In an effort to bring the arts and the sciences together, the Millennium Café hosted both the Pennsylvania Quintet and geoscientist Richard Alley at this week’s event.

In an effort to bring the arts and the sciences together, the Millennium Café hosted both the Pennsylvania Quintet and geoscientist Richard Alley at this week’s event.
A laser that creates a three-dimensional picture of a bee’s head may sound like an experiment being conducted in Dr. Evil’s super-secret volcano base, but this technology is blossoming right here at Penn State — and it has real-world applications for research in agriculture and horticulture.
At a recent talk at the Millennium Science Complex, Benjamin Hall, an undergraduate student in energy engineering working part-time in the laser lab of the Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State, discussed the technique — and showed images and videos that rival most Hollywood special effects. By placing an object, such as a plant root, on a moveable platform that passes under a laser, researchers can vaporize the sample section by section. The technique creates a series of surface images, which Hall then processes with a software program to create three-dimensional interior and exterior — and unbelievably cool — images of the sample. Continue reading Cool Images, Big Potential: Startup Uses Lasers to Create 3D Imagery