Superhuman

Is this why some people see the cheap LED lights flicker and some don't?

Scientists discover speed of visual perception ranges widely in humans

Apr 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-04-scientists-visual-perception-ranges-widely.html

There is considerable variation among people in their temporal resolution, meaning some people effectively see more "images per second" than others.

To quantify this, the scientists used the "critical flicker fusion threshold," a measure for the maximum frequency at which an individual can perceive a flickering light source.

Some participants in the experiment indicated they saw the light as completely still when it was in fact flashing about 35 times per second, while others were still able to perceive the flashing at rates of over 60 times per second.

via Department of Zoology in the School of Natural Sciences and the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience: Clinton Haarlem, PLoS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0298007

https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298007

Image credit: AI Art - Holding Hands 1 - 2023

Brain–computer interface experiments first to decode words 'spoken' entirely in the brain in real time

May 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-05-braincomputer-interface-decode-words-spoken.html

The electrodes were implanted in the supramarginal gyrus, a part of the brain that recent research suggests is involved in subvocal speech.

via California Institute of Technology: Sarah K. Wandelt et al, Representation of internal speech by single neurons in human supramarginal gyrus, Nature Human Behaviour (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01867-y

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01867-y

Also: Brain–machine-interface device translates internal speech into text, Nature Human Behaviour (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01869-w

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01869-w

This Ecuadorian forest thrived amid deforestation after being granted legal rights

Jun 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240614-how-los-cedros-forest-in-ecuador-was-granted-legal-personhood

Rights of Nature Movement - In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to change its constitution to state that nature has the same rights as people. The change was led by Ecuador's Indigenous movement, and marked one of the first major steps in what has become known as the 'rights of nature' movement – a movement centred on a legal framework that recognises the inherent right of the natural world to the same protections as people and corporations.

The rights of nature movement "is a move to transform natural entities from objects to subjects, in courts and in front of the law", says Jacqueline Gallant from New York University's School of Law's Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic. "But in a much broader sense, it's been a movement to reanimate and recentre nature as a subject of intrinsic worth," Gallant explains. This is in contrast, she says, to the Western view of nature as "an inanimate backdrop against which the drama of human activity unfolds".

Radiation Photography and Energy Art

Peter Shellenberger's Radiation Art comes without a hazard warning.

What we call light is really just one kind of energy, the "visible" kind. This means it's an energy that falls within a range the electrical nerve circuits of our eyebrains are receptive to. There's other kinds of light, like infrared and ultraviolet light; you've heard of those. There are other kinds of energy that we don't even call light, like sound, and like nuclear radiation.

We definitely can't see nuclear radiation, which is only one of the reasons it's scary. It will literally smash your DNA to pieces until you are a lump of inert molecules. Then again, because we humans are so good at extending our sensory appendages, we can make special "eyes" to see this stuff.

Here's this artist, Peter Shellenberger, who lets a piece of radiating material do its thing in a box for over a month, recording the whole process on camera. He's actually using Fiestaware with uranium oxide.

Aside, Fiestaware, besides being "the most collected brand of china in the United States" (NYTimes) is also well-known for being radioactive, although it isn't anymore; I mean the radioactive kind is no longer sold on the market (although it's obviously still available, which is how Mr. Shellenberger got it for his artwork). The red-orange glaze is made of uranium oxide. Anything made with that red-orange color, at that time (let's say 1940's-ish), is probably made with the same radioactive material.

In fact, as a former ceramicist and art teacher, I was taught to avoid all red glazes, but mostly for lead not radioactivity. Radioactive material is so locked down nowadays that you're not likely to come in contact with it (unless you're getting cancer treatment). Then again, it depends on where you buy it. I can tell you from firsthand experience using a lead detector crayon on a bunch of different dinnerware products - you better think twice and check for yourself before you use anything on a daily basis, especially if it's hot or acidic, and especially if you have kids (who are more susceptible to the negative effects of lead, or anything for that matter).

Cloudlabs helps us visualize cosmic energy.

Personally, I think this next one is way cooler. It's called informally a cloud chamber, and it is a way to show us all kinds of particles that are whizzing through the air around us. 

Here's a description of how it works from the youtube page:
A sealed glass container contains liquid alcohol at the top. Emanating alcohol vapors fill the whole volume of the container until they reach the bottom of the chamber maintained to a very cold temperature (-40°C).

Most of the vapour condenses on the glass surface creating a mist, but a small fraction of it stays in vapour form above the cold condenser. This creates a layer of unstable sursaturated vapour which can condense at any moment. When a charged particle crosses this vapor, it can knock electrons off the molecules forming ions. It causes the unstable alcohol vapor to condense around ions left behind by the travelling ionizing particle : the path of the particle in the matter is then revealed by a track composed of thousands droplets of alcohol.

Any charged particle is visible in a cloud chamber. The most common ones are alphas, electrons, positons, protons, nuclear charged fragment, muons (...). Theses particles come from natural cosmic and telluric background radiations or from close radioactive sources. They will all leave tracks of different shapes in the chamber, based on their charge, mass and speed. Electrons are the lightest particles and will be easily deflected by magnetic fields. Alphas and protons are much heavier and slower and will thus ionize more, causing denser track of droplets. Interactions of neutral particles like gamma rays or neutrons can be seen thanks to the charged particles they create in matter.

check out their lab here - cloudylabs.fr
check out the video here

Notes

Peter Shellenberger
Moberg Gallery, 2018

**Still can't find my blowdryer picture...anyone that knows of someone using an IR camera to capture blowdryer drawings on canvas, help me out.

Technicolor Vision

These are all examples of infrared landscape photography. There is a good series of the Congo by Richard Mosse.

Colorblindness has nothing to do with infrared vision; I just thought these pictures were awesome.

There is no cure for colorblindness. There are special tinted glasses that help, but now there are dyed contact lenses. This article explains it more directly than I can:

"...dyed with a non-toxic rhodamine derivative dye. This particular derivative of rhodamine was chosen as it is known for its ability to absorb certain wavelengths of light in the optical spectrum. Researchers found that the dye blocked the band that lies between the red and green wavelengths, which is perceived by two sets of corresponding optical cones simultaneously. The removal of this band through the dyed lens inhibited the simultaneous triggering of the cones designated for green and red wavelength bands, enabling better differentiation between red and green colours."

New development in contact lenses for red-green color blindness using simple dye
Apr 2018, phys.org

Tropical garden infrared landscape photography.

And surreal infrared landscape photography by David Keochkerian.

more nice pictures with no source credited

Blurry Vision

It looks like the robot brains are beating the sensory prostheses. Telescopes and microscopes are way better at seeing than humans and our smartphones. But we may not need to put these advanced lenses in our phones or our future robots in order to make them superhuman. Instead, we need to fill them with fuzzier brains. 

Artificial intelligence may seem like a hyper-concise, over-literal, braniac, but not these days. The new generation of AI, known simply as deep learning, is the opposite of this. It is less like a calculator and more like a guess. (Although technically it's both). It favors approximation over concision.

Relative to us humans, however, its results are more concise than we could ever attain. A research group via UCLA has outfitted regular lenses found on a smartphone with a 3D-printed microscope attachment and an AI that makes a really good, phenomenally good guess at what it sees. Their invention gives us back an image of the same precision as a lab-grade microscope.

Their fuzzy AI brain "learns" how to see under high resolution by being fed both images taken with the regular smartphone, and with lab-grade microscopes. Using thousands of examples, the brain compares the one to the other, and eventually learns how we get from the one to the other - if I give you this crappy fuzzy image, how do you make it into that sharp-shaped product? It learns how to do that, using algorithms that we don't program (the brain programs itself).

It's only superficially ironic that the loose AI analogy of 'blurry vision' is used by these deep learning techniques to see in high res. The real story here is that we're using the brains, or the software, of our robots to liberate us from the hardware restrictions.


Deep learning transforms smartphone microscopes into laboratory-grade devices
Apr 2018, phys.org

Yair Rivenson et al. Deep Learning Enhanced Mobile-Phone Microscopy, ACS Photonics (2018). DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.8b00146
Provided by: University of California, Los Angeles

To See Better

The automation of artmaking - Adobe's Project Felix

The automation of artmaking - Adobe's Project Felix

Adobe’s Project Felix Uses AI to Help You Craft Hyper-Realistic 3-D Renderings
Nov 2016, WIRED

This thing is nuts, and makes me scared for my job. (But not really; I used to be an art teacher, but am no more.)

A New Way of Seeing

image source

New imaging system uses an open-ended bundle of optical fibers—no lenses, protective housing needed
Feb 2016 phys.org

In Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants 2011, he mentions how seeing always makes eyeballs, and digestion the gut.

***
cool blog about eyes
and a video about the The Evolution of the Human Eye

The Panopticon is Among Us

via heliocentra tumblr

Ultra tiny camera has no lens – uses algorithm to develop pictures
Mar 28, 2014, phys.org 

An extremely tiny lensless camera, developed by Rambus, has been slowly making waves over the past year. Researchers for the company, David Stork and Patrick Gill won a Best Paper award at last year's Sencomm 2013 for describing what the company has created. They spoke again at last month's Mobile World Congress, describing their new type of camera—one that might someday soon be used to give virtually any digital device, some degree of vision.

Instead of a lens, a pattern is etched into the glass above the chip—the imager reads the light that is received, processes it using an algorithm developed by Rambus and converts it into a recognizable image. What's amazing is that the etched pattern on the glass and the chip are both roughly the size of a period at the end of a sentence.

Particular etched patterns allow for light to be intentionally refracted in different ways as it passes through the glass—images made from them would appear unrecognizable to the human eye, but the algorithm makes use of refraction properties to reconstruct the light received into a recognizable image.

Trying to grind ever smaller lenses has reached its limits, thus something new had be developed.

Making a camera so tiny opens the door for its use in a whole host of new applications, allowing them to become aware of their physical surroundings, all at a very low cost—perhaps just pennies per chip—that means they could be embedded in clothes, toys, mirrors, security systems, etc., bounded only by the imagination of device makers. On the other hand, such tiny cameras could also open a Pandora's box if they are used to invade privacy or for control purposes.

More information: Lensless Ultra-Miniature CMOS Computational Imagers and Sensors
PDF paper
PDF presentation

New surveillance technology can track everyone in an area for several hours at a time
Craig Timberg, Washington Post, 5 Feb 2014

Maurizio Galimberti_photographer

[This system, stationed miles above an area, can watch many square miles, for hours at a time, where 'targets' are single blips on the area below, being followed for the duration of time. All data can be stored indefinitely.]

Now You Can See Which Websites Are Tracking You in Real-Time
vice, 25 Nov 2013