厚度僅百分之一毫米的相機問世
Cameras were once big and bulky. Today, really good cameras fit in your pocket. And now, researchers at Cornell have developed a camera that’s just a half-millimeter on each side and a hundredth of a millimeter thick。
以前的照相機都又大又笨，而如今，一些好的照相機小到可以裝進口袋裏。最近，康奈爾大學的研究人員已經發明一種長寬只有半毫米，厚度僅百分之一毫米的照相機。
The lens-less device is called a Planar Fourier Capture Array. It’s a flat piece of doped silicon. Each of its pixels is sensitive to specific incident angles and supplies a component of the mathematical operation called the Fourier Transform to produce an image about 20 pixels across. The details of the new camera are outlined in the journal Optics Letters。
這種無鏡頭照相機被稱爲平面傅里葉捕獲陣列。它其實就是一塊參雜了硅元素的扁平材料。它的每一個像素點都對指定的入射角十分敏感，並提供一部分稱爲“傅里葉變換”的數學運算以產生一張20像素的圖像。這款新型相機的細節發佈在《光學快報》期刊上。
Animals like the nautilus manage with lens-less eyes. The images aren’t necessarily sharp, but they’re still useful. Same with this tiny camera。
Patrick Gill, who headed the project, had been trying to create a lens-less implantable device to detect brain neurons that, due to modifications, glow when they’re active。
有些動物的眼睛裏缺少晶狀體，比如說鸚鵡螺。它們眼睛裏形成的圖像並不清晰，但是仍然可用。這款微型相機也是同樣的道理。
領導這個項目的帕特里克·吉爾一直以來希望製造一種無透鏡可植入式裝置用來檢測這些動物的大腦神經元。因爲進化的原因，這些神經元活躍時會發光。
The camera his team came up with could cost just pennies to produce, and could find use in surgery, research and robotics. An insect-sized robot with tiny silicon cameras could tell light from dark and perceive general shapes. After all, the flatworm planaria does just fine with eyes that are arguably not as good。
他的小組所提出的這款相機成產成本很低，可用於外科手術，科研和機器人學。一個昆蟲大小的機器人攜帶着微型硅相機可以在黑暗中感覺到光亮，並感應出大概的形狀。從上可知，扁形渦蟲的眼睛比理論上要好得多。
