Drawing inspiration from the simple design of the human eye, Illinois engineers have invented a new kind of eyelike camera that avoids some pitfalls of ordinary cameras and could lead to a host of novel devices based on flexible electronics.The electronic eye made by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern University collects light on a curved screen resembling a retina, in contrast to digital cameras that use lenses to focus images on a flat sheet of light detectors. A curved surface reduces the need for multiple lenses and cuts down on distortion that comes from projecting the light on a flat surface.That allows for a compact camera with low distortion and a wide field of view, much like a natural eye, according to a study published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.Making curved arrays of electronics is far tougher than it sounds, experts say. Until now, nearly all complex electronics have been etched on flat wafers, with even slight curves posing a steep engineering and production challenge.
The short answer is "no", but it is a qualified "no" because there are odd ways of interpreting the question which could justify the answer "yes". Light is composed of photons so we could ask if the photon has mass. The answer is then definitely "no": The photon is a massless particle. According to theory it has energy and momentum but no mass and this is confirmed by experiment to within strict limits. Even before it was known that light is composed of photons it was known that light carries momentum and will exert a pressure on a surface. This is not evidence that it has mass since momentum can exist without mass. [ For details see the Physics FAQ article What is the mass of the photon? ]. Sometimes people like to say that the photon does have mass because a photon has energy E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency of the photon. Energy, they say, is equivalent to mass according to Einstein's famous formula E = m
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