday March 21 2014, @08:16AM
Graphene contacts might provide infrared vision one day in the future
systemd is Roko's Basilisk