Using equipment costing about $80, researchers from Inverse Path were able to point a laser on the reflective surface of a laptop between 50 feet and 100 feet away and determine what letters were typed.
Chief Security Engineer Andrea Barisani and hardware hacker Daniele Bianco used a handmade laser microphone device and a photo diode to measure the vibrations, software for analyzing the spectrograms of frequencies from different keystrokes, as well as technology to apply the data to a dictionary to try to guess the words. They used a technique called dynamic time warping that’s typically used for speech recognition applications, to measure the similarity of signals.
Line-of-sight on the laptop is needed, but it works through a glass window, they said. Using an infrared laser would prevent a victim from knowing they were being spied on.
A quarter-century ago, American rocket scientists proposed the “Star Wars” defense system to knock Soviet missiles from the skies with laser beams. Some of the same scientists are now aiming their lasers at another airborne threat: the mosquito.
In a lab in this Seattle suburb, researchers in long white coats recently stood watching a small glass box of bugs. Every few seconds, a contraption 100 feet away shot a beam that hit the buzzing mosquitoes, one by one, with a spot of red light.
When U.S. troops train, they often use a kind of Laser Tag system, to record simulated kills from rifles and artillery. But these days, American forces face less conventional threats, like suicide bombers. Which is why the Navy has funded a patent, for a simulated suicide bomber vest.
The Iowa Department of Transportation is using a mix of new and old technology to count traffic in a busy area along Interstate 80-35 in Des Moines. D.O.T. spokesperson Karen Carroll says the high-tech laser system counts the vehicles.
Carroll says the system puts two lasers across the road and counts traffic as the vehicles cross the lasers. She says they decided on this system because it would be costly to have to shut down and tear up the road to install the traditional loops under the roadway that measure traffic. Caroll says its’ called the “AxleLight” laser system and is able to tell the type of vehicle by the number of wheels and the distance between each wheel.
Imagining dinosaurs in the flesh is tricky since the prehistoric subjects died out some 65 million years ago, but a new tool is helping to fill out the skeleton of T. rex and one of the largest-known duckbill dinosaurs, among other beasts.
Paleontologists used laser imaging technology called LiDAR for the first time to create 3-D computer models of five dinosaurs, including two of Tyrannosaurus rex, a spiny predator called Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, the ostrich-like Strutiomimum sedens and the plant-eating Edmontosaurus annectens, a hadrosaur or duckbill dinosaur.
Seventy-six years after the invention of the modern sprinkler helped revolutionize farming, a professor of environmental engineering is pointing a laser beam across an alfalfa crop in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, looking for a better way to conserve the millions of gallons of water sprayed each year on thirsty crops.
Jan Kleissl and a handful of his students at UC San Diego have rigged up a contraption called a large aperture scintillometer to study exactly how much irrigation water is lost to evaporation and the peak times that water disappears.
It took Norma Margeson a few minutes to learn to control the skinny metal robot. But instead of viewing it as a machine, she soon warmed up to it as a companion.
Researchers have uncovered a pond-sized crater in the woods of central Alberta, Canada, carved out by a meteor that slammed into Earth about 1100 years ago. The technique they used to pinpoint the pit–a laser take on radar–figures to help scientists find evidence of hundreds of similar impacts that have remained hidden until now.
In the past two and a half thousand years, the temples of the Acropolis have suffered fire, bombing and earthquake. Now, scientists are trying to save them from a new modern enemy: pollution.
Standing on a hilltop at the centre of Athens, a city of 4 million people, the Acropolis’ elaborately sculptured stones have fallen prey to a film of black crust from car exhaust fumes, industrial pollution, acid rain and fires.
A team of Greek engineers and restorers are using an innovative laser technology system to clean the surface of the ancient monuments, uncovering colours and ornamentation hidden for decades.
DuPont has unveiled an advanced technology the company said will transform seed research and considerably speed up the development of higher yielding corn and soybean varieties.
DuPont business Pioneer Hi-Bred introduced Laser-Assisted Seed Selection as the newest tool in its Accelerated Yield Technology (AYT) toolbox. The technology promises to increase the size and scope of the Pioneer breeding program five-fold in the next three years, said DuPont.
Laser-Assisted Seed Selection uses a 120-watt carbon dioxide laser to score a small slice from a seed to capture its genetic information while maintaining the seed’s viability for planting.
