Optics

In August the White House announced that the results of all federally funded research should be freely accessible by the end of 2025. This will be a big change for scientists in many fields but ultimately a good move for the democratization of research. Under this new guidance, many peer-reviewed papers would be free for the world to read immediately upon publication rather than stuck behind expensive paywalls, and the data that underlay these papers would be fully available and properly archived for anyone who wanted to…

Do people have a right to an unobstructed view of the heavens? For most of human history, such a question would have been considered nonsensical—but with the recent rise of satellite mega constellations, it’s now being asked again and again. Mega constellations are vast groups of spacecraft, numbering in the thousands, that could spark a multitrillion-dollar orbital industry and transform global connectivity and commerce. But the rise of mega constellations also threatens to clutter the night sky, cripple the work of some…

For a second time, NASA has decided not to rename its flagship James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The decision follows a historical investigation into the telescope’s namesake, a former NASA administrator who held high-ranking government positions at a time when the United States systematically fired LGBT+ employees for their sexual orientation. Many LGBT+ astronomers and other scientists have spoken out against having Webb’s name on the telescope, saying the association perpetuates a dark and hateful period in American…

Each year, millions of people visit the Louvre in Paris to gaze upon arguably the most iconic work of art in history: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Most visitors are drawn to the painting’s aura of mystery. But some behold a deeper beauty there, too—the Mona Lisa’s hazy landscape and beguiling expression alike arise from Leonardo’s use of sfumato, a complex technique in which soft outlines emerge from many delicate layers of paint, like figures from a fog. Some of the Mona Lisa’s layers, scientists showed in 2010, are 10…

Vivo X90 series is likely to make its debut in China by the end of December this year. A reliable tipster has suggested that this flagship handset will also be sold globally. In addition, live images of the top-of-the-line Vivo X90 Pro+ have surfaced. The leaked images offer a glimpse at the rear panel of this Vivo smartphone, including the Zeiss co-engineered camera setup. The handset is said to feature a Sony IMX989V image sensor and could be capable of offering up to 100x zoom.The alleged Vivo X90 Pro+ image was…

For more than three decades, the Hubble Space Telescope has been breaking new ground in astronomy, cosmology and planetary science, delivering results that few if any other facilities can match—let alone exceed. No other orbital observatory has managed such consistent high performance for so many years, thanks to a series of repair and servicing missions by NASA astronauts. NASA staged five space shuttle missions to Hubble in low-Earth orbit between 1993 and 2009 to upgrade science instruments, replace failed systems and…

Nearly two years ago one of the most iconic telescopes in the world came crashing down on itself. The Arecibo telescope—located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico—was the world’s largest single-dish telescope for most of its more than half-century of existence. A series of cable failures caused the telescope’s 817-metric-ton receiver platform to collapse onto the dish below on December 1, 2020, putting the telescope out of commission. Last week, the National Science Foundation (NSF)—which owns and finances the Arecibo…

Meta is introducing the first in a new line of high-end VR and mixed reality headsets starting with the Meta Quest Pro (which was previously demoed under its code name, Project Cambria). “Pro” tends to overused in the tech world, but Meta actually sees the Quest Pro being used by professionals, while the Quest 2 will stick around for casual gaming. The Quest Pro is powered by the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 1, which Qualcomm unveiled today. It promises 50% higher sustained performance than the XR2 inside the Quest 2 as well as…

Astronomers have been so keen to use the new James Webb Space Telescope that some have got a little ahead of themselves. Many started analysing Webb data right after the first batch was released, on 14 July, and quickly posted their results on preprint servers—but are now having to revise them. The telescope’s detectors had not been calibrated thoroughly when the first data were made available, and that fact slipped past some astronomers in their excitement. The revisions don’t so far appear to substantially change many…

Privacy is an obvious concern now that everything from smartphones to smartwatches to even smart glasses has built-in cameras. Banning covert cameras is never going to happen, and digitally altering images for privacy reasons is a real pain. So, researchers at UCLA are instead working on a radical new kind of camera that can selectively capture or ignore specific objects in frame before they’re even recorded.If you’ve ever seen an investigative news show protect the identity of a source by blurring or pixelating their…