Someday I’ll catch up

By Jenny Huang

(That photo is of a mantis shrimp, which isn’t actually a shrimp at all, and in a bit I’ll explain what it’s doing in this post. Photo by Jenny Huang.)

I hope you all are enjoying the fourth season of Heroes as much as I am!

What have I been up to?
One of the more fun things I’ve published lately is an article on a car adapted for blind drivers (Optics&Photonics News, November 09 issue).

All those months of messing about with superresolution microscopy concluded with the cover feature story for Advanced Imaging magazine, Seeing Molecules With Visible Light.

I just finished some stories (that aren’t out yet, so I won’t point you at them) about the world’s longest laser (it’s 270 km long, so if you laid it out straight, it would stretch from San Francisco to beyond San Diego) (It is, for obvious reasons, not laid out straight. But it takes up a fair bit of room in the lab.)

I also just wrote about a bunch of biologists who have figured out how a mantis shrimp sees polarized light across the visible spectrum. And they discovered that it’s eyes put to shame our human attempts to do the same. (And that is why I included Jenny Huang’s photo of a mantis shrimp!)

And finally, I got the preliminary program for the The American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting, in February. I won’t be there, alas. AAAS is the most fun science meeting I’ve attended and a really good way to get a snapshot of what’s going on across the sciences.