This will be a short one. My recent paper, ‘Nanotechnology, storytelling, sensing, and materiality‘, gave me a chance to explore the impact that various sensing technologies used for the nanoscale might have on storytelling. In one of those happy coincidences that can occur, I came across a new sensing technique (although strictly speaking it’s not applied at the nanoscale) that incorporates light and sound on Nanowerk News here. The new technique has allowed researchers to create three-dimensional whole body visualizations of zebra fish. From Nanowerk News,

The real power of the technique, however, lies in specially developed mathematical formulas used to analyze the resulting acoustic patterns. An attached computer uses these formulas to evaluate and interpret the specific distortions caused by scales, muscles, bones and internal organs to generate a three-dimensional image. The result of this “multi-spectral opto-acoustic tomography”, or MSOT, is an image with a striking spatial resolution better than 40 micrometers (four hundredths of a millimeter). And best of all, the sedated fish wakes up and recovers without harm following the procedure.

This new technique, MSOT, has applications for medical research.

In tangentially related news, Rob Annan’s posting on the ‘Don’t leave Canada behind‘ blog (June 30, 2009) features a few comments about a recent article in the New York Times that suggests current funding structures inhibit innovative cancer research. The report was written about US funding but Annan offers some thoughts on the matter and points the way to more Canadian commentary as well as the New York Times article.

That’s it. Happy Canada Day.