Good morning, Whitewater
In the City of Whitewater, today, at 5:30 p.m., there is a scheduled meeting of the Park & Recreation Board at the Municipal Building. The agenda for the meeting is available online as a pdf file.
The National Weather Service predicts that today will be snowy with a high of 31 degrees. The Farmers’ Almanac predicts that the next three days will be “cold and dry.”
Last week’s better prediction: NWS.
In our schools today, at 6:30 p.m., there is a scheduled Music Parents’ meeting at the high school.
From Wired, an interesting science discovery, wholly accidental, is recounted in a news squib entitled, “Happy Accident Opens Door to Cheaper, Higher-Resolution Cameras.”
Scientific accidents have brought some of the most groundbreaking discoveries — vulcanized rubber, X-rays, penicillin — and now scientists at UCLA have accidentally discovered a material that could make digital cameras as we know them obsolete.
Graduate student Hsiang-Yu Chen was working on a new formula for solar cells when something went wrong. Instead of creating electricity when hit with light, the conductivity of the material she was working with changed.
“The original purpose [was] to make a solar cell more efficient,” says Chen. “However, during the research we found the solar cell phenomenon [had] disappeared.” Instead, the test material showed high gain photoconductivity, indicating potential use as a photo sensor.
Thanks to this lucky mistake, a new breed of camera sensors that are cheaper, higher-resolution and have lower distortion could be on the horizon.
Wired offers a gallery with images (taken through a conventional digital or film camera) related to the discovery.