lasers

Laser weapons haven't exactly lit the world on fire yet. And that's a big part of what's holding them back.

That's one of the main conclusions of a new report, "Changing the Game: the Promise of Directed-Energy Weapons," just out from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C., think tank focused on national security and military matters.

The report comes at a low ebb in the enthusiasm for directed-energy weapons -- futuristic gear that produces "a beam of concentrated electromagnetic energy or atomic or subatomic particles." That includes … Read more

Physicists have engineered a significantly more stable laser, an advance which could lead to better atomic clocks for equipment, such as GPS satellites, and physics experiments.

Researchers at the JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, have built a prototype of a superradiant laser using 1 million rubidium atoms. Their work was described in a paper published in Nature yesterday.

Using a different structure than traditional lasers, the researchers believe they can build a laser which is 100 to 1,000 times more stable. These lasers could be used in … Read more

The iPad reviews are in, and today we'll take a closer study of the common complaints made by tech pundits around the Web. Collective criticisms run from the lack of FaceTime over LTE to longer charging time and juice for the larger battery to a 7 percent thickness increase over the previous model.

It's not all about Apple, though. We'll also tell you about how a home-energy monitoring Android app helped a father bust his teenage daughter's secret Project-X house party, show off a laser un-printer that could help save the trees, and examine a Kickstarter campaign to fund an iPhone case with a built-in wall plug!… Read more

What if instead of recycling old printouts, you could simply "unprint" them and re-use the paper?

Researchers at the University of Cambridge say it's possible--and that ultimately, widespread adoption of the practice could not only save trees but significantly reduce climate-change emissions from paper manufacturing and recycling as well.

The university reported yesterday that Julian Allwood, leader of the Low Carbon Materials Processing Group at Cambridge, and doctoral student David Leal-Ayala had successfully used lasers to remove toner from paper without significantly damaging the paper.… Read more

Some say our inner teen never leaves us, but merely takes on more sophisticated tastes.

One wonders, therefore, about the inner teen of a parent at a high school girls hockey game in Massachusetts, who allegedly brought along his laser pointer.

Did he wish to use it to feature some aspect of the home team's strategy? Not quite. He is accused of using it to distract the opposing team's goalie.

I know that hockey exists largely so that people can reconstruct each other's faces, but the idea that a parent could try to do this to a … Read more

It was supposed to be a weapon of the future. Now the Airborne Laser is communing with the ghosts of aircraft past.

Earlier this month, the Airborne Laser, a seriously tricked-out Boeing 747-400 Freighter, arrived at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, where it has been consigned to a sprawling and dusty final resting place known as the "Boneyard" (the Air Force's Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, under its formal name).

Officially on the books as the YAL-1A Airborne Laser Test Bed, the big aircraft with the bulbous nose was designed to shoot down ballistic missiles. The … Read more

Paper doesn't grow on trees, you know. Oh, wait...

Paper's not free, you know. So why do you print on only one side of it? That's like throwing 50 percent of your paper investment down the drain.

To get more bang for your paper buck, consider a duplexing printer, which can print on both sides of a page.

For a limited time, Newegg has the Brother HL-2270DW monochrome laser printer for $69.99, plus $1.99 for shipping.

It's wireless, of course, like all good printers, but it also supports duplex printing--something you rarely see in … Read more

When it comes to cancer cells, a particularly confounding breed called cancer stem cells have proven difficult to kill. Because they divide so slowly, chemo drugs do them little harm, and they appear resistant to heat therapies that are generally good at killing most cells. Some cancer drugs even appear to promote the growth of cancer stem cells.

Now, three years after they found that the heat from 30-second laser blasts can kill kidney cancer stem cells, researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center say the same treatment works to kill breast cancer stem cells as well.

Torti's team … Read more

Researchers have created the smallest room-temperature laser, a breakthrough that could lead to faster optical computers.

A group at the University of California at San Diego published a paper in Nature today that describes a new method for making lasers smaller than ever before. The technique allows for low-power lasers smaller than one micron in diameter. A human hair is about 600 microns wide and air-borne particles such as pollen are as small as 10 microns.

The advance in producing a low-power laser opens up many applications, according to the UC San Diego team. Nanolasers could be used to send … Read more