Infrared

A NASA-led citizen scientist project has discovered an ancient white dwarf that’s surrounded by large rings, which is shaking up our understanding of how these systems form.

Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have developed a new material that senses how warm a person’s body is and automatically adjusts how much heat it traps or releases.

Every year, millions of tonnes of perfectly good food are wasted around the world because people aren't sure it's still fresh. To cut down on this, researchers at Fraunhofer are developing an infrared pocket scanner that will let food handlers determine if a food item has gone bad.

Currently, if you want to measure someone's blood oxygen levels, you have to use an oximeter that clips onto their finger. An experimental new system, however, is able to check those levels anywhere on the body – and that could mean big things for the field of medicine.

The Ocean Cleanup project has been experimenting with a new technique to fill in some of the blanks and has, what it says, is the first proof of concept for using a form of infrared imagery to quantify marine plastic pollution. ​

​When it comes to cooking in your oven, you simply set the temperature to the exact number required. For stove-top cooking, though, you have to estimate if the saucepan is at more or less the right temperature. PanPerfect offers a way of knowing exactly how hot it is.

​Scientists may have discovered large amounts of water hidden deep beneath the surface of Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot. The discovery, which was made using ground-based telescopes, opens up the possibility that extremophile lifeforms could exist in the atmosphere of the enigmatic gas giant.

​The ESO's VISTA telescope has captured a breath-taking view of the Carina Nebula – one of the Milky Way’s largest star-forming regions. The image reveals the complexity of the nebula hidden behind its dusty shroud, and showcases some of the most massive and brightest stars in our galaxy.

Saturn’s moon Titan is one of the most interesting bodies in the solar system – but at a glance it looks like a dull yellow ball, thanks to a soupy atmosphere. Now, using 13 years’ worth of infrared data from Cassini, astronomers have stitched together the clearest images yet of Titan’s surface.

A company called Brava is launching a countertop oven that cooks food quickly and thoroughly using visible and infrared light, and if you cut through the marketing faff it looks like there might just be a useful product hiding under there.

​In the movie "Predator," Arnold Schwarzenegger hid from an alien's night vision system by covering himself in mud. He might have found things much easier, however, if he'd had access to a newly-developed thermal camouflage material.

Metamaterials that cloak people and objects from radar, visible light or infrared are usually thick and heavy, but now engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed an ultrathin, lightweight sheet that absorbs heat signatures and can even present false ones.