Tomorrow In Brief

3-D Posters

Coming soon to billboards near you: posters you can see in 3-D without special glasses.

Based on the same principle as the old grooved “3-D” postcards of years past, the new displays consist of 250,000 individual lenses with a diameter of 2 millimeters each, aligned on sheets with computer precision to eliminate distortion.

The resulting 3-D images can be up to five meters in size. The technology was achieved by researchers from Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques, RealEyes Company, and the University of Kiel.

Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, www.fraunhofer.de.

Musical Clothing

Fabrics with sensors could give musicians a simple way to carry their instruments with them: in their clothes.

An outfit that produces sounds when the user touches it has been created by Swedish School of Textiles fashion student Jeannine Han and technician Dan Riley.

The prototype garments yield a harp-like sound. The goal is to improve the use of technology to produce future clothing, and also to create clothing with a larger and easily controlled musical palette. Han and Riley plan to form a band that will wear the outfits and “play themselves.”

Source: University of Borås, Expertanswer, www.expertsvar.se/english.

Bridging the Mentor Age Gap

If you’re choosing a mentor, it may be better to choose one who is still relatively early in his or her career. Doing so increases the likelihood that you, too, will become a productive mentor in the future.

In a study of mathematicians, Northwestern University researcher R. Dean Malmgren and colleagues found that older, late-career mentors were too far removed from the experiences of young protégés to train them effectively, and those protégés subsequently mentored fewer protégés of their own.

“It’s a phenomenon in our culture that as you gain more importance and success you are expected to oversee more and more people, which means that face time with your protégés goes down,” says Malmgren. “This tradeoff has negative consequences.”

Source: Northwestern University, www.northwestern.edu.

Crowd-Sourcing the Crowd

A new social-search engine promises to identify popular places in the same way that Twitter identifies popular, or “trending,” topics.

With a program developed by the Sency search-engine company in Santa Monica, California, users can find where the action is by simply selecting a city name; the search results show the locations of the most-active chatter, along with addresses and street maps.

Among the searchable places now available are London, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Be warned, however: Party goers may have to do some extra trending-topic searching, lest they inadvertently join a protest movement or street riot.

Source: Sency, www.sency.com.

Arctic Warming, Mid-Latitude Freezing

Loss of sea ice in the Arctic region is likely to yield colder and snowier winters in other parts of the world, according to new research presented by James Overland of the NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.

Arctic warming, which is occurring twice as fast as in the rest of the planet, is due to a combination of factors, including loss of sea ice reflectivity, ocean heat storage, changing wind patterns, and natural variability.

“The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009–2010 in Europe, eastern Asia, and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic,” Overland reported to the recent International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference.

Source: International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference, Research Council of Norway, www.ipy-osc.no.