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While some scientists are working on an invisibility cloak to hide things, Cornell postdoctoral researcher Moti Fridman and his colleagues have been working on a “temporal cloak,” to hide events in time.
A physical object or even another beam of light in the laser beam’s path could create a change in the laser light that the detector would register. But with some clever optics, Fridman and his colleagues were able to open up a brief time gap in the beam and then close it back up as if the beam had gone undisturbed, and such that the detector did not register the interruption. The gap allows anything that would have otherwise affected the beam to instead slip right through [see animation below], leaving no trace for the detector to pick up.
The events that can slip through the cloak have to be very fast: the gap is only 50 trillionths of a second. The video at the link explains the process much more clearly. Link -via Monkeyfilter
Want to turn your brown eyes blue? Forget contact lenses! Changing the color of your eyes permanently from brown to blue may be just a laser treatment away, according to one doctor working on the technology:
Dr. Gregg Homer at Stroma Medical in California announced on KTLA-TV that he had come up with a laser procedure that removes the brown pigment, known as melanin, in the iris. Once removed, the blue color underneath is revealed, giving the person blue eyes. Homer said the procedure takes about 20 seconds.
“We use a laser that’s tuned to a specific frequency to remove the pigment from the surface of the iris,” he told KTLA. [...]
“The eyes are the windows to the soul, [there's] this idea that people can actually see into it — a blue eye is not opaque. You can see deeply into it, and a brown eye is very opaque, and I think that there is something meaningful about this idea of having open windows to the soul,” Homer told KTLA.
Link | See the video clip over at KTLA - via Technabob
Last year, the folks at Big Cat Rescue showed us how big cats react to catnip. Here they investigate another burning question: will big cats chase a laser dot the way house cats do? Let’s hide and watch. -via The Daily What
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While there are many reasons riding a bike is beneficial (great exercise, good for the environment) bike lanes on the side of city streets can prove hazardous for motorists and bicyclists alike. A new laser guided bike lane system may ease up the on road tension by giving drivers a heads up when there are bicyclists in the lane next to them. Now if we could only get bicyclists to stop running through red lights.
BLAZE is a small, battery operated device that can be attached to the handlebars of bicycles, motorcycles or scooters. It projects a bright green laser image onto the road ahead to alert other motorists that there is someone in the bike lane. The image can be made to flash to increase visibility and can even be used in sunny daylight conditions.
Why does this sound like the beginning of a sci-fi horror movie? Let’s hope the scientists learn something really cool like the existence of parallel universes by tearing apart the vacuum of space-time.
Recently the European Commission approved the construction of three high powered research laser. The primary purpose of these lasers is to search for theoretical particles. They are hoping to build a fourth laser that could potentially “tear apart the vacuum of space-time” to reveal the matter and anti-matter within.
One of the best shooter-style video games I have played in a long time is Dead Space 2. The game was lots of fun, and it has one of the more interesting weapons to be in a video game called the plasma cutter. If you purchased the collector’s edition of Dead Space 2, you would have received a little plastic replica of that plasma cutter to play with. One gamer took that plastic toy and grafted blue laser pointers onto it that are powerful enough to light matches and pop balloons. link
You’ve seen cats chase a laser light, in real life or in videos. Turkeys will chase one, too, as long as they have appropriate music to accompany them! (via Cynical-C)
No, sadly that’s not a Proton Pack from Ghostbusters, but it’s no less cool: behold the laser backpack developed by researchers from UC Berkeley (go Bears!). InventorSpot explains:
We’ll state right up front that the thing bears little resemblance to the slick units used in “Ghostbusters” or anything that a Star Wars fanboy or Star Trek fangirl dreamed up.
It’s ugly and misshapen – almost aggressively so – but the scientists at the University of California, Berkeley weren’t exactly going for looks.
Instead, they were going for an improvement in current laser mapping techniques, which right now can take anywhere from a few day up to a week or more, especially for an interior space with a great deal of surface variations, nooks, crannies, and things you should really have put away before your mom came over.
Shine a laser through a drop of water and you can project the image of its flora and fauna on your wall or ceiling. Really. The cat sure enjoyed it!
After witnessing the image of a mosquito in a laser beam outside, I decided to investigate the phenomenon further. I started by locating scuzzy water. Ponds lacking, I decided to take water out of the bowl of my 6 year old spider plant. I then filled a syringe and hung it above a laser so that a drop of water, almost ready to fall, was in the beam path. Below is the incredibly complex apparatus involving a book, sticky-tac, a random bottle, a 250mW laser, and a syringe.
See the setup described in the quote at Teravolt. Link -via reddit
The original link, which has currently blown its bandwidth.
Male flies have penises covered with spines and hooks. To figure out what the purpose of those spines are, researchers Michal Polak and Arash Rashed removed the spines to see what would happen.
Their spines are too small to cut off by hand. So the duo used a laser instead, wielding the light with such surgical precision that they could cut off a third of each millimetre-long spine, or the entire structure.
They found that a partial shave did nothing, but the full treatment significantly reduced the odds of the males mating with females.
The conclusion is that the fly’s penis hairs act as Velcro, to grasp the female long enough to inject sperm. Now you know. Link -via Treehugger
Previously at Neatorama: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits.
Photo manipulated at Speechable.
I’m a big foe of multitasking: I find that I can’t concentrate and actually get less things done when I try to do multiple things at once (i.e. parallel processing) rather than just doing ‘em in series. Perhaps I’m old fashioned that way, but science appears to be on my side.
Here’s a very interesting article by John Tierney of The New York Times about the science of concentration and how it may be possible in the future to have a gadget that actually boosts your concentration by using lasers:
“It takes a lot of your prefrontal brain power to force yourself not to process a strong input like a television commercial,” said Dr. Desimone, the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T. “If you’re trying to read a book at the same time, you may not have the resources left to focus on the words.”
Now that neuroscientists have identified the brain’s synchronizing mechanism, they’ve started work on therapies to strengthen attention. In the current issue of Nature, researchers from M.I.T., Penn and Stanford report that they directly induced gamma waves in mice by shining pulses of laser light through tiny optical fibers onto genetically engineered neurons. In the current issue of Neuron, Dr. Desimone and colleagues report progress in using this “optogenetic” technique in monkeys.
Ultimately, Dr. Desimone said, it may be possible to improve your attention by using pulses of light to directly synchronize your neurons, a form of direct therapy that could help people with schizophrenia and attention-deficit problems (and might have fewer side effects than drugs). If it could be done with low-wavelength light that penetrates the skull, you could simply put on (or take off) a tiny wirelessly controlled device that would be a bit like a hearing aid.
Link (Photo from the always entertaining I Can Has Cheezburger)
Photo: Dave Bullock
Dave Bullock, one of our favorite photographers here on Neatorama, has just sent us his latest photos from his visit to the innards of the National Ignition Facility. Wired has the story:
It may look like one of Michael Bay’s Transformers, but this mass of machinery could soon be the birthplace of a baby star right here on Earth.
Using 192 separate lasers and a 400-foot-long series of amplifiers and filters, scientists at Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) hope to create a self-sustaining fusion reaction like the ones in the sun or the explosion of a nuclear bomb — only on a much smaller scale.
Sci-fi-inspired End of Days jokes may follow this historic undertaking like they did for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, but the science behind this advanced laser system is profoundly serious.
"Completion of the NIF construction project is a major milestone for the NIF team, for the nation and the world," said Edward Moses, the facility’s principal associate director for NIF and photon science. "We are well on our way to achieving what we set out to do — controlled nuclear fusion and energy gain for the first time ever in a laboratory setting."
The hope is that this reaction will release more energy than the lasers put into the target isotopes and perhaps redefine the global energy crisis in the process.
Astrophysicist Lowell Wood worked on the hydrogen bomb and Ronald Reagan’s "Star Wars" defense system to protect the US from Soviet missiles using lasers.
Now, Wood and colleagues at Intellectual Ventures have a plan to protect mankind from a far worse enemy, the mosquito. Behold, a "mosquito flashlight" that knock out the bug’s eye-like sensor:
On the shelf were five Maglite flashlights, a zoom lens from a 35mm camera, and the laser itself — a little black box with an assortment of small lenses and mirrors. On the floor below sat a Dell personal computer that is the laser’s brain.
A mosquito hovers into view. Suddenly, it bursts into flame. A thin plume of smoke rises as the mosquito falls. At the bottom of the screen, the carcass smolders.
Not only can the laser target a mosquito, it can also tell a male from a female based on wing-beat.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.
The following is reprinted
from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
Most of the time we're willing to shovel down the popcorn and watch Yoda
lift X-Wings out of the swamp using nothing but the Force and a smattering
of questionably parsed English, or let Jean-Luc Picard get the Enterprise
out of a scrape by the convenient discovery of yet another type
of particle beam. But every once in a while we just have to vent about
some of the truly egregious "fiction" in science fiction.
1. Sounds in Space
The tag line from Alien got it right: "In Space, no one
can hear you scream". The reason no one can hear you scream is that
sound needs air to travel in, and there's none in space.
Most of space is a hard vacuum, with a molecule or two of hydrogen floating
around in every cubic meter - not nearly enough to transmit sound. Every
sound in the movies, from photon torpedoes and laser beams to exploding
starships and hyperspace booms, would never happen in real life.
For that matter, you'd never see laser beams in space either, since in
a vacuum there's no medium to reveal them. So a real-life laser dog fight
in space would be really boring to watch.
2. Faster-Than-Light TravelWarp drives and hyperspace are very useful in science fiction, but there's one catch. According to Einstein, the speed of light isn't just a good idea, it's the law. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum (that's about 186,000 miles per second). Even inching toward the speed of light is difficult - immense energy is required to get to even a fraction of the speed of light, and the closer you get to the speed of light, the more energy is required. The amount of energy you'd need to achieve the speed of light is infinite (i.e., more than you've got, even with those supercool long-lasting batteries). So just tossing in a few more dilithium crystals into the warp drives isn't going to make it happen. There are loopholes in our understanding of the physics that make faster-than-light travel theoretically possible. For example, it's theoretically possible to create a "bubble" of space that breaks itself off from other space and moves faster than light relative to that space (all the while everything inside both "spaces" moves no faster than the speed of light). This is known as an Alcubierre Warp Bubble. The catch (there had to be one) is that these bubbles require the existence of exotic matter that has negative energy, and wouldn't you know, there isn't really any lying around, and it's not clear that any actually exists.3. Laser Bolts You Can Dodge Aside
from the issue of Imperial Stormtroopers being bad shots, let's review
a fundamental fact of light (which is what lasers are): It travels at
186,000 miles per second. So the idea of ducking before the laser hits
you is just plain silly.
Not to mention (of course) the idea of a laser bolt being visible as
a streak that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you were zapped
by a laser from a laser gun, it would look like a single stream of light,
with one end attached to the barrel of said gun, and the end attached
to whatever portion of your head had not melted yet (assuming you're having
a laser battle somewhere where there is enough air around to illuminate
the entire beam).
Most "laser" beams in science fiction movies travel slower
than bullets do today. Let's see Obi Wan whip his light saber around fast
enough to stop the spray of a Mac-10 (and let's not even begin
to talk about all the things wrong with a sword made of light).
4. Human-Looking Aliens This
is endemic on the various Star Trek series, where creatures from
entirely different sectors of the universe look just like humans except
for the occasional bulging ridge on their foreheads. Yes, this is the
result of having only humans at casting calls, but in a large sense, all
these "humanoid" variations ain't gonna happen.
Look, humans evolved on earth and shared a basic body format (four limbs,
one head, side-to-side symmetry) with just about every other vertebrate
on the planet. It's a form that works fine for this planet, but not even
every vertebrate sticks with it (see: snakes, whales, seals, etc).
Given that any planet with life on it will have that life evolve in it's
own way, the chances of the universe being stocked with chesty alien princesses
who crave human starship captains is slim at best.
Related to this is the following.
5. Half-Breed Aliens Humans
don't even interbreed with other species here on earth. Our DNA is simply
too different from other species to allow such a mating to produce offspring.
Given this, what are the chances of successful mating with an alien species
that may not even have DNA as its genetic encoding medium?
Also going back to the idea that aliens probably won't look like Humans,
how would you do it anyway? It's not exactly the "Insert Tab A Into
Slot B" proposition it would be here at home.
6. Brain-Sucking Aliens
The
Good News of an Alien Facehugger Attack T-Shirt, art by Mike
Jacobsen
Ditto aliens that control your body by using your brains, or gestate
in your chest, or whatnot. Let's posit that any creature that controls
the brain of any other creature (not that any exist here on Earth) does
so only after a few million years of what's called "speciation"
– i.e., one species eventually enters a symbiotic relationship with
another species. This relationship would have to be pretty specific, as
symbiotic relationships are here on Earth.
Which is to say just because you're in a symbiotic relationship with
one species doesn't mean it transfers over to another species, especially
an alien species, who's body chemistry, DNA, brain wiring, etc., isn't
even remotely close to your own. So don't worry about the "Puppet
Master" scenario too much, or that you'll be nothing more than a
glorified egg sac for some nasty breed of space monster.
7. Shape-Shifting Aliens Shape-changing
aliens are all very well, but there's a tiny problem in having a roughly
human sized lump of alien protoplasm turning itself into, say, a rat,
to scurry around in the ventilation shaft: Where does rest of the alien
go? You can't just make 99% of your mass disappear into thin air (or reappear,
as the case may be); it has to go somewhere.
Unless that "rat" is running around with a highly compressed
mass of a human-sized object (which presents its own problems), shape-shifting
in to different sized objects is not very likely (one of the smart things
about Terminator 2 was that the T-1000 only shape shifted into
things of roughly the same mass, like human beings or a floor).
8. Time Travel Got
an itch to spend time in the Arthurian England? Or perhaps Gettysburg
during the Civil War?
The same relativistic principles that keep us from going faster than
light also keep us rom traveling backward in time and messing with the
past. It's possible to slow down time - the closer you get to
the speed of light, the slower time moves for you relative to your original
frame of reference - but to get the clock spinning in the other direction
would require you to go faster than light, and you can't do that.
Again, there are theoretical loopholes that could allow it - worm holes,
actually, which are "tunnels" in the fabric of space-time that
could possibly allow travel back in time. but once again, keeping these
wormholes open would require exotic matter with negative energy. Got any?
Neither do we.
9. The Planetary Gravity ScamEverywhere you go in science fiction, people are walking around like they weigh just what they do on Earth. Chances of that happening in the real universe? Slim. Consider our own solar system. On Mars, a 180-pound man would weigh just 70 pounds; on Jupiter, 424 pounds (not that you can walk on Jupiter, as it has no solid surface). That man on the moon? Just 30 pounds. The man's mass is the same, it's just that different planets have different gravitational pulls. The idea that all the planets that humans might visit would exactly match Earth's own gravitational profile is a little much. As is, alternately, the idea that all alien creatures would be as comfortable in our gravitational field as we are.10 The Planetary Sameness Principle
Tatooine looks just like the |
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The article above is reprinted with permission
from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular
books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure
yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom
Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
 |
Attach this neat little gadget to your guitar, and load in your favorite MP3s on a Flash memory card, and let the laser guides your fingers across the frets.
The device called the "Maestro" is a laser and MP3 guitar learning aid. When you select a song, it computes the MP3 into guitar tabs, and then guides your fingers to the correct frets to play music.
This is definitely the next stage up for those who’ve already completed Guitar Hero on the hardest setting and are looking for their next axe fix.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Jake.
Boeing has taken the first step in making the laser gunship a reality by installing the weapon on a C-130H.
Boeing completed the laser installation Dec. 4 at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. The laser, including its major subsystem, a 12,000-pound integrated laser module, was moved into place aboard the aircraft and aligned with the previously-installed beam control system, which will direct the laser beam to its target.
With the laser installed, Boeing is set to conduct a series of tests leading up to a demonstration in 2008 in which the program will fire the laser in-flight at mission-representative ground targets to demonstrate the military utility of high-energy lasers. The test team will fire the laser through a rotating turret that extends through the aircraft’s belly.
ATL, which Boeing is developing for the U.S. Department of Defense, will destroy, damage or disable targets with little to no collateral damage, supporting missions on the battlefield and in urban operations.
Link: defensetech
