The only way to create something with this sort of complexity is rapid prototyping—and laser sintering, to be exact. The process works by sweeping a laser across a pan of powdered nylon; when the lasers hit the nylon, it fuses ("sinters"). The process repeats in layers, until the final product emerges. Thus, you can create interlocking shapes all at once—for example, a chain whose links are completely closed.

Dror created the lamp for Materialise.MGX, which specialises in producing furniture using laser sintering. The lamp shade itself is designed so that the cubes are densest in the center—thus diffusing the light simply by overlapping.

[FastCompany]

Tests have concluded that foods labeled with the low-energy carbon dioxide laser beam show no signs of increased decay when compared to their stickered counterparts. The system has already been employed in New Zealand, Australia, and Pacific Rim countries, but the FDA is in the final stages of approving the procedure for US agriculture. Honestly, fruit branding cannot come soon enough. Truly, this is a problem of national importance. How many more stickers must we eat? Answer me USDA! [Physorg via Inhabitat]

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons is in an uproar about the things people are doing in their bathrooms. It's not that those surgeons are just worried about losing money on procedures, they're bound to gain clients from all the DIY messups anyway, but they appear genuinely concerned about regulations and safety. And I agree, because somehow former Gizmodo intern Benny Goldman letting the Jezebel team cajole him into a bikini wax doesn't seem so insane when you read about people ordering Botox from websites called Discount MedSpa and putting videos of their DIY injections onto YouTube (Warning: the clip may make you cringe).

We all like to look pretty, but there are safer ways to get rid of hair, folks! And somehow it's better to have wrinkles than order Botox from a website that looks like it was made in Microsoft Word. [Wired]

Basically, and I use the word loosely, the researchers understand that fruit flies are able, to a degree, to avoid things that have caused them pain in the past (in this case, they were electrically shocked when flying into a specific area). But then the researchers genetically engineered some flies so that their dopamine-producing brain cells manufacture a laser-sensitive protein. When shone with a laser in a particular area, though the stimulation produced no pain, the flies avoided that area with almost the exact same frequency as they had when there was pain involved. Says one of the researchers:

Miesenböck concludes that stimulating dopamine release in these 12 neurons has the same effect as applying electric shocks to flies. In other words, these flies feared that [area] as if they had been conditioned to associate an electric shock with it. "Stimulating just these neurons gives the flies a memory of an unpleasant event that never happened," he says.

And as for what I know you're all wondering: Can this experiment be extended to humans? Well, maybe, and maybe not. A biochemical researcher named Wayne Sossin points out that it's sort of unethical to genetically engineer humans, making the hypothesis pretty difficult to test, and that the original fruit fly test only works for short-term, not long-term, memory. So false memories of the sort we expect from sci-fi (or should I say syfy? Answer: I should not) may not be immediately forthcoming. [NewScientist]

Indications this may be a joke:

1. I'm not totally sure you can laser-etch corn.
2. There's no way Kellogg's has or deserves a monopoly on flakes of corn.
3. A Kellogg's "food technologist" claims that "In recent years there has been an increase in the number of other brands trying to capitalise on the popularity of Kellogg's corn flakes." Corn flakes are not a new invention, you guys. Why the sudden popularity? Plus, "capitalize" is spelled with a z (zed).
4. Corn flakes requires tons of sugar to be palatable anyway, and the combination of sugar and milk is sure to erase the delicate laser etching.
5. This appeared in the Daily Mail, which I don't know anything about—but it is British, and my damnable xenophobia has convinced me that all British publications not called the Guardian are lying tabloids.
6. LASER-ETCHED CORN FLAKES LASER-ETCHED CORN FLAKES.

It's pretty hilarious, regardless of whether it's true (and the above six points indicated it is not). Way to be exciting, Corn Flakes, even though you have neither marshmallows nor peanut butter! [Daily Mail via Geekologie]

Apparently quite a few key observatories use lasers to adjust telescope optics for atmospheric turbulence. Those same lasers can damage Earth-observing satellites and so regulations on their usage have been getting stricter and stricter over the years. Now astronomers have had enough. They are happy to consult with the Air Force each time they point a laser at the sky to make sure that a satellite isn't in the path, but it seems that the turnaround time is too long. I don't see why they don't just change it to a "We'll have your analysis delivered in less than 30 minutes or you can point your lasers wherever you want" rule. [New Scientist]

Designed by Andy Kurovets, this concept uses a laser mounted inside the wrist band and angled over the flat part of the wrist to reveal digital time. Very slick, undeniably futuristic. [Yanko Design]

The parked truck's hood and engine gets burned through like butter, and as you can see, the accuracy is pretty amazing. If this was a missile, it would have exploded in the air. The laser can produce between 100-300 kW of power, and the next step is to trial it on moving targets.

Even though the Air Force has scaled back the ambitious program's funding, perhaps we may still see the laser make it to battlefields. Maybe on the 250-Foot Long Hybrid Airship that will spy over Afghanistan in 2011? [Boeing via PopSci]

The lasers detect CCDs, or charge-coupled devices, which are used in most (but not all; CMOS chips are also around) photoelectric sensors. Guards can activate the lasers when they spot any suspicious glint of a camera's lens, which will then shoot a bright, focused light directly at the camera, ruining any photography.

Predictably, paparazzi (the only Italian plural I know, embarrassingly Looks like I don't know any Italian, and will never pretend to know even a single word again) are angry about the laser shield, whining that:

Intermeddling with goods belonging to someone else, or altering their condition, is a trespass to goods and will entitle the photographer to claim compensation without having to prove loss.

It might be kind of a lost cause, since it's awfully hard to hide a 557-foot boat at all times without, like, sinking it, but anything that involves lasers shooting at paparazzi sounds pretty good to me. [Wired]

Phil Torrone was kind enough to lend us his laser machine for a second straight year, and we fully intend to make use of it. His open source setup includes a Epilog Laser machine that can cut/etch everything under the sun—cork, paper, ceramic, tortillas—as long as it's not PVC or vinyl. They also use along with a Windows PC running Corel Draw to allow for custom graphics
.
We'll have some templates available for you to use, but you can also bring your own stuff in—provided they meet the following guidelines:

• First, your illustration must be a vector file. Not a bitmap. If you are not sure what this means, don't bring it. The machine can only etch vector-based files.
• Save your vector illustration in Adobe Illustrator format (again, no bitmaps saved inside. Just vector art).
• Make sure your illustration is adjusted to your hardware physical features. If you are bringing a MacBook, you can use the templates here.
• Also, laser etching of pancake machines, giant cheetos or KCRW DJs are not allowed. Sorry guys.

We'll be charging for etching this year as a fundraiser for charity. Laptops will cost $25 to etch and handheld gadgets will cost $5 apiece.

Gizmodo Gallery 2009
Groupe
267 Elizabeth Street
New York, NY 10012

Gallery Dates:
September 23rd-27th

Times:

9/22 Tuesday
Media Day by appointment only. For info please contact gallery@gizmodo.com.

9/23 Wednesday
12-8

9/24 Thursday
12-8

9/25 Friday
12-8

9/26 Saturday
11-8
9-? - Live Musical Performance

9/27 Sunday
11-6

Read more about our Giz Gallery 09 here, follow @gizgallery on Twitter and see what else we'll be playing with at the event. And special thanks to Toyota's Prius — without their sponsorship, there would be no Gizmodo Gallery.

Just how long will we have to wait? There's no information on that, but we do know that Sharp is going through some testing of the devices:

Sharp has already verified the reliability of the new blue-violet semiconductor laser. It confirmed that the laser operated for more than 1,000 hours under the temperature of 80°C with a pulse width of 30ns and an output of 500mW.

Sounds safe enough to me, but sadly that stage is nowhere near actual products shipping. Let's hope they hurry up, especially since we've had the discs collecting dust for a year. [TechOn via electronista]

Light sources using lasers for display applications, such as laser TV's and pocket laser projectors, are expected to have superior properties in terms of size, weight and power consumption. For this reason, R&D activities aimed at commercialization of these devices have expanded rapidly over the past several years. Up to now, only red and blue laser diodes were commercially available, while green lasers (*1) were obtained by frequency conversion of infrared lasers. Gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductors, commercially available for blue LEDs, are also expected to be the key material for light-emitting devices in the green region. However, the material has been plagued with a phenomenon where the luminance efficiency shows a rapid decline with increasing wavelength.

At Sumitomo Electric, we have overcome this problem by developing a GaN crystal which inhibits the efficiency drop, resulting in room temperature pulse operation of a laser diode emitting in the pure-green region at 531nm. It is the first green laser diode in the world.

Sumitomo has applied for 60 patents on the technology, and are currently entertaining offers to use it in a wide range of applications. [Sumitomo via Crunchgear]

Normal mirrors reflect light back at a 90-degree angle, but this universal mirror reflects light, including microwaves and lasers, back in the exact same direction from which it originated. It uses metamaterials, structures smaller than the light's wavelength, to force said light to bounce back at this specific angle. Because metamaterials are so difficult to create, this universal mirror is only 1x10 centimeters in size, and can only reflect light with longer wavelengths (like microwaves).

Invisibility cloaks use these same metamaterials to guide light around an object instead of sending it back out, and while the opposite may not seem as cool, it may have just as many uses. It could be used for radar location, deflection laser weaponry and as a general-purpose shield. The tech is still a few years off, but it's very futuristic and interesting stuff. [MSNBC]

The technique is a form of keylogging, which is nothing new, but in an interesting twist hackers have figured out a non-traditional way to replicate the process using nothing but the electric signals created with each keystroke. Oh, and even if you aren't plugged into a socket, they they can still log keystrokes remotely using a laser.

Called the "power-line exploit," the two-part technique is outlined in a Network World article ominously headlined "How to use electrical outlets and cheap lasers to steal data," and will be but one of several nefarious data-stealing methods on display at Black Hat USA 2009 in Las Vegas later this month.

Network World explains:

In the power-line exploit, the attacker grabs the keyboard signals that are generated by hitting keys. Because the data wire within the keyboard cable is unshielded, the signals leak into the ground wire in the cable, and from there into the ground wire of the electrical system feeding the computer. Bit streams generated by the keyboards that indicate what keys have been struck create voltage fluctuations in the grounds.

[If the laptop is unplugged], attackers point a cheap laser, slightly better than what is used in laser pointers, at a shiny part of a laptop or even an object on the table with the laptop. A receiver is aligned to capture the reflected light beam and the modulations that are caused by the vibrations resulting from striking the keys.

Which is precisely why I blog and work in a Faraday cage. In my underwear with stains on my shirt, naturally, as Best Buy revealed earlier. [Network World via CrunchGear]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Bono, schmobono. I still prefer LED Pac Man running over Addy's tits. And LED Pac Man over her breasts won't damage anyone's eyes, unlike lasers. In fact, my theory is that her LED'ed breasts may even cure the blind. UnLED'ed too.

Update: Moritz Waldemeyer wrote to us to tell us that the lasers were harmless, perfectly "safe class 2M lasers that have been defocused for additional safety." OK, Moritz, but would they cure the blind like LED'ed breasts? I didn't think so. [Waldemyer via Dezeen]

One modder bought a brass keychain from Lowe's, then squeezed in a Blu-ray diode along with a 200mW lithium ion battery. (The photo here is technically of his 6x build of the laser, which actually burns out in about half an hour but operates at 268mW.) No matter how many lasers we see (hopefully not beamed directly into our eyes), we just don't get sick of em. Actually, the ones that shoot right into your eyes are pretty great, too. [Hack n Mod via Hackaday]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.As you remember, Lightlane was just a very clever concept in a design competition. Apparently the response was so overwhelming from bicyclists all over the world that the inventors actually decided to make it into a commercial product.

Apart from the "super-bright red LEDs," LightLane uses two high visibility Diode-Pumped Solid State green lasers to draw a path that "protects" the biker on the street. Yes, it won't protect bikers as much as if it used Boeing's missile-destroying laser, but it will be a great alert for drivers in poor lit roads. Not to talk about the psychological deterrent factor of seeing the bicyclist's safety space marked on the asphalt. Lightlane via Coolhunting]

USA Today says that the Advanced Tactical Laser was carried aboard a C-130 plane. Though the power level produced during the test wasn't revealed, these lasers, Global Security says the Advanced Tactical Laser can produce between 100-300 kW of lethal or non-lethal power (in theory).

The Advanced Tactical Laser is said to improve accuracy of military attacks with less collateral damage, something the U.S. Military has drawn criticism for as of late. But you know that secretly, General Gates is even more excited by the idea of getting some pew pew action in real life. [USA Today]