Photonics for a Better World

ACTION MAN: Brandon in the lab working on a lidar system Meet Brandon Hellman, this week's SPIE Faces of Photonics series feature. He is a student researcher at the University of Arizona, pursuing a PhD in Optical Sciences. Brandon and his colleagues work on making new lidar systems in Professor Yuzuru Takashima's lab. You can see a sample of their work on the College of Optical Sciences' YouTube page. Enjoy the interview with Brandon! 1. Share your favorite outreach or volunteer story.  Laser Fun Day is an annual optics outreach event put on by the Student Optics Chapter "SOCk" in the College of Optical Sciences. The event is free and open to the public, encouraging hundreds of children and adults of all ages to explore optics through hands-on demos put on by undergraduate and graduate students and faculty in the college.  Demos include a laser maze -- Mission: Impossible- style -- a six-foot-long kaleidoscope, laser radios, solar telescop...

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which kicks off each year in Las Vegas and did so again last week, is a mega-event that identifies trends and gives some of the biggest gurus in technology a platform. The mainstream media covers it all with gusto. Of course the tech media is all over it too, with everything from product specs to analysis of tweets to see who the biggest “influencers” are . The good thing about CES is that there is something for everyone – but that’s also the bad thing. Significant developments or important new products might just be overshadowed by something with a bigger flash, but possibly not much substance. And there’s also the paradox of constant monitoring. As Junko Yoshida says in EE Times : “While consumers see the Orwellian implications of constant monitoring, they can’t resist the temptations to see or hear things that wouldn’t be on the radar without embedded cameras or microphones.” Of course photonics plays a big role in just about everything toute...

In the Netherlands, by midyear they expect to have installed the first of several innovations that will lead to better highway safety and energy efficiency, Smart Planet has reported. Lights that are activated by passing cars, special lanes for charging electric vehicles while they’re moving, and temperature-responsive road paint that alerts drivers to freezing conditions are just a few of the features of this highway of the future. Watch the video: Two companies, Studio Roosegaarde and Heijmans Infrastructure , came up with the highway ideas. The luminous road markings and temperature indicating road will be installed first, and the other things shown in the video will take longer. Any one of these ideas would be a welcome enhancement, but taken together, an exciting new driving environment will be created beginning this summer in Holland’s Brabant province. By the way, this comes from the country that last year brought us heated bike lanes for icy streets. Technolog...

Are you headed for SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco later this month? Have you sorted out which papers you want to hear -- from among the 4,127 on the program? If you’d like a much shorter list to consider, here are some ideas we collected from conference chairs and others who have studied the program. While these technologies cover the full range of the four-symposium event, they are representative of all 4,000 papers in their focus on solving the challenges facing the world: They offer promise for detecting cancer in time to enable a cure, restoring vision, detecting clandestine nuclear weapons, enhancing automobile safety, improving both energy efficiency and human health with solid-state lighting, and much more. BiOS 7885-23 “OCT-guided femtosecond laser system for cataract surgery,” Daniel Palanker (Stanford Univ. School of Medicine), et al. A new technique using a femtosecond laser to break up damaged lenses before removal can make cataract surgery easier and more pr...