lasers

In April, a team from Glasgow School of Art will shoot lasers at the heads of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Thomas Jefferson. And they will do it all in the name of preservation.

The Scottish artists have perfected a system of laser scanning giant monuments, ensuring the digital preservation of even their finest nooks and crannies. They have already completely digitized Scottish landmarks like Rosslyn Church and Stirling Castle. The team is also working in conjunction with CyArk, a non-profit dedicated to laser scanning 500 UNESCO world heritage sites.

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Manned Air Force jets and drones could soon send high quality video and audio by using ultra-high bandwidth lasers, transmitting critical battlefield data faster than ever. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has conducted experiments that transmit data without interference across almost 22 miles, both in the air and on the ground.

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Physics nerds and sci-fi geeks just about everywhere agree: lasers are cool. But cool enough to drop the temperature of a gas by 119 degrees in a matter of seconds? German researchers say so, having made advances on ideas reaching back 30 years but never successfully executed. Bombarding high-pressure gas with a laser, the scientists were able to create a significant cooling effect, shaving the aforementioned 119 degrees from the gas almost instantly by pushing electrons into higher orbit.

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For decades, electronic devices have been shrinking, in accordance with Moore's Law. Now, as circuits reach the size of single atoms, progress begins to bump up against the physical limitations of matter. Enter the spaser. This new kind of laser produces a beam so small that it could someday form the foundation of circuits made of light, not electrical impulses.

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We at PopSci appreciate new weapons. And lasers. And laser weapons. Which is why we're excited to tell you that the Navy and the Marines have given a company called Applied Electronics about a million dollars to attach lasers onto planes. The weapons would be ultra-short-pulse (USP) lasers, which shoot beams of frequent-pulse light that create a path through the air, via which bolts of electricity can travel toward a target.

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Future business travelers may literally ride a laser to work. The U.S. and Brazilian Air Forces are experimenting with Lightcraft technology that could become part of your daily commute, using plain old air to fuel 45-minute transcontinental jaunts.

The design uses a ground-based laser to beam the Lightcraft skyward on a series of blast waves. A parabolic mirror on the back of the craft would capture and focus the pulsing laser beam so that it heats air to 5 times the sun's temperature, creating mini-explosions that propel human passengers or cargo to any point on the planet in under an hour, or into orbit.

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German researchers at the FLASH facility in Hamburg decided to roast a piece of aluminum foil with a 10-million-gigawatt X-ray laser. They heated the foil so hot that it became a new matter state: transparent aluminum. It's also believed to be the same state of matter that comprises the core of planets, such as Jupiter.

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For long-distance trips, the seeing-eye dog might soon be replaced by the seeing-eye car. Researchers on Virginia Tech's Blind Driver Team, with funding from the National Federation of the Blind, might soon give blind people the ability to do something they never thought possible: drive. The prototype "car" is actually a buggy equipped with lasers that judge the surrounding terrain.

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Building your own guitar or synthesizer is impressive enough. But when you decide to smash the two music makers together -- and throw some lasers in for kicks -- the end result is the jaw-droppingly awesome "Prism."

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This is not your typical light show. The neon light piping into the brain of a mouse with Parkinson's disease stops the animal's tremors instantly. Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Karl Deisseroth and his colleagues at Stanford University believe the laser light can "turn on" damaged or inactive brain cells.

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