New CAT scan technology allows for 3D imaging of individual cells [3D Model]

Medical imaging is an interesting field. There are things like fMRI, PET scans, CAT scans, radioactive dye traces, and a million other different techniques — but they’re usually so limited and specific (as extraordinary as they are) that there’s always a need for a new one. In this case it’s soft X-ray tomography, a variant on the more familiar CAT scan.

Normal X-rays penetrate too effectively for them to be used on individual cells; the amount of interference provided by the cell is simply not enough to detect and create an image from. So they use soft X-rays, which have a slightly longer wavelength than the kind used on a broken arm. A new technique developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has enabled soft X-ray images to be taken quickly and sequentially, and then assembled into a 3D model of the subject.

It’s not “live” like an fMRI, and it doesn’t provide the detail one finds in electron microscopy, but obviously it’s very useful. I doubt any of us will ever run into one of these machines in real life, but it’s cool to know they exist.

[CrunchGear via Reddit]

Spacy ZScanner Shoots Lasers, Just Not of the Pew-Pew Variety [3D]

Z Corporation's Z-Scanner looks like a 23rd century View-Master, and in some ways it is. This scanner uses lasers to capture complex forms in 3D, with resolution up to 40 microns. Set shields to full for the hands-on video below!

Autodesk University 2009: Z Corp from Core77 on Vimeo.

[Gizmodo via Core77]

Google Docs OCR

Google Docs API tests a new feature that lets you perform OCR (optical character recognition) on an image. There's a live demo that illustrates this feature: you can upload a high-resolution JPG, GIF, or PNG image that has less than 10 MB and Google Docs extracts the text and converts it into a new document. Google mentions that 'the operation can currently take up to 40 seconds' and a small test showed that the service is not yet reliable: it's slow and it frequently returns errors.


The results are far from perfect and you'll find many errors, but the service is free and it's constantly improving. Here's the result of the OCR for this scanned document:


There aren't many free OCR services available, so an OCR service provided by Google would be very popular. ABBYY FineReader Online is one of the best online OCR services, but the free version is limited to 10 pages a day.

Google sponsors the development of an open-source OCR software called OCRopus, but it's not clear if the online service provided by Google Docs uses OCRopus.

[Google Operating System (Unofficial Google Blog)]

Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA

The image above is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we're happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect more than 100,000 websites from spam and fraud.

Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.

In this way, reCAPTCHA’s unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users. So we'll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process.

That's why we're excited to welcome the reCAPTCHA team to Google, and we're committed to delivering the same high level of performance that websites using reCAPTCHA have come to expect. Improving the availability and accessibility of all the information on the Internet is really important to us, so we're looking forward to advancing this technology with the reCAPTCHA team.

Posted by Luis von Ahn, co-founder of reCAPTCHA, and Will Cathcart, Google Product Manager

Google Street View explained in stop-motion blockery

Google wouldn’t have an image problem if they made these ads international. Seriously, they have to have the money, just saturate the airwaves with these things. It’s a different kind of cute overload — the kind that prevents lawsuits from people who don’t understand how Street View works.
[via BoingBoing]