Fun in Cognitive Melee

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thisistheverge: Steve Jobs was interested in Lytro’s plenoptic camera, company confirms There’s a lot of buzz today about how Lytro’s shoot-first, focus-afterwards camera technology could appear in a new Apple iPhone, and while there hasn’t been any confirmation of that idea, a new nonfiction book, Inside Apple, revealed that Steve Jobs met with Lytro CEO Ren Ng and discuss how the two companies could work together in the future. 

thisistheverge:

Steve Jobs was interested in Lytro’s plenoptic camera, company confirms

There’s a lot of buzz today about how Lytro’s shoot-first, focus-afterwards camera technology could appear in a new Apple iPhone, and while there hasn’t been any confirmation of that idea, a new nonfiction book, Inside Apple, revealed that Steve Jobs met with Lytro CEO Ren Ng and discuss how the two companies could work together in the future. 
sciencecenter: Spider’s hundreds of fine hairs are hundreds of ears Hunting spiders can not only watch your every move, but they can feel those moves, and that of their prey, through the air. How their tiny specialized hairs do it has puzzled researchers for decades, but one team of scientists may have found a break. Their physics-focused work suggests each hair acts like a single, independent ear — not a network of ear parts that, together, turn a spider’s exoskeleton into one giant ear, as was previously assumed. “Nobody had looked at these hairs in just the right way. When you look at what they are mechanically optimized to do, you could design better ones,” said physicist Brice Bathellier of the Institute Of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, who co-authored a study of trichobothria hairs Dec. 14 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. “But nature optimizes. Animals evolve under stringent conditions,” Bathellier said. “So it became a question of what [the hairs] actually do, what type of signals tell animals ‘I should leave’ or ‘that’s just wind blowing on me.’”

sciencecenter:

Spider’s hundreds of fine hairs are hundreds of ears

Hunting spiders can not only watch your every move, but they can feel those moves, and that of their prey, through the air.

How their tiny specialized hairs do it has puzzled researchers for decades, but one team of scientists may have found a break. Their physics-focused work suggests each hair acts like a single, independent ear — not a network of ear parts that, together, turn a spider’s exoskeleton into one giant ear, as was previously assumed.

“Nobody had looked at these hairs in just the right way. When you look at what they are mechanically optimized to do, you could design better ones,” said physicist Brice Bathellier of the Institute Of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, who co-authored a study of trichobothria hairs Dec. 14 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

“But nature optimizes. Animals evolve under stringent conditions,” Bathellier said. “So it became a question of what [the hairs] actually do, what type of signals tell animals ‘I should leave’ or ‘that’s just wind blowing on me.’”