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POLK COUNTY, Fla. – A central Florida man faces a host of charges after deputies accused him of shooting towards two people and pointed a rifle and laser at a sheriff’s helicopter Saturday night. According to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, Kenneth Massey, 48, was arrested near Avon Park. In a tweet, the sheriff’s office said Massey told detectives that he did everything because he was “being stupid.”

NOKOMIS, Fla. – A Florida man was arrested after he allegedly shined a laser at a Sarasota County Sheriff’s office helicopter. Deputies said Nick Davidson, 44, pointed the green laser at the chopper on Tuesday, while pilots were responding to a fire. The Sarasota Sheriff’s office said Davidson’s actions could not have come at a worse time because the area was under a state of emergency after Hurricane Ian. Deputies were busy assessing damage and guiding ground units around potential hazards. “Not only are Davidson’s actions dangerous, but they have the potential to flash blind and cause long-term damage to...

A trial researching treatment for patients with sight loss as a result of diabetes has shown a type of laser treatment to be both cost effective and non-invasive. There are several treatment options offered to people with Diabetic Macular Oedema (DMO), including two types of laser treatment and eye injections. DMO happens when blood vessels in the retina at the back of the eye leak, causing fluid build-up at the macula, which provides central vision. The leakage occurs when high blood sugar levels damage blood vessels. Patients with severe DMO are treated with injections into the eye of drugs, known...

The Air Force Research Laboratory took delivery earlier this year of a compact, ruggedized laser developed for potential use as a defensive weapon on fighter aircraft, according to Lockheed Martin which claims the new airborne laser is the smallest, lightest, high-energy laser of its power level built to date. The company, in an announcement timed to generate interest in advance of the Farnborough Air Show, said it had completed factory acceptance testing and delivered its low-SWaP (size, weight and power) airborne laser to the government during the first quarter of 2022. “It is the smallest lightest, high-energy laser of its...

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett visited a Rafael facility in northern Israel Tuesday to inspect the new 'Iron Beam' laser defense system. During his visit, Bennett received an extensive briefing from the Rafael's senior management – led by President and CEO Maj.-Gen. (ret.) Yoav Har-Even, Chairman Dr. Uzi Landau – on the Iron Beam laser system. Rafael President and CEO Har-Even and members of its senior management also presented the heart of the classified systems that serve the Israeli defense establishment. The Director General of the Prime Minister's Office, the Prime Minister's Military Secretary and other senior officials also participated...

President Joe Biden met with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Tuesday in an attempt to reassure Americans about rising inflation. The president spoke briefly to reporters at the top of the White House meeting in the Oval Office, reassuring them he was focused on high prices.

Russia's announcement of a new laser weapon system is like the Nazi's search for a "Wunderwaffe" - wonder weapon - and shows the invasion is failing ... “In the propaganda of Nazi Germany there was such a term ‘wunderwaffe’,” he said. “The clearer it became they had no chance in the war, the more propaganda there was about the wonder weapon, which would be so powerful that it would provide a turning point in the war.” “And here we see that in the third month of a full-scale war, Russia is trying to find its ‘wunderwaffe’. Allegedly a laser. All...

Artist's concept of a ship-mounted laser weapon The US Navy has shot down its first drone representing a subsonic cruise missile using an all-electric high-energy laser. At the US Army’s High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility at the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, the Lockheed Martin Layered Laser Defense (LLD) weapon disabled the engine on a drone, which then parachuted to earth. Sponsored by the US Office of Naval Research (ONR) and conducted in partnership with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Research and Engineering) and Lockheed Martin, the February 2022 test was intended not only to...

Israel's new laser missile defense system has successfully intercepted mortars, rockets and anti-tank missiles in recent tests, Defense Minister Benny Gantz said Thursday. The Israeli-made laser system, designed to complement a series of aerial defense systems such as the costly Iron Dome deployed by Israel, will be operational “as soon as possible,” Gantz said. The goal is to deploy the laser systems around Israel's borders over the next decade, Gantz added. The tests took place last month in the Negev Desert. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in February that Israel would begin using the system within a year, sending a...

Powerful, radio-wavelength laser light has been detected emanating from the greatest distance across deep space yet. It's a type of massless cosmic object called a megamaser, and its light has traveled for a jaw-dropping 5 billion light-years to reach us here on Earth. The astronomers who discovered it using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have named it Nkalakatha – an isiZulu word meaning "big boss". The discovery has been accepted into The Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available on preprint server arXiv. "It's impressive that, with just a single night of observations, we've already found a record-breaking megamaser,"...

An artist's conception of the Starshot Lightsail spacecraft during acceleration by a ground-based laser array. Previous conceptions of lightsails have imagined them being passively pushed by light from the sun, but Starshot's laser-based approach requires rethinking the sail's shape and composition so it won't melt or tear during acceleration.Astronomers have been waiting decades for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which promises to peer farther into space than ever before. But if humans want to actually reach our nearest stellar neighbor, they will need to wait quite a bit longer: a probe sent to Alpha Centauri with a...

NASA challenged engineers to design a mission to Mars that would deliver a payload of at least 1,000 kilograms in no more than 45 days, as well as longer trips deep into, and out of, the solar system. The short delivery time is motivated by a desire to ferry shipments and, someday, astronauts to Mars while minimizing their exposure to the damaging effects of galactic cosmic rays and solar storms. McGill's concept, called laser-thermal propulsion, relies on an array of infrared lasers based on Earth, 10 meters in diameter, combining many invisible infrared beams, each with a wavelength of about...

Preamplifiers that boost laser beams at the National Ignition Facility. (LLNL/Damien Jemison) PHYSICS ========================================================================= A major milestone has been breached in the quest for fusion energy. For the first time, a fusion reaction has achieved a record 1.3 megajoule energy output – and for the first time, exceeding energy absorbed by the fuel used to trigger it. Although there's still some way to go, the result represents a significant improvement on previous yields: eight times greater than experiments conducted just a few months prior, and 25 times greater than experiments conducted in 2018. It's a huge achievement. Physicists at the...

Illinois and Indiana have been ranked as two of the worst states in the U.S. for laser point attacks, the Federal Aviation Administration said, revealing such attacks against aircraft are increasing across the country. NBC 5’s Chris Coffey reports.

The U.S. Air Force has taken delivery of the first prototype Airborne High Energy Laser, or AHEL, which is set to be flight tested on one of its AC-130J Ghostrider gunships next year. The service hopes to demonstrate the feasibility of adding this directed-energy weapon to the AC-130J's already very diverse arsenal, which could give these aircraft a unique capability to engage ground targets silently and stealthily.Lockheed Martin confirmed yesterday that it had completed factory acceptance testing for the AHEL and then turned the weapon over to the Air Force. The laser will now need to be integrated together with...

Laser weapons will be fitted to a British warship and armoured vehicles for the first time in a test that could "revolutionise the battlefield", the Ministry of Defence has said. So-called radio frequency weapons, which use electromagnetic energy to disable electronic systems, will also be included in three contracts worth around £72.5m. The money will be used to build demonstrators that will test the capabilities before they are cleared for regular use. Jeremy Quin, the defence minister in charge of procurement, said: "Directed Energy Weapons are a key element of our future equipment programmes and we intend to become a...

Lattice Confinement Fusion NASA Detects Lattice Confinement Fusion A team of NASA researchers seeking a new energy source for deep-space exploration missions, recently revealed a method for triggering nuclear fusion in the space between the atoms of a metal solid. Their research was published in two peer-reviewed papers in the top journal in the field, Physical Review C, Volume 101 (April, 2020): “Nuclear fusion reactions in deuterated metals” and “Novel nuclear reactions observed in bremsstrahlung-irradiated deuterated metals.” Nuclear fusion is a process that produces energy when two nuclei join to form a heavier nucleus. “Scientists are interested in fusion, because...

Whether you're a farmer tending to expansive crops that you depend on for your livelihood or a hobbyist gardener trying to keep your tomatoes in check, weeds can be a time-consuming and relentless problem. Startup Carbon Robotics has wheeled out an autonomous machine that has these pesky plants in its cross hairs, using a combination of computer vision and high-powered lasers to comb fields and take out thousands of weeds an hour. Carbon Robotics has built a 9,500-lb (4,300-kg), four-wheeled robot that uses GPS and computer vision to trundle through crops on the lookout for weeds. It relies on an...

ORLANDO, Fla. — Temporarily blinded Saturday morning by a laser pointed at him from 1,000 feet below, a Florida Highway Patrol pilot alerted other aircraft about the flying hazard then landed his plane and began an investigation that led to the arrest of a Kissimmee man at a multi-story construction site. Guillermo Negron Roque, 47, was jailed pending a charge of pointing a laser light at a pilot, a second-degree felony. The bright flash of green light startled FHP pilot J.C. Pollock as he was flying west of Interstate 4 about 6:30 a.m. “At first I thought I was about...

Why is sugar not transparent? Because light that penetrates a piece of sugar is scattered, altered and deflected in a highly complicated way. However, as a research team from TU Wien (Vienna) and Utrecht University (Netherlands) has now been able to show, there is a class of very special light waves for which this does not apply: for any specific disordered medium—such as the sugar cube you may just have put in your coffee—tailor-made light beams can be constructed that are practically not changed by this medium, but only attenuated. The light beam penetrates the medium, and a light pattern...