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Book of Fungi Makes Us Want to Go Mushroom-Hunting

admin — Tue, 24 May 2011 21:31:57 +0000

The new Book of Fungi, by Peter Roberts and Shelley Evans, is a couple of kilograms worth of beautiful mushroom book. The lurid photographs and enticing, offhandedly witty descriptions make the reader want to go out collecting specimens right away -- ...

Video: Augmented Reality App For Librarians Instantly Shows Which Books Are Misfiled

admin — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:31:28 +0000

E-books, iPads and Kindles may be the way of the future, but most of the world's knowledge is still stored in millions of good old paper books on library shelves. So researchers at Miami University have created an augmented reality app that makes all ...

Video: Augmented Reality App For Librarians Instantly Shows Which Books Are Misfiled

admin — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:31:28 +0000

Breakfast at Myhrvold’s: Pea Butter, Drinkable Bagels, and Other Modernist Miracles

admin — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 18:13:33 +0000

In a high-tech kitchen laboratory in Seattle, Nathan Myhrvold is putting the finishing touches on Modernist Cuisine, his obsessive 2,438-page cookbook documenting the future of food. I recently visited for a futuristic breakfast Recently, in a laborat...

Video: Fastest Book Scanner Ever Captures Flipping Pages with High-Speed Camera

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:53:59 +0000

The technology blows away the competition by scanning 200 pages a minute

A new super-fast book-scanning technology could make publishers cringe even more than when they heard about Google Book Search. A University of Tokyo researcher has developed a "book flipping scanning" method that does exactly what it sounds like, digitizing 200 pages per minute, according to IEEE Spectrum. The Japanese researchers hope to enable a digital library for Japanese manga comics.

The scanner's camera runs at 500 frames per second, and captures rapidly flipping book pages in two modes. First, a regular line shines on the page to capture text and images. The second mode then manages neat the trick of reconstructing the curved, distorted pages in their original form. A laser device projects lines onto each page that the system can use to recreate the 3-D page model and correct the deformed lines.

Google's own proprietary book-scanning technology seems to use some sort of infrared camera to capture the 3-D shape of book pages, but the book lies flat and the page-turning mechanism is unclear. Other book scanners boast of capturing about 50 pages per minute, which is four times slower than the new method.

Masatoshi Ishikawa -- the University of Tokyo researcher behind the book-scanning marvel -- previously developed the fastest robot hands in the East, so he's probably not too worried about tiring out human hands by flipping book pages.

Miniaturized versions of this technology could eventually find their way into our smartphones for completely legal digitizing delights. Or it might combine with the robot hands to bring Short Circuit's Johnny 5 to life.

[via IEEE Spectrum]