LASERS

Now You Can Split A Laser Beam Into The Force Awakens‘ New Lightsaber

We have potentially reached peaked Crossguard Lightsaber madness (oh who am I kidding, we’ve got another year of this) – we’ve seen it in fan art, we’ve had it 3D printed, and now, here’s The Force Awakens’ shiny new lightsaber made out of laser beams. Because why not? Wicked Lasers are well known for their…

A Real-Life Laser Tri-Blade Lightsaber Is the Best Worst Idea

A Wicked Lasers product has long been the closest you can get to a real-life lightsaber, but there are some Jedi weapons better left on the screen. If the tri-blade lightsaber revealed in the Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser has caught your eye, and safety isn’t your utmost concern, with the help of a…

This Is How A Physicist Lights Up A Christmas Tree

In our new Scientific Guide to Celebration, we’ll teach you how to harness the power of science for enhancing all your celebratory moments. Today, learn how to deck a Christmas tree using the power of physics! Step 1: Build a nanoscale Christmas tree. Step 2: Zap it with a 35-femtosecond pulse from a terawatt-class laser.…

The Navy’s ship-mounted laser cannon has been a long time coming, notes Brian Resnick, who chronicles the 50-year history of the military’s “dream” project. “The LASER may be the biggest breakthrough in the weapons area since the atomic bomb,” the head of the Army Ordnance Missile Command wrote in 1962.

Watch the Navy’s New Laser Cannon Successfully Fry a Drone 

After months at sea patrolling the Persian Gulf region, the USS Ponce and its shiny new laser cannon have successfully confronted and destroyed not only an unmanned aerial vehicle but also an incoming speed boat and other moving targets—all without breaking a sweat. “We ran this particular weapon, a prototype, through some extremely tough paces,…

Trains Could Get Lasers To Burn Slippery Wet Leaves Off the Tracks

Each autumn, leaves fall to the ground by the billions. Slightly annoying if you have a backyard but really annoying if you run a railroad company. It turns out those leaves are a slippery menace on train tracks. That’s why Dutch Railways is testing a high-energy solution: Train-mounted lasers. In a recent article, New Scientist…

This High Speed Camera Tracks Light Bouncing Off a Mirror at 100bn FPS

Slow-motion photography is cool and all, but now a team of scientists has decided to use high-speed photography to track light as it travels through space. In this GIF, you’re looking at a pulse of light hitting and bouncing off of a mirror. Really. The researchers, based in Washington University in St. Louis, have used…

This Is What Plane-Mounted Laser Guns Could Look Like

DARPA is going gaga over the pew-pew. The department just awarded a Northrop Grumman a $20.2 million contract to begin the second phase of its Excalibur Program—one which aims to give the same kind of missile-frying laser cannon that’s currently patrolling the Persian Gulf to America’s Air Force. Specifically, Northop has been contracted as part…

James Bond’s Laser-Cutting Watch Is Finally a Reality

Thanks to some clever special effects, the gadgets that Q creates for James Bond and other MI6 agents are often well ahead of their time. So much so that it’s only now, more than 31 years after Never Say Never Again hit theaters, that we finally have a wristwatch with a built-in laser powerful enough…

The U.S. Navy’s First Laser Cannon Is Now Deployed in the Persian Gulf

After seven years and $40 million of development, the US Navy has finally sent its prototype laser weapon, one capable of blowing holes clean through UAVs, on patrol throughout the disputed Persian Gulf. https://gizmodo.com/watch-a-navy-laser-gun-blast-a-drone-right-out-of-the-s-5994074 The Laser Weapon System (LaWS) prototype has been affixed to the bow of the USS Ponce, an amphibious transport ship, since…

Scientists Are Sending Data-Carrying Spiral Lasers Across Entire Cities

Twisted laser beams may just be the key to unlimited bandwidth in the future—and now a team of scientists has used them to beam data through the air, from one side of Vienna to the other. We’ve already seen twisted laser beams transmit data at speeds of over 1.6 terabits per second via fiber-optic cable.…

Could We Use Ground-Based Lasers To Propel Rockets Into Space?

A pair of Russian scientists are proposing a radical new propulsion technique that would accelerate a rocket while in flight, by using a ground-based laser. Should it work, it could push aircraft to go beyond Mach 10. Conventional rockets are limited by the amount of solid or liquid fuel they can carry. To achieve higher…

Video: How removing tattoos with lasers works

Smarter Every Day takes an in-depth look at something super cool: removing tattoos with the help of lasers. The science behind it is fascinating, all the zapping lasers do is basically break down the bigger ink blobs inside your skin and let your body’s white blood cells and liver take care of the rest of…

New Laser Projector Makes 3D Images That Hang In Mid-Air

Maybe the solution to touchscreen displays that don’t get washed out in direct sunlight is to skip the screen altogether. Researchers at Aerial Burton are working to perfect a new kind of display technology that uses lasers to produce 3D pixelated images that appear to hang in mid-air and are still visible no matter how…

Why You Shouldn’t Shine Lasers at Police Aircraft (You Get Hunted Down)

When I was a kid, I had a small laser pointer. It chowed down on single cell batteries and did little more than annoy my pets. Now, modern laser pointers, such as the Wicked Lasers that exist for whatever reason, can burn through stuff and shoot a beam all the way into space. Sure, that…

Scientists Demonstrate What A Real Laser Bullet Would Look Like

Contrary to what’s portrayed in scifi, short bursts of laser pulses travel at speeds far too fast for the human eye to see. But what would it look like if we could film it in slow motion? Thanks to a team of physicists from the Polish Academy of Sciences, we now have the video evidence.…

Laser physicists from Australia have built a reversible tractor beam capable of retrieving tiny particles. It’s nowhere near as strong as the beams portrayed in scifi, but it’s the first long-distance optical tractor beam capable of moving particles one fifth of a millimeter in diameter a distance of up to 20cm. Scaled up, it could…

This Is What Happens in Slow-Mo When You Shoot Liquid Drops With Lasers

Lasers? Fun. Slow motion? Beautiful. Shooting things with lasers and recording what happens in slow motion? That’ll be what happens in this beautiful video. The headline may sound like it over-promsies but actually it… doesn’t, really. This video shows how shooting small droplets of liquid with incredibly short laser pulses can create all kinds of…

This Cathedral Is Filled With Smartphone-Powered Laser Beams

Step into France’s Saint-Eustache cathedral, and—unlike most places of worship—you won’t be asked to turn your cellphone off. Instead, you’ll be told to send a text message to the building, which is then converted into part of a laser show. Called Shooting Thoughts, the installation byFilipe Vilas-Boas uses test messages to trigger mapped laser beams.…

A Collar Laser Pointer Is the Dangling Carrot Your Pet Will Never Catch

The only thing better than a toy that keeps your cat and dog occupied for hours is one that requires no intervention on your part. A ball needs to be tossed, a pull toy needs to be tugged, but this laser pointer that clips onto a collar will have your pet chasing, but never catching,…