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Do any of you suffer from "floaters" in your eyes? I'm finding it increasingly difficult with my vision. Is there a remedy for this? I have noticed that my vision has deteriorated significantly the past few years. Just want some input.

The European Space Agency says a new laser terminal has been launched into orbit as part of wider efforts to develop Europe's first optical communications network, a system able to monitor natural disasters and other catastrophes. The European Data Relay System terminal, launched Friday from Kazakhstan, was released from its host satellite Saturday morning. ...

Lockheed Martin has marked successful entry into low rate initial production on the F-35 Lightning II Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS). The first production units have been delivered to Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Fort Worth, TX, for integration onto the aircraft. Embedded into the F-35's fuselage with an innovative faceted sapphire window, the low-drag, stealthy EOTS is the world's first and only sensor combining forward-looking infrared and infrared search and track functionality. The F-35 EOTS will provide Lightning II pilots with significant air-to-air and air-to-ground situational awareness in a single compact and completely passive sensor. "Our team looks forward to meeting...

A new generation of electro-optical imaging satellites to be built by Lockheed Martin pending congressional approval will have an aperturesize of 2.4 meters, a senior U.S.intelligence official said. James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, disclosed the aperture size — or diameter of the satellite’s primary imaging mirror — of the Next-Generation Optical satellite system Oct.19 during a keynote address here at the Geoint 2009 Symposium. Technical details and capabilities of the nation’s spy satellites typically are closely guarded secrets. Aperture size and altitude are the two factors that determine a satellite’s imaging resolution, which is the minimum size...

TUCSON, Ariz. - The world's most powerful optical telescope is now operating on southeastern Arizona's Mount Graham, capturing striking images of objects millions of light years away. The Large Binocular Telescope — two 8.4-meter diameter mirrors that together gather more light and have 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope — took its first images using both mirrors late last year. The first images were released to the public on Thursday. There are huge telescopes that operate in other parts of the spectrum — from low-frequency radio waves to far beyond visible light — but no traditional telescope...

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) scientists plan to unveil a prototype chip Monday that uses optical connections to increase the speed of moving data among chips to eight times that of previous technologies. The chip's speed, clocked at 160 billion bits of data a second, would allow a high-definition movie to be transmitted over a short distance in a fraction of a second, compared with the half-hour it takes over home broadband connections, IBM said. The technology could pave the way for devices that almost instantly transmit a digital X-ray to a doctor's hand-held screen, a seismic analysis to an...

OK, labradorite isn't really luminescent, but it's famous for it's optical effects. The image below is reduced in size; click for a full-size look.

Building upon recent studies on optomechanical entanglement with lasers and mirrors, a group of scientists has developed a theoretical model using entanglement swapping in order to entangle two micromechanical oscillators. This ability could lead to advances in information processing, as well as other applications that use micromechanical resonators, such as electrometers, displacement detectors, and radio frequency signal processors, wrote scientists Stefano Pirandola et al. in a recent Physical Review Letters. "Until now, entanglement has been observed only for optical modes, i.e., photons (which are massless particles)," Pirandola told PhysOrg.com. "The significance of purely mechanical entanglement would be that it involves...

Claim: Photograph shows a bathroom with an unusually painted floor. Caption on photo making rounds on internet states: This is a painted floor!!!! I don't think I could even step into the room Status:False "IMAGINE . . . you are at a party. You have to go to the bathroom. There's only one at the house you're in. This is the bathroom you enter." Origins: The image shown above may qualify as a genuine artwork, but not of the type claimed (i.e., a bathroom with its floor painted to make it appear open to the sky from thousands of feet...

The tantalising prospect of DVDs capable of holding almost a terabyte of data - or several hundred movies - has been presented in a patent issued to US storage company Iomega. The US patent describes a disc that could store 40 to 100 times more information that a conventional DVD, using more nanometre-scale sloped ridges to diffract light. US patent number 6879556 - entitled "Method and Apparatus for Optical Data Storage" - was issued to Iomega on April 12 2005. Conventional DVDs store information in the form of ridges and depressions, each several hundred nanometres wide. These correspond to bits...

ENGINEERS often admire the ways in which living creatures solve problems. The difficulty with man-made fibre-optic cables, says Joanna Aizenberg of Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, New Jersey, is that they often crack and break. For a solution, Dr Aizenberg and her colleagues have turned to the exquisitely structured siliceous skeleton of a deep-sea sponge known as the Venus flower basket. This sponge, they say, can do things better. As they explain in a paper published in this week's issue of Nature, the sponge has a lattice of spiny outgrowths, or “spicules”, at its base, which provide structural support. These...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 November 28 The Supermassive Black Holes of NGC 6240 Credit: Optical: R.P.van der Marel & J.Gerssen (STScI), NASA;X-ray: S.Komossa & G.Hasinger (MPE) et al., CXC, NASA Explanation: The Hubble optical image on the left shows NGC 6240 in the throes of a titanic galaxy - galaxy collision 400 million light-years away. As the cosmic catastrophe plays out, the merging galaxies spew forth distorted tidal tails of stars,...