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

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.

Link

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.

Link

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)

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.

Link

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.

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.

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)

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.

Link – Thanks Dave!

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.

Link – via reddit

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.

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.

Link – via gizmodo

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Jake.

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