The poor water droplets never stood a chance. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Lab have aimed their insanely powerful X-ray laser at these tiny spheres of H20, and in the process created these stunning videos.
Set lasers to star mode. The European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile now has four powerful laser beams with which to create artificial stars in the night sky.
They don’t look much, but these little black balls harness the power of bright light to zip across the surface of water—pulling up to 150 times their own weight in the process.
As optical computing becomes a more realistic prospect, lasers will be required to connect components inside our devices. Now, a new silicon-based laser could make it far easier for researchers to replace wires with beams of light.
This grainy black-and-white image may not look like much, but it’s a record-breaker. A radar scan acquired by satellite and beamed back to Earth by laser, it allowed the European Space Agency (ESA) to identify ships off the coast of Brazil in less than 18 minutes—without any satellite ground stations nearby.
Want to make sure you back something up indefinitely? Then you could do worse than a digital data storage technique that uses laser light to store 360 terabytes of information on nanostructured quartz for up to 14 billion years.
Turning off a light just became a much smaller task. A team of researchers has developed the world’s smallest optical switch, which uses just a single atom to control the flow of light.
Setting fire to things isn’t in and of itself science. But if you record it using schlieren photography at 10,000 frames per second—as in this video of laser-ignited methane—then it’s getting closer.
Many autonomous cars use LIDAR — a kind of laser-based radar — to sense the world around them. But now a researcher has developed a simple system that can fool the devices into seeing objects where really none exist.
A team of researchers from the University of Rochester has managed to levitate nanodiamonds in a vacuum using laser light for the first time—which could provide a new breed of microscopic sensors.
Even the hardest of materials react to immense pressures. In this image, x-ray imaging reveals how a laser-generated shock wave propagates through a piece of diamond.
This breathtaking photo shows the intense orange beam of a new 22-watt laser pointed at the planet Saturn. Wait, isn’t this like the shocking scene in Star Wars where the Death Star’s superlaser completely annihilated planet Alderaan?
Charles Townes, the physicist whose work would help lay the foundations for the development of the laser died today. He was 99. His career also ranged far beyond an interest in lasers, into astronomy and a fascination with spirituality.
This may look like a fairly normal satellite image of Berlin, but it holds a rather special secret: it's the first image of its kind to be beamed back from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1A satellite in almost real time by laser.
Unlicensed drones spying on China better watch out because the People's Republic reportedly has a super terrifying laser weapon designed to blast small aircraft out of the sky.
Not how to destroy an entire planet, but how humans are able to create a star—with the help of a laser tuned to 589.2 nanometers wavelength.
It's like watching a ballerina dance. It's like seeing an invisible hold never let go. It's a multi-axis laser cutter with such pinpoint accuracy that it never moves from the spot it's set at. It's impossible. If these are our future robot overlords, it makes complete sense. Take me now.
From the DIY Laser Guy: "I present my most terrifying laser creation as of yet... the remote controlled death ray drone bot! This beast packs a potent 2W blue laser that fries anything in it's path. It can walk around and shoot it's death ray at the touch of a button."
If you thought low-light photography was coming on in leaps and bounds, you ain't seen nothin' yet. This new camera, developed by researchers at MIT, can capture ultra-sharp images of objects even when they're illuminated by just a handful of photons.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who did this, but the first thing I did when I got my first laser pointer was go outside and point it at the moon. I'd stare and wonder if someone was up there, would they be able to see the little red light shining from the Earth?
