New technology developed at my alma-mater, Carnegie Mellon University, has made it possible to reveal carved inscriptions in previously unreadable tombstones through high-resolution 3D scans. They've been trying out the technology at a very neat 200-year-old cemetery at Old St. Luke's Church - a place I drive right by on a regular basis. How cool is this!

Another interesting project being developed at Carnegie Mellon with cemetery research implications is Gigapan - short for gigapixel panoramas. The technology enables a digital camera to take dozens — even hundreds — of photos of a scene that can be electronically stitched together to create a panoramic computer image that users can examine in great detail. The Project, which hopes to make it easy for people to virtually explore historic battlefields and cemeteries such as Gettysburg, is a joint initiative of Carnegie Mellon, NASA, Google and National Geographic.