Laser

A new laser "scarecrow" is helping farmers to protect their sweetcorn crops from marauding birds.

France has announced it will expand its military space assets and defend them using systems that may include anti-satellite lasers. The Minister of the Armed Forces said the government will spend an additional €700 million to produce new surveillance satellites with self-defense capabilities.

Statistically it’s pretty much a given that alien life is out there, whether that’s Martian microbes or intelligent life beaming comms through the cosmos. Now, a new telescope array has joined Breakthrough Listen, scanning for flashes of laser light that alien civilizations might be giving off.

A team at the University of Maryland are developing a more accurate version of the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment that was left behind by Apollo 11, 14, and 15 between 1969 and 1971 that allows scientists to measure the distance from the Earth to the Moon extreme accuracy.

Wicked Lasers' latest gadget is one of the most mesmerizing and compelling toys we've played with in a long, long time. It's also extremely dangerous, powerful enough to pop balloons, etch patterns on wood, and surely fry the odd retina if used incorrectly. We loved it.

​How safe would you feel, going back into a multi-story building that had just been through an earthquake? A new sensor system could allay your fears, as it optically measures how much a building has swayed, and thus how damaged it may be.

​Looking for impurities in drinking water or other liquids typically involves chemical analysis, which may be time-consuming. Now, however, scientists have created an inexpensive system in which light – that's converted to sound – is used to instantly determine if water is safe to drink.

A team of researchers has developed a non-invasive tool which not only detects circulating tumor cells in the bloodstream, but can blast them away at the same time. Dubbed the Cytophone, it employs a laser which heats the CTCs, subsequently detecting them via ultrasound.

Slated to fly in 2021, the new Moonrise laser system will be incorporated in the Berlin-based PTScientists unmanned lunar rover and will be used to demonstrate if it is possible to turn lunar regolith into practical building materials.

A team led by Gabriel Blaj, a staff scientist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, has generated what may be the loudest possible underwater sound.

Researchers have, for the first time, used a semiconductor laser​ to send and receive radio signals. The hybrid electronic-photonic device uses a laser to extract and transmit microwave signals, providing a data rate that may one day lead to ultra-high-speed Wi-Fi.

​Getting a tattoo certainly isn't known for being a comfortable process. It can also cause damage to the skin, plus it results in bio-hazardous used needles that need to be properly disposed of. A new needle-free technique, however, gets around all of those problems.