Liquid Lens Can Magnify at the Flick of a Switch 108
An anonymous reader writes "German engineers have designed the first liquid camera lens with no moving parts that provides two levels of zoom. 'Liquid lenses bend light using the curved boundary between watery and oily liquids. When the two liquids are held in the right container, the boundary between them can be made to curve in a way that focuses light simply by applying a voltage. Liquid lenses have attracted much attention because they are potentially smaller than conventional optics and cheaper to build. Samsung has already built them into some cellphones.'"
Great for Democracy (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems that police brutality is getting so common now that they are willing to beat members of the media on camera [youtube.com]. (The clip begins with the narrator suggesting that the protestors were "asking for it" by throwing rocks at the police, but they can't spin the footage of their own camerapeople getting beaten up.)
What's worse, is that police now tend to focus on people with cameras , as you can also see in the above video. [mediachannel.org]
The tapes are very helpful in prosecuting police misconduct [cnn.com] , so we neeed more people taping.
Otherwise, the police tend to lie about the incidents [bbc.co.uk], even going so far to claim in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in Britain that 5 different cameras watching the action were all somehow not functioning [wikipedia.org].
In a Missouri case, a teenager was being harassed by the police at a DUI checkpoint for not telling them where he was going -- when he asked why he was being detained, he was told If you don't stop running your mouth, we're going to find a reason to lock you up tonight [thenewspaper.com].
Stuff like this happens all the time, and it will be a great day when we can start getting more of it on tape. Then the police can keep policing the citizens, but the citizens can also police the police.
Re:Can I take camera as carry on luggage? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Lens isn't working (Score:3, Insightful)
I can imagine: Let me put on my glasses. Oh, they are set for concave.
I guess there *is* something to see.
Re:Great for Democracy (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, why turn an article on scientific discovery into a political... essay?