Industry News

Deal to combine overlapping efforts, regarded as the first major merger in the lidar sector, should be completed by mid-2023.

A US research team tests out a system in which blue light replaces very high temperature and pressure to drive a key step in making an essential global material.

The board of directors of Optica elected 109 members from 24 countries to the society’s 2023 fellow class. Optica fellows are selected based on several factors, including outstanding contributions to business, education, research, and engineering, as well as service to Optica and the optics and photonics community.

The new fellows will be honored at Optica conferences and events throughout 2023.

A complete list of fellows is available at www.optica.org.

A smartphone-based system that relies on OCT to detect jaundice in newborns will be put to use diagnosing very young patients in the U.S. and Nigeria, thanks to a nearly $500,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH awarded the grant to the lab of Audrey Bowden, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University, to test the usability of the system prototype, in the vicinity of Vanderbilt and in a clinical setting in Nigeria.

The basic concept of the device was presented by lab members earlier this year at SPIE Photonics West. The device is essentially a visible light OCT system with a single-mode fiber illumination source, using the camera of a commercial smartphone and...

Recent progress in the fabrication of nanostructures has led to their application in numerous fields, including materials engineering, environmental remediation, biomedicine, and more. In particular, nanostructure nanochannels with at least one physical dimension smaller than 100 nm are actively studied for their potential use in DNA stretching, nanofluidics, and artificial membranes.

For example, in traditional DNA testing methods based on polymerase chain reaction, a single mutated gene is easily treated as noise. Inside nanochannels with sub-100-nm diameter, the DNA molecule can be stretched along a line. As a result, it is possible to investigate the base pairs one-by-one along a single DNA, through which the single mutated gene...

Frigate Sachsen successfully engaged UAVs at short ranges in Baltic near Putlos military training area.

Digital lidar company Ouster and lidar sensors and solutions developer Velodyne Lidar have entered into a definitive agreement to merge in an all-stock transaction. The combination reportedly brings together roughly $400 million in market value.

Under the terms of the agreement, which the companies signed Friday, Nov. 4, each Velodyne share will be exchanged for 0.8204 shares of Ouster at closing. The transaction will result in existing Velodyne and Ouster shareholders each owning approximately 50% of the combined company, based on current shares outstanding.

Both companies will continue to operate their businesses independently until the close of the merger transactions. The merger transactions are expected to be completed in...