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Super Sensitive Sensor Sees What You Can’t

A team of engineers at Dartmouth College has invented a semiconductor chip that could someday give the camera in your phone the kind of vision even a superhero would envy.

The new technology comes from Eric Fossum, a professor of engineering and his colleagues at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering.

This isn’t the first imaging technology Fossum has worked on. Twenty-five years ago, while working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he invented CMOS image sensor technology.

“There’s about 4 billion cameras made every year with that CMOS image sensor technology,” Fossum says.

The CMOS sensor chip turns light into electrical signals that can be processed to form digital images.

Fossum calls his new technology QIS, for Quanta Image Sensor. Instead of pixels, QIS chips have what Fossum and his colleagues call “jots.” Each jot can detect a single particle of light, called a photon.

“What this chip can do because it’s sensitive to single photons is it can see in the dimmest possible light,” Fossum says.

This is a sample photo taken with the 1-megapixel Quanta Image Sensor. Instead of pixels, QIS chips have what researchers call “jots.” Each jot can detect a single particle of light. Jiaju Ma

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Space-Grown Crystals May Lead to More Efficient Drug Development

The International Space Station is a perfect environment for creating protein crystal structures for research.

In microgravity, protein molecules form more orderly, high-quality crystals. Studying these structures helps scientists understand their function and contributes to development of more effective treatments for diseases.

Experiments often need more than one try to generate ideal crystals, though. Researchers may have to return samples to Earth for analysis and then try again on a later mission on the space station.

Scientists are testing new methods of growing crystals that allow crew members to observe imperfections, make real-time adjustments, and try growing them again right away. This dramatically reduces the time and cost of conducting experiments aboard the space station and opens up the orbiting lab to more users. More efficient use of time and resources can produce research results in less time and lead to development of better drugs sooner.

Learn more @ISS_Research!