Lasers are like your favorite uncle who can do no wrong. You know, the one who’s always hip to the latest technology, does amazing magic tricks at all the family dinners, always photographs well, and has more than once saved baby Med-Tech from a burning house of boring. All the other technologies wish they were he, and Wired.com readers openly admit he’s their favorite. So in celebration of one of our greatest news topics here at Wired.com, we’ve selected a compilation of the best recent laser appearances on our site. Thanks for the memories, Big L. (Have your own favorite laser news item? Let us know in the comments.) Left:http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/texans-build-wo.html Texans Build World’s Most Powerful Laser Scientists have switched on the world’s most powerful laser, which for one-trillionth of a second is 2,000 times more powerful than all the power plants in the United States. The laser’s output tops a petawatt, which is a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) watts of power. (https://more-deals.info/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/05/gallery_lasers?slide=2&slideView=3 More in next slide) Photo: Courtesy Mikael Martinez and Texas Petawatt Project, led by Todd Ditmire
(https://more-deals.info/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/05/gallery_lasers?slide=1&slideView=4 Continued from previous slide) The power of a laser, its output in watts, is determined by the energy of the laser pulse, measured in joules, divided by its duration, measured in seconds (tiny fractions of a second in this case). So, to get high power, you can either turn up the energy or cram the same amount of energy into a shorter duration pulse – or do both. The problem is that turning up the energy makes it more difficult to get short pulses. The solution to this problem requires an almost Rube Goldberg setup inside a 1,500-square-foot clean room. The most powerful laser in the world starts, poetically enough, with a "seed laser" that puts out a wimpy nanojoule of energy for a couple of hundred femtoseconds (that’s 10-15 seconds). It must be run through a series of amplifiers, compressors and stretchers before it can recreate the conditions inside the sun for a trillionth of a second. Photo: Courtesy Mikael Martinez and Texas Petawatt Project, led by Todd Ditmire
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/05/review-beamz-mu.html Beamz Music System Lets You Compose a Symphony With the Power of Freaking Lasers If Dr. Evil of Austin Powers fame were more musically minded, he may have demanded something like the beamz – a musical instrument with "fricking lasers" attached to it. This large USB peripheral includes six laser beams that, when broken, activate elements of 30 songs stored on your computer.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/05/laser-etched-qr.html Laser-Etched QR Codes: Digital Graffiti For Gadgets Forget stickers. Real geeks show their commitment with something more permanent: laser engraving. And Jason Fields takes your etching and raises you one QR code. Sure, it’s too big for most little QR readers to handle, and the gray on gray isn’t exactly contrasty, but Jason has squeezed in his "e-mail signature file, postal address, with links to my blog and twitter pages as well."
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/05/photos_the_geek.html The Geekiest Van Conversion Ever This is the Tele Atlas map machine, a Toyota van tricked out with tens of thousands of dollars worth of cameras, laser range detectors and global-positioning hardware. The laser sensors on the back (the devices labeled SICK) are used to determine the height of overpasses and buildings to help delivery vehicles find the route with the most overhead clearance. Photo: Michael Calore/Wired.com
http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2007/06/gallery_raydiance The Ultrashort Pulse Laser in Action Raydiance, a startup company in Petaluma, California, has developed a laser it says can cleanly cut just about any material you can think of – from human skin to glass – without throwing off heat or damaging the surface. This glass slide is seconds away from being ablated by the Raydiance USP laser. Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/07/lockheeds-death.html Laser Death Star A new patent granted to Lockheed Martin seeks to combine multiple lasers into a single, higher-power beam, which would, in theory, help achieve the power output needed for laser weapons. The patent outlines a method to "combine multiple laser beams into a single coherent beam without requiring insertion of optical elements into the laser beam."
http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/10/69033 This Laser Trick’s a Quantum Leap Ph.D. student Elliot Fraval (left) and Dr. Jevon Longdel perform scientific measurements on light in the lab at Laser Physics Centre at Australian National University. Photo: Tim Wetherell
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/03/battlefield-str.html Navy Pushing Laser ’Holy Grail’ to Weapons Grade For decades, scientists have been slowly working on a laser that never runs out of shots – and can be "tuned" to blast through the air, at just the right wavelength. For most of that time, all they could get was a laser at light-bulb strength. But researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility finally managed in 2004 to assemble a "Free Electron Laser," or FEL, that could generate 10,000 watts of power. Now the Navy has started an effort to design and build a new FEL, 10 times as strong. That would bring the laser up to 100 kilowatts – what’s considered the minimum threshold for weapons grade. But it would also be just a steppingstone on the way to an energy weapon as powerful as any produced. If ray gun researchers can get the thing to work, that is.
http://archive.wired.com/culture/design/magazine/15-11/st_laser# Stupid Laser Tricks: Make Your Own Piece of Jesus-Miracle Toast They can do everything from nuclear fusion to vaginal rejuvenation, so you know it’s a mathematical certainty that lasers = awesome. Plus, your right to tinker with dirt-cheap lasers in your basement is all but guaranteed in the Constitution! With that in mind, here are a few of http://archive.wired.com/culture/design/magazine/15-11/st_laser# our favorite DIY laser hacks. (Disclaimer: If you are foolhardy enough to try any of these and end up maiming yourself or getting sucked into the Tron game grid, something else was probably going to remove you from the gene pool soon anyway.) Photo: Gene Lee
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/11/laser-guided-sa.html Laser-Guided Saw: Cool Tool or Novelty Toy? It might not cut as effectively as a lightsaber, or even a real laser cutter, but at least your lines will be (theoretically) straight. At $20, though, it’s probably too cheap to actually do its job. If you’ve ever used a cheap saw you know that the blade will flex and buck, leaving your supposedly neat cut looking about as straight as Earring Magic Ken. And the laser doesn’t even come with a battery. We say: Avoid. You’ll get a better result with an old popsicle stick.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/03/diy-laser-light.html DIY Laser Lightshow for $80: Useless but Awesome What’s cooler than a green laser? A green laser that paints semirandom moving spirograph patterns on your wall. Toronto-based hardware hacker Artur Petrovskyy shows you how to make one of your own from about $80 in parts in a new how-to on Instructables.com: http://www.instructables.com/id/Laser-show-for-poor-man/ Laser show for poor man. Image: Instructables.com
