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Big Picture shows technology through the lens of photographers.
Every month, IEEE Spectrum selects the most stunning technological images recently captured by photographers around the world. We choose images that reflect important achievements, trends, or simply catch the eye. We post all images on our website and one also appears in our monthly print publication.
Enjoy the latest images and if you have any suggestions leave a comment below.
Intentional grounding
A group of researchers from the University of Geneva has developed how to use lasers to improve the ability of lightning rods to protect nearby buildings from the severe surges in nature. It has long been known that an ordinary lightning rod will protect an area with a radius roughly equal to its height. Since it is impractical to make rods beyond a certain length, modern sacrificial electrical conductors leave some vulnerabilities. The Swiss team fired powerful laser pulses into the sky during a thunderstorm, creating a conductive channel in the air. This conduit attracted lightning from a large area down to the tip of a metal rod, which transmitted the electricity harmlessly to the ground.
Martin Stallberg/TRUMPF
Showcasing the Inner Beauty of Electronics
When we think of product design, shiny and/or colorful “skins” usually come to mind that make them recognizable at first sight. But what matters is what’s inside. And while few other than repairers have ever seen them, the innards of consumer electronics have their own aesthetic charms. Take, for example, the power transformer shown here. The arrangement of wires, coils, magnets, and insulators that step up or step down AC voltage is reminiscent of a college marching band or a military regiment on parade.
Eric Schlepfer & Windell H. Osky
BMW car changing color
Henry Ford once remarked that customers of his eponymous company could get the Model T “any color, as long as it’s black.” A little over a century later, BMW made it possible to upgrade a car’s livery to any of 32 colors at the push of a button. At this year’s CES, the German automaker showed off the iVision Dee (“Dee” stands for “Digital Emotional Experience”). The exterior of the concept car is covered in e-paper panels that make it easy to change the appearance of the sedan. The panels are designed to showcase the iVision Dee’s “personality” by responding to external stimuli such as the sighs of onlookers gazing at the combustion-engined chameleon for the first time.
bmw
3D printed spaceship
Your 3D printed drone is child’s play compared to the ambitions of Relativity Space, a startup that positions itself as a rival to Elon Musk’s Space X by launching a 3D printed reusable rocket. The goal is to put satellites and other payloads up to 20,000 kg into orbit. The use of additive manufacturing has obvious advantages, the main one being that it significantly reduces the complexity of the launch vehicle (and therefore its possible points of failure). Instead of the two-year process required to assemble rockets the old-fashioned way, Stargate’s patented fourth-generation Relativity Space metal 3D printers, one of which is pictured here, will allow the team to go from plan to product in two months.
relativity