Mantis shrimp inspires new breed of light sensors | Hacker News Reader

Mantis shrimp inspires new breed of light sensors

news.ncsu.edu

68 pointsrbanffy13 comments

How do people reckon with the limitations on the use of new scientific discoveries imposed by copyrights, trade secrets and patents? In other words: how do you justify the use of artificial limitations imposed by the commodification and monopolizing of science (through ‘intellectual property’ systems)? Especially since most inventions are made possible/are funded by the state (see the work of Mariana Mazzucato and her book ‘The Entrepreneurial State’ for fully fleshed out arguments for this), as well as the actual labor being done by wage laborers (not the people owning these trade secrets and patents).

It doesn’t necessarily need to be specifically for this invention. The question came up for me while reading this thread.

One note: Because a lot of basic science is done by researchers who don't want to start businesses, commercialization via licensing is one of the mechanisms available to them to actually see something get to market. Many of those agreements have "use it or lose it" style provisions in them.

Scientists are scandalously underpaid. IP is a way to compensate them without increasing the official budget. See also: green cards.

In general, science has a massive value capture problem and gets systematically underfunded as a result. If research A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J was required to reach commercializable result K, the usual situation is that money backpropagation stops at J or K depending on how aggressive the IP commodification was. I am far more scandalized by the fact that A-I get left out of the value calculus than by the fact that J can sometimes wedge its foot into the door.

I would strongly prefer a system where we fully compensate scientists in dollars and don't play IP games, but that doesn't seem to be on the table.

Scandalously underpaid is putting it lightly. We've basically transitioned to scientists being minimum wage workers, with the main incentive being permanent residency for the legions of foreign phds.

Of note, engineering other than software also pays like shit compared to the cost of living.

If I had to make a bet, I'd say there will be a lot less innovation and cool new stuff being invented outside of software due to brain drain. If I could be a mechanical engineer and afford a house in a big city, sure, but that's just not doable, whereas I can easily get a job that will cover my rather prodigious mortgage payment.

Source paper: Mantis shrimp–inspired organic photodetector for simultaneous hyperspectral and polarimetric imaging

A detector is also experimentally demonstrated, which simultaneously registers four spectral channels and three polarization channels. The sensor showcases the myriad degrees of freedom offered by organic semiconductors that are not available in inorganics and heralds a fundamentally unexplored route for simultaneous spectral and polarimetric imaging.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/10/eabe3196.full

Here is a graphic explanation of Mantis shrimp vision and the two appendages at the front of its body so powerful that they create light from water cavitation.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp

Divers call them thumb splitters for a reason.

Further exploration of the different types of mantis shrimp, courtesy of one of the best episodes of children's television out there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9lV1_q20Zw&ab_channel=JeffM...

> So, the researchers created an organic electronic sensor that mimics the mantis shrimp’s eye. It’s called the Stomatopod Inspired Multispectral and POLarization sensitive (SIMPOL) sensor.

Stomatopods gifting humanity with another tool, thanks Abbott and Costello

So, while this looks like it's more about breaking up the human-visible color spectrum into more discrete parts than RGB, and not stretching it out into infrared/ultraviolet. Still very cool (especially since even within the human band there's a lot of resolution missing), and honestly I'd love to see what happens when you map some of those other colors into RGB to see what the world looks like. What colors look smooth to humans but would appear splotchy or unmixed to other eyes, I wonder?

As I was reading this I was thinking back to recent articles about the challenges with sensors for autonomous vehicles, LIDAR vs. optical, etc. - sensors based on this technology may be what we really need to make autonomous vehicles practical. Interesting stuff!

I wonder if evolutionary pressures for such an interesting predator scale for size? Could a similar but larger aquatic creature evolve or is this strategy restricted to a size domain?

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