Laser
drorzel | February 8, 2010A couple of weeks ago, I announced a contest to determine the Most Amazing Laser Application. After a follow-up post listing the likely candidates, we have a final list of candidate applications, an even dozen of them (after consolidating some related topics):
Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show
Laser cooling/ BEC
Laser ranging/position measurement
Optical tweezers
Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray)
LIGO
Telecommunications
Holography
Laser ignited fusion
Laser eye surgery
Laser frequency comb/ spectroscopy
Laser guide stars/ adaptive optics
Here's how this will work: over the next week or…
drorzel | February 1, 2010Last week, I asked for nominations of the most amazing laser application, with the idea being that I will collect a list, write up the top vote-getters in a series of blog posts, and then we will have a vote to determine what is THE coolest laser application of ALL TIME!
At least, you know, as far as you can do that on a blog...
Nominations will remain open until next Monday, but I wanted to remind people, and give you a list of the top nominees thus far. These will be pretty hard to top, but there are still lots of laser applications that have not been mentioned, so be sure to get your vote…
edyong | January 5, 2010
If you looked at the penis of a Drosophila fly under a microscope (for reasons best known only to yourself), you'd see an array of wince-inducing hooks and spines. These spines are present in all Drosophila and they're so varied that a trained biologist could use them to identify the species of the owner.
What's the purpose of these spines? Are they intended to actually wound the female during mating? Do they help the male fly to scrape out the sperm of his rivals? Do they actually pierce the walls of the female's genital tract, allowing the male to bypass any barriers to his sperm, as…
sciencepunk | May 14, 2009I love to see new and inventive ways of measuring the passing of time, and especially I love this fabulous "Digital Calendar" (haha) that Bre Pettis laser-etched onto his fingernails.
sciencepunk | May 11, 2009Talking to submarines is a very a tricky business - most communication systems are based on radio or acoustic signals, but neither travel very far in water. This means that to pick up radio signals, submarines must surface or raise communication buoys very close to the surface, neither of which are appropriate for nuclear-powered stealth submarines that remain deep underwater for months at a time.
Radio operators can overcome the problem of poor signal penetration by using giant arrays broadcasting in extremely-low frequency ranges, but these are expensive, difficult to build, and…
bleimanb | March 24, 2009The Wall Street Journal reported last week that scientists have finally taken my advice and designed a ruthless mosquito-killing laser that could never ever malfunction and target human children by mistake. Former Lawrence Livermore Science Laboratory researchers have created a laser that aims only at female mosquitoes, using parts that they bought on Ebay (not kidding).
Hey, Dr. Strangelove. A little help here?
Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist, is the main force behind the mosquito laser. He was well known for his work on the "Star Wars" defense program of the...
...80's that sought to…
drorzel | January 12, 2009 There's been a fair bit of press for the article Subtracting photons from arbitrary light fields: experimental test of coherent state invariance by single-photon annihilation, published last month in the New Journal of Physics, much of it in roughly the same form as the news story in Physics World (which is published by the same organization that runs the journal), which leads with:
A property of laser light first predicted in 1963 by the future Nobel laureate Roy Glauber has been verified by physicists in Italy.
These stories can be a little puzzling, though. After all, Glauber got his…
rallain | October 23, 2008I am sorry to point this out, but I can't help it. My kids watch this show "Fetch with Ruff Ruffman". It's mostly an ok kids show. However, there was a problem. In one episode, some kids were in the desert and measuring temperature with (they said it several times and it was even a quiz question at the end) - a LASER. Here is the device they used:
This is an infrared thermometer with a LASER aiming system. The laser is only there to help you aim. The temperature is determined by measuring the infrared…
rallain | October 13, 2008I went home for lunch today. While waiting, I saw this lizard. We have many lizards in Louisiana, I like them, really I do. So, this is what I did:
No lizards were harmed in the filming of this video.
I was really surprised. I thought for sure that I had tried this before and nothing happened. Maybe it was because of the white surface the lizard was on. Maybe it was because it was an older and wiser lizard (it was larger than normal). Maybe this is already a well known fact about lizards and laser pointers. Needless to say, this was quite entertaining and completely justifies the…
grrlscientist | November 21, 2007tags: star trek, blu-ray phaser, streaming video
Hack a Playstation 3 blu-ray laser and turn the Star Trek Phaser into a Blu-Ray Laser Phaser! First time in the world this has ever been done! Less than$100 [1:27].
Blu-Ray Laser Phaser!