Swipe to swirl around the action
You鈥檝e got a thousand wedding photos to go through, but all you want is one that shows the happy couple鈥檚 first kiss from a flattering angle. How do you find it quickly? CrowdCam, an app developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, can help. Upload all the images of an event and then CrowdCam assesses their similarity and arranges them according to the angle from which they were taken. Users can just swipe to the left or right to circle around a scene, and the system will show them the best matching photo.
鈥淲atching 3D is quite a hassly experience in the home鈥�
The BBC鈥檚 head of 3D, Kim Shillinglaw, announces that the corporation is to stop producing shows for the format due to a 鈥渓ack of public appetite鈥� for the technology
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Laser your way to the root of a problem
The roots of plants are a pain to study, because you can鈥檛 see what they are doing. Last year the problem was partially cracked with the development of transparent soil made of plastic particles soaked in a clear liquid. Now a team at the University of Dundee, UK, are adding lasers. The laser passes straight through the transparent soil, but bounces off the roots in all directions, helping to build up an incredibly detailed 3D image of them as they grow. Watch a video of it in action at (Optics Express, ).
3D-printed liquid metal
It鈥檚 not quite Terminator 2, but a way of 3D printing liquid metal could offer a new range of flexible electronics. An alloy of metals gallium and indium, liquid at room temperatures, forms a thin skin when exposed to air. Collin Ladd of North Carolina State University and colleagues put the alloy in a syringe and were able to squeeze out vertically standing wires and towers of liquid metal droplets, all held together by the skin. The wires remain flexible so they would be suitable for bendy electronics, and could be produced in a 3D printer.
