Yes, it sounds completely crazy: A 747 jumbo-jet, embedded with a powerful laser, that can shoot missiles right out of the sky. But for sixteen long years, the U.S. military tried to turn that idea - called the Airborne Laser Test Bed - into a reality.

At Burning Man, the annual arts festival, mutant vehicles plod across Nevada's Black Rock Desert. And this year's art cars include a fully-functional spider walker, a remote-controlled trilobite, and a mobile mammoth skeleton.

U.S. Marshals could've been made tolerable if they just tossed Tommy Lee Jones one of these Atomic Disrupter Rayguns. Actually, think of how much better every crappy shoot 'em up movie would be.

I don't write much with a pen and paper anymore, but the aptly named "Ray Gun" pen by designer Ben Hall could very well bring my penmanship out of retirement.

If you suffer from that sexiest of learning disabilities (ugh, sexlexia), you too might enjoy shooting off your Zapp Brannigan Atomic Ray Gun at unsuspecting bystanders. The gun itself is based off of Japanese Ray Guns of the 1950s—as is a bunch of the retro stylings of the Futurama set—but updated to include your…

The MEDUSA crowd control ray gun we reported on earlier this month sounded like some pretty amazing-and downright scary-technology. Using the microwave auditory effect, the beam, in theory, would have put sounds and voice-like noises in your head, thereby driving you away from the area. Crowd control via voices in…

The Sierra Nevada Corporation claimed this week that it is ready to begin production on the MEDUSA, a damned scary ray gun that uses the "microwave audio effect" to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people's heads. Short for Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio, MEDUSA creates the audio…

If I need to spend a hundred words explaining to you just why the $18 Channel Changer Ray Gun is worth your time, then you really shouldn't be reading Gizmodo at all. Seriously, do yourself a favor. Unplug your computer and—very carefully—carry it to the trash can and—gently—drop it in. And when you're finished doing…

For those of us who love to give our dolls more realistic props to play with, toy maker IxTEE Productions is putting out a series of 1:6 scaled guns that do everything from lighting up to shooting darts to squirting water.

This 1934 Buck Rogers rocket ship toy appears in the book Ray Gun by Eugene W. Metcalf and Frank Maresca. The photography is by Charles Bechtold.

We've told you all about our favorite rayguns, blasters, flechette pistols, and laser guns before, but where did they all come from? Laser pistols are as identifiable with science fiction as rocketships, aliens, and robots, even though the first laser wasn't invented until 1960. So what spurred science fiction…

Fact : Guns from the future belong on your person. And this ray gun wallet is the best way to score pocketable space weapons for at least the next decade or so. Handmade by sandwiching the geek chic design along with Japanese newspaper clippings between vinyl, the wallet won't look like a laser-firing galactic dildo,…

Those mad scientists are at it again. David Cassidy and Allen Mills, a couple of propellerheads at the University of California, Riverside are using the stuff of science fiction, antimatter, to create gamma ray lasers they say could be a million times more powerful than the lasers we're using to watch Blu-ray discs.…

Originally starting out as just sketches by Greg Broadmore, these ray guns were eventually made by David Tremont and Weta—the same people who created the special effects and props for the Lord of the Rings trilogy—these steampunk-inspired toys are the best thing you could buy a nerd who loves pretending to shoot…

The book Ray Gun by Eugene W. Metcalf and Frank Maresca examines the science fiction side of the paleo-future. I tend to stay away from pure science fiction on the Paleo-Future blog but there's no doubt that images of futuristic heroism had a large impact on mainstream ideas of what tomorrow held.

This scene of a picnic gone horribly wrong can be found in the book Future War and Weapons (World of Tomorrow) by Neil Ardley. The author talks about "the ultimate weapon," the death ray of science fiction which has become a reality. I suspect that this image had an effect on the children of 1981 similar to that of…

Want a really sweet ray gun? Well, wait, before you answer, know that it doesn't really work. But wait, still don't answer. It was created by the guys at Weta Workshop, people who made props and weapons for movies such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Hellboy. The ray gun is designed to look like an antique sci-fi…

The U.S. military has developed a non-lethal ray gun that makes people feel like they're on fire. Yes! It's supposed to be used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan (where else?) in order to disperse crowds and get people to cooperate. It uses millimeter electromagnetic waves to penetrate the skin and raises body…