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Stories about: laser


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Mobile Lasers Shoot Down Unmanned Aircraft

The famed aeronautics company Boeing has announced recently that it has developed a variety of laser cannon that can successfully bring down unmanned aerial reconnaissance drones. The laser, mounted on the back of a Humvee, is capable of destroying the very probes that president Obama claims are the future of the US ...

27 January 2009
09:00 GMT

Tropical Forests Measured with Lasers

Experts from the US Forest Service and the Carnegie Institution have developed a new laser system that allows them to use a plan for monitoring changes that might have occurred in tropical rain forests. The changes refer to the influence of outside intrusive plant species, as well as to the effect the spread or reduc...

26 January 2009
03:19 GMT

Laser Technologies Paint Bike Lanes

A new revolutionary laser technology allows bicyclists to carry their own bike lanes with them, with the aid of a new portable device that basically projects the said lane on the street, as the person pedals along idly. The new invention was created specifically with the average bike rider in mind, as the number of r...

16 January 2009
04:36 GMT

Laser Battles in the Sky

Battles fought in the heights with powerful laser weapons are no longer the product of SF stories, as such a device has recently been tested with success. The Airborne Laser (ABL) was installed on a Boeing 747 airplane and carried aloft, where it fired shortly upon a ground target. Although the laser beam is invisibl...

16 December 2008
09:32 GMT

Laser Could Soon Refuel Aircraft

All flying vehicles share a common problem – fuel. Their flight duration ability is severely limited by the amount of fuel they can carry, which forces designers to resort to annoying compromises in order to develop craft models with reduced consumption that have enough room for giant fuel reservoirs. But this ...

10 December 2008
04:39 GMT

Laser Plus Gold Equals Antimatter

A team of scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California came up with a technique that allows obtaining impressive quantities of antimatter. But as the antimatter suddenly became so easily available, two problems related to it subsequently occurred. The former refers to the possibility of st...

2 December 2008
08:17 GMT

Radio Light Will Carry Your Data

A European project funded by EU’s Sixth Framework Programme for research, called UROOF (short for Photonic components for Ultra-wideband Radio Over Optical Fiber), has high goals for data transmission and possibly many other applications in the future. The developing team, coordinated by Moshe Ran, has come up ...

27 November 2008
04:12 GMT

The Randomness of Lasers

Atsushi Uchida, a Japanese electrical engineer from the Saitama University, and fellow researcher Peter Davis, from the NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, have managed to obtain actual random number sequences at speeds of up to 1.7 GB per second. Their discovery will prove to be crucial for digit...

24 November 2008
05:11 GMT

Mitsubishi's LaserVue Should Make Great Friends with Apple TV

With NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX, all bringing their HD content to the iTunes Store, what else could possibly sound better than Apple's set-top-box hooked up to Mitsubishi's laser-enabled flat TV set?Mitsubishi, as some of you may know, announced earlier this year a revolutionary TV set, called LaserVue. As its n...

30 October 2008
10:16 GMT

Lurker Missile Waits for Ten Hours Before Striking

A new missile that can follow its target for about 10 hours or 100 miles (161 km) and then strike within a minute with surgical precision is being developed by the Ministry of Defense in order to support the British troops in Afghanistan against Taliban ambushers. The powerful weapon, officially dubbed Fire Shad...

13 October 2008
09:41 GMT

Next-Gen MacBook Spy Shots 'Confirm' Laser-Cutting Method

We are likely looking at the first genuine picture of what is one of Apple's unassembled next-gen MacBooks, those who spotted it say. The design appears to confirm Apple's rumored manufacturing methods of carving the laptop's shell from a single, solid piece of aluminum.Earlier this week, Macworld drop...

9 October 2008
02:51 GMT

Laser & Water-Jet Mac Making Methods Questioned

Allegations that Apple is planning to craft out its own hardware casings out of aluminum bricks have spawned speculation saying the process is not quite feasible. Experts weighing in on the matter have divided opinions, raising even more questions.As reported before, a BusinessWeek piece has one analyst quoted as say...

8 October 2008
03:43 GMT

Apple's 'Brick' Really Is a Laptop, Analysts Say

An analyst at market research firm iSuppli going by the name of Kevin Keller believes Apple's "Brick" is indeed a laptop in the making. And, while such a radically different production method would boost costs in some areas, overall manufacturing costs would be lower, he claims. So, it's plausible.Yesterday...

7 October 2008
03:11 GMT

Apple 'Brick' Riddle Resolved

IT Blogwatch is citing one of its own people as saying he has solved the riddle behind Apple's “Brick”. According to the blog posting daily digests of IT sources, there are clues that Apple products' cases are crafted by taking a “brick” of aluminum and carving it using a laser and w...

6 October 2008
06:23 GMT

Optical Material Makes Universal Laser Development Possible

A newly-developed material made of optical fibers could soon lead to constructing laser devices operating at more different frequencies simultaneously.The newly-created material (cesium zirconium phosphorus selenium - CsZrPSe6) is able to add, subtract or double laser beam wavelengths, thus allowing for the deve...

3 October 2008
09:05 GMT

Microsoft Hardware Gets Ready to "Say Goodbye to Laser"

Microsoft is getting ready to "Say Goodbye to Laser" with its hardware division. The Redmond company is gearing up to unveil the items from its latest product lineup on September 9 2008. The software giant has already announced the event under the slogan "Say Goodbye to Laser," but has failed to deliver any sort of a...

27 August 2008
19:59 GMT

Physicists Unlock the Secrets Behind Liquid Fiber Optics

Basically, any liquid column should be able to act as a guide for light, thus behaving similarly to optical fibers. The problem with these liquid fiber optics is that they become unstable after reaching a physical limitation known as the Rayleigh-Plateau instability which states that in free-fall conditions the lengt...

30 July 2008
10:48 GMT

Highly Directional Semiconductor Laser Created at Harvard

We often think of lasers as sharp, highly focused beams of light, but the truth is that most of the time lasers have high divergences, spreading light into beams similar to those produced by flashlights. This is especially true for semiconductor lasers, such as those used in building CD-ROM devices and in fiber-optic...

28 July 2008
03:46 GMT

Wrinkle Removal Works Best with Lasers

Carbon dioxide laser resurfacing is currently by far the best solution when it comes to wrinkle removal techniques, giving overall better results than some of the latest invented procedures. Most of the time the technique is successful in clearing up the skin, and the side-effects are relatively harmless, generally c...

22 July 2008
04:49 GMT

Logitech Announces the V450 Nano Cordless Laser Mouse

Logitech, the company that has made heads turn with the release of its G15 keyboard and the MX Air mouse, has just released a new product. Meant to offer an alternative solution to notebook users, the V450 Nano Cordless Laser Mouse for Notebooks is now available for purchase in the US and is expected to arrive in Eur...

22 May 2008
02:53 GMT

Nuclear Fusion Laser Heats Matter to 10 Million Celsius

The Vulcan laser, currently the most powerful in the world, was used recently to test future nuclear fusion reactor concepts. During the experiments Vulcan was able to heat matter to a temperature of 10 million degrees Celsius, hotter than the surface of the Sun which is averaging about 5,500 degrees Celsius. The rel...

19 May 2008
09:17 GMT

Researchers Create First Room-Temperature Terahertz Laser Source

The new breakthrough in laser technology comes from Harvard University researchers who have designed and demonstrated the first Terahertz coherent source using room-temperature electrically-pumped semiconductors. The terahertz laser sources commercially available today are based on nanotechnology fabrication techniqu...

19 May 2008
05:49 GMT

How One-way Mirrors Work

A one-way mirror is basically just like any other mirror, just that it has the ability of reflecting light on one side while on the other, it is transparent. Typical mirrors achieve a high degree of reflectiveness on one side, leaving the reverse opaque to optical light. This is done by covering the glass layer with ...

10 May 2008
05:12 GMT

How Blu-ray Discs Work

It all started in 1982, when compact discs became commercially available. They were the first optical devices used to store data in a digital format, have typical capacities of up to 700 megabytes, or 80 minutes in audio format, and diameters between 60 to 120 millimeters. In 1997, a new optical storing medium became...

17 April 2008
09:13 GMT

Researchers Trigger Lightning with Laser Beam

During an experiment carried out in South Baldy Peak, New Mexico, European researchers using a high-power laser deliberately triggered electrical activity in two passing thunderstorms. Laser pulses created plasma filaments inside the clouds, through which electric current was discharged inside the clouds. However, no...

14 April 2008
06:42 GMT

World's Brightest Laser Source: T-REX

The Thomson-Radiate Extreme X-ray Source is an energetic light source emitting picosecond laser pulses and possibly one of the brightest laser light sources in the world at this moment. T-REX is a LLNL project developed in collaboration with the NIF & Photon Science Principle Directorate and the Physical Sciences Dir...

7 April 2008
04:01 GMT

LIGO Detector to Receive Upgrade

In August 2002, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, became operational and started looking for the elusive gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein. It collected a massive amount of data, probably including some gravitational waves, however when scientists were put to the dauntin...

3 April 2008
07:25 GMT

New Type of Atom Trap Developed at NIST

Erbium is generally used in optical communication components, due to the magneto-optical properties it has and may one day be used to build optical computing systems and quantum computing. A new study conducted at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in collaboration with the University of Maryland, su...

2 April 2008
11:14 GMT

Star Trek Weapons Are Here

It is spelled PHaSR, however I'm more than convinced that the U.S. Department of Defense guys call it phaser. Whether the name is coincidental or not with that of the weapon used in the Star Trek series is not the issue, albeit it closely mimics some of those devices and tactics. They don't call them non-le...

24 March 2008
10:25 GMT

Sharp Pitches at 8x Blu-Ray Lasers Until 2010

Sharp's semiconductor unit is reported to be working on a new Blu-Ray laser diode that will bring 8x reading speeds in the HD industry until 2010. The company also plans to release a 250mW blue laser diode with only 6x speeds in a two-year timeframe.During yesterday's conference in Japan, Sharp showcased it...

22 March 2008
07:07 GMT

Robot Returns Objects at a Click of a Button

Robots, as most other computer controlled devices, probably will never be able to fully understand human language, or to differentiate between two images of the same object. That is the disadvantage of processing information in binary code. However, robots can be taught, or at least instructed. Such a robot was recen...

20 March 2008
07:58 GMT

'Sexy' Little Experiment Leaves Atoms Without Nuclei

While in school, science taught us that atoms are made of two major components: the nucleus and the electronic shell orbiting around nucleus. Atoms may lose or gain electrons and neutrons during certain interactions. The number of neutrons inside an atom determines the type of isotope associated with the respective c...

20 March 2008
05:33 GMT

Forget About Knives, Use a Laser

Most of us regard lasers as some kind of weird devices that came from the future and are restricted only to scientific investigations, when in fact use lasers every day without even noticing. Infrared remote control? Laser powered, so is your compact disk player. Remember that the thin line of light scanning your pro...

18 March 2008
07:44 GMT

Explosions Can Also Create Holograms

Holograms are usually produced with the help of laser systems, which copy the image of a real three-dimensional object onto a photosensitive material such as Fotoresist. In doesn't mean though that only optical techniques are able to create holograms. For example, embossing holograms of steel plates with the hel...

7 March 2008
06:16 GMT

What Is a Quantum Dot?

I'm sure most of you have heard a few things about quantum dots in science news, however most of these never seem to present what a quantum dot really is. Quantum dots are usually constructed out of semiconductors and routinely studied in electronic devices such as transistors, light emitting diodes or laser dio...

3 March 2008
10:05 GMT

New LED Design Revealed!

Light emitting diodes are taking over our lives, whether you like it or not. They can be found almost everywhere starting with your average mobile cellular phone, to indoor lighting solution, lasers and even liquid crystal displays and televisions. However, although being extremely energy efficient, small and resilie...

29 February 2008
06:01 GMT

Laser Detects Diseases in Your Breath!

You don't even have to say something. Just a laser beam, and the doc tells you what you have and ever have had. A new study, made at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder, and published in the journal Optics Express, shows how molecules from the breath, mark...

22 February 2008
06:10 GMT

Chip Minimization Through Dark State Light

The biggest problem with computer chip minimization today is that the fabrication process of semiconductor chips only allows components larger than the laser light wavelength used in the photoresist process. Any attempts to create smaller structures than the light's wavelengths will ultimately result in the use ...

14 February 2008
07:07 GMT

Black Holes Replicated in Laboratory Conditions!

Black holes are some of the most mysterious objects in the whole universe. Except a handful of properties, almost nothing is known about what lies beyond their event horizon, whether it's a wormhole, a ultra-dense singularity or some other structure we have no knowledge about. And here is the worst part of the p...

14 February 2008
05:31 GMT

LED Startups Are Silently Working On Blu-Ray Killer

The battle format is about to end with a double-knockout, as two famous LED technology developer companies are cooking a new successor to rule over high-definition formats. Just as we thought Blu-Ray is about to become the next stable standard, Kaai and Soraa are trying to develop lasers and LEDs that will change onc...

13 February 2008
04:38 GMT

New Quantum Cascade Laser Created!

Quantum Cascade Laser systems represent semiconductor lasers that have the ability to emit light in the mid and far-infrared wavelengths of the electromagnetic systems. They are usually used to make spectroscopic analysis, such as measuring gases concentration in the Earth's atmosphere, as sensors for cruise con...

8 February 2008
07:07 GMT

Saitek Unveils Transformers-Like Mouse: the Cyborg

Gaming gear designer Saitek has unveiled a fully adjustable mouse dedicated to professional gamers and enthusiasts. Known as the Cyborg Mouse, the high end laser device allows gamers play longer without any sign of discomfort of fatigue.The Cyborg Mouse is powered by a switch-activated motor that allows the user to ...

6 February 2008
03:40 GMT

Researchers Turn Aluminum Gold!

Researchers from University of Rochester have turned aluminum gold just with the help of a laser, meaning they changed its color into gold. Not only that, but they have been able to recreate a series of other colors in several other metals such as platinum, tungsten and gold. Almost one year before, Chunlei Guo had d...

1 February 2008
10:36 GMT

Smaller, Cheaper Blu-ray Reader/Writer to Hit Notebooks

Since the format war is something of the past, it was only a matter of time before either Sony or Apple announced Blu-ray laser technology for thinner, smaller notebook drives in the future. As such, the company responsible for 1.8 million iBook G4 and PowerBook G4 busted batteries is now officially revealing a new, ...

28 January 2008
08:11 GMT

What to Do with World's Most Accurate Laser?

Most of the problems related to lasers nowadays is the so-called photon noise, which determines fluctuations in the laser beam intensity, due to random quantum mechanics interactions, that ultimately reduces the sensitivity of the device. Physicists from the Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (known as the Al...

26 January 2008
05:23 GMT

Get Your Picture in a Diamond Now!

You haven't yet found a way to preserve your precious pictures of the loved ones? Say no more! Silicon Valley company Gemory LLC stated recently in a press release that it currently has the capability of inscribing high-resolution images onto diamonds and a series of other precious stones, without damaging the s...

17 January 2008
07:30 GMT

Weird Quantum Force Finds Classical Equivalent

The Casimir effect, as it is known, represents the attraction force exerted between parallel conducting surfaces placed into vacuum. On macroscopic scale, it is virtually undetectable, but on distances as small as 10 nanometers, about 100 times the size of an average atom, the Casimir effect can produce forces as pow...

14 January 2008
05:31 GMT

Top 4 Technological Advances That Keep off Diseases

In Europe, diseases steal annually 500 million workdays. Decreased productivity and high medical costs are paid by all of us. And do not believe that only in developing countries people do not have access to medical care: 46 million people in US do not have medical insurance. Science fights hard to eradicate infectio...

14 December 2007
07:02 GMT

Lasers - What Are They?

There are probably more myths circling around about Lasers, than about any other invention of the 20th century. However a very small number of people actually know what a Laser is or how it works, though they are currently being used in many domains such as medicine, physics and technology applications.A Laser device...

12 December 2007
03:19 GMT

Fastest Optical Shutter Triggered by Laser

The principle behind the newly developed technique involves using light in order to trigger a physical transition without varying the temperature of the material in wide ranges. This is usually done with the help of a coherent light source, such as radiation emitted by lasers, that interacts with a system on a molecu...

7 December 2007
09:10 GMT


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