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Boffins in Shanghai, China, have been designing the world's most powerful laser. The team has already made history with its earlier invention, the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility have already set records. The machine is small enough to fit on a tabletop, and contains a disc, the width of a frisbee, which is made of titanium-topped sapphires.(Snip)This year physicist Ruxin Li and his team are planning on building a laser that will pack a mind-boggling 100 petawatt burst. Called the Station of Extreme Light, the team hopes the laser will be able to tear a hole in the fabric of...

Having proved it can deploy and fire shipboard lasers, the U.S. Navy is moving at warp speed to develop lasers with more punch and power sources. “We’re doing a lot more with lasers, Rear Adm. Ronald Boxall, director, Surface Warfare Division, said earlier this month at the annual Surface Naval Association national symposium. The Navy plans to fire a 150-kw weapon off a test ship within a year, he said. “Then a year later, we’ll have that on a carrier or a destroyer or both.” That’s quite a jump from the kw AN/SEQ-3(XN-1) Laser Weapon System (LaWS), which deployed in...

SCIENTISTS have discovered a bizarre way to potentially control the weather using laser beams and could potentially beat the threat of droughts, it has been revealed. A six year drought in California was finally declared over this year but the threat for the south-western state as well as other locations in the world remains the same. But scientists may now be able to induce rain and lightning storms using high energy lasers in a breakthrough that could potentially eradicate droughts throughout the globe. The possibility of condensation, lightning and storms are ever present in the clouds and are containED through...

While 150 watts is generally associated with lightbulbs and other devices that are usually thought of as low-power and benign, at Olympus Laser Creations in Rochester, 150 watts is all it takes to craft wood into elaborate decorative boxes. The shop and products are the result of the minds of Lance Crummett and Steve Luce, two former Olympia tech industry workers who found themselves unemployed after they were laid off three years ago. “After a suitable time of enjoying our day off, we decided that we actually needed to make some money,” Crummett said. At the company they had worked...

National-security agencies counseled Ottawa against allowing a Chinese firm to take over a Montreal high-tech company, warning it would undermine a technological edge that Western militaries have over China, The Globe and Mail has learned. “If the technology is transferred, China would be able to domestically-produce advanced-military laser technology to Western standards sooner than would otherwise be the case, which diminishes Canadian and allied military advantages,” said a national-security assessment prepared for cabinet by the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 2015. The acquisition of ITF Technologies of Montreal by Hong Kong-based O-Net Communications is...

British firm unveils research which shows that the atmosphere could be used to spy on ordinary citizens in unprecedented detail. BAE Systems are designing a directed energy laser system that could allow military commanders to spy on enemy activities from space. BAE believe that within 50 years, one of their aircraft could use an “atmospheric lens” to observe people from very long distances using the Earth’s atmosphere as a tool. The lasers temporarily change the Earth’s atmosphere into magnifying glass structures which can alter light and radio signals...... A high pulsed power laser system will temporarily heat a small region of atmosphere so...

Northrop Grumman has been awarded a USD39.3 million contract related to the development of a laser-based self-defence system for the US Air Force (USAF). The contract, which was awarded by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) on 23 August, is for the Self-Protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) Turret Research in Aero-Effects (STRAFE) programme. Northrop Grumman will develop and deliver an advanced beam control system for integration as part of a complete laser weapons system into a tactical pod for USAF fighter aircraft.

The optics advancement may solve an approaching data bottleneck by helping to boost computing power and information transfer rates tenfold BUFFALO, N.Y. — Like a whirlpool, a new light-based communication tool carries data in a swift, circular motion. Described in a study published today (July 28, 2016) by the journal Science, the optics advancement could become a central component of next generation computers designed to handle society’s growing demand for information sharing. It may also be a salve to those fretting over the predicted end of Moore’s Law, the idea that researchers will find new ways to continue making computers...

Stephen Hawking is backing a project to send tiny spacecraft to another star system within a generation. They would travel trillions of miles; far further than any previous craft. A $100m (£70m) research programme to develop the computer chip-sized "starships" was launched by the billionaire Yuri Milner, supported by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Interstellar travel has long been a dream for many, but significant technological hurdles remain. But Prof Hawking told BBC News that fantasy could be realised sooner than we might think. Media captionThe spacecraft would be propelled from earth by a giant laser, as Pallab Ghosh reports "If...

Lasers could heat materials to temperatures hotter than the centre of the Sun in only 20 quadrillionths of a second, according to new research. Theoretical physicists from Imperial College London have devised an extremely rapid heating mechanism that they believe could heat certain materials to ten million degrees in much less than a million millionth of a second. The method, proposed here for the first time, could be relevant to new avenues of research in thermonuclear fusion energy, where scientists are seeking to replicate the Sun’s ability to produce clean energy. The heating would be about 100 times faster than...

From hand-held blasters to planet-destroying death rays, laser weapons are a fanciful staple of science fiction. But at their core, lasers are just concentrated beams of light that generate heat. As simple as that sounds, they've proven remarkably difficult to weaponize. Until now. Quietly and without great fanfare the laser weapon has arrived, and warfare will never be the same. This week Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor behind the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, announced it was exploring ways to put a laser on the controversial fighter. The U.S. Navy has already fielded a laser weapon on the USS Ponce. And...

Europe15:11 24.09.2015(updated 17:34 24.09.2015) Get short URL 3787052822 During this week’s defense and security expo in London German defense contractor Rheinmetall Defense Electronics unveiled a new sea-based anti-drone laser system. © Lockheed Martin Lockheed Laser Gun Destroys Truck From a Mile Away The system, unveiled at the Defense and Security Equipment Industry Expo in London, features four high energy lasers mounted on turret, making it look like some kind of laser Gatling gun, Popular Mechanics reported. The four 20 kilowatt lasers fire simultaneously, in a technique known as superimposition which combines them into a single powerful 80 kilowatt beam.

An upstate New York teen who became an Internet sensation last fall after petitioning his school to let him appear in a senior yearbook photo with his cat has died after apparently taking his own life, according to police and the teen's parents. Draven Rodriguez, 17, was a senior at Schenectady High School when his petition for his yearbook photo to feature him and his beloved rescue cat, Mr. Bigglesworth, against a blue and pink laser background went viral. The petition gained thousands of signatures online after the school initially refused. While the school did ultimately reject the individual photo,...

Every generation has its own music genre. Those from the Sinatra and Big Band age thought rock and roll was horrible. Those from rock and roll thought disco, then grunge, etc were all horrible. Well, it appears that the rage in music now is EDM - electronic dance music. Here is a short video clip of an amazing holographic and laser performance by Eric Prydz at Madison Square Garden.

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Watch out, enemy drones. The U.S. military is developing laser weapons to smite you. The Office of Naval Research announced last week that it is building a laser weapon that will be able to shoot down aerial drones, spelling big trouble for any enemy who tries to target the U.S. Marines. GBAD – Ground-Based Air Defense Directed Energy On-the-Move – is a laser weapon designed to be installed on the Marines’ Humvees, Joint Light Tactical Vehicles and other light tactical ground vehicles. Intended to provide an affordable alternative to traditional firepower, GBADs could prevent enemy drones from tracking and targeting...

This year on Barack Obama’s birthday a group of Russian activists shined a laser show of Obama fellating a banana on the US Embassy in Moscow.hdi is nothing more than a que

The last thing a pilot needs is a distraction during those critical moments right before landing a plane. But lately, it's been happening with an alarming frequency. At 7:35 p.m. Tuesday, a Shuttle America pilot headed toward LaGuardia said a green laser lit up the cockpit when he was about six miles from the runway. The FBI says the light seemed to come from near the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx. Then, about three hours later, the pilot of a private plane reported a similar incident, with the light shining from Broadway and Steinway Street in Queens. The FBI says...

A new advance in accelerator technology has scientists creating tiny glass chips smaller than a grain of rice that can power electrons up to speeds 10 times faster than present-day conventional technology. Experts from Stanford University and U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator detailed their glass chip accelerator research in a study in the journal Nature. The researchers reveal that they are able to achieve such incredible acceleration in such small distances by using commercial lasers to speed up the electrons instead of microwaves, which are typically used. These new chips offer an unprecedented level of acceleration, clocking...

THOUSANDS of planes coming in to land at Britain’s busiest airports are being endangered by a wave of potentially deadly laser attacks from the ground. Police helicopters chasing criminals over densely populated areas are also regularly hit. In most cases the beams are being shone by mindless youths, but pilots and security experts worry terrorists could also use them.

The dream of igniting a self-sustained fusion reaction with high yields of energy, a feat likened to creating a miniature star on Earth, is getting closer to becoming reality, according the authors of a new review article in the journal Physics of Plasmas. Researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) engaged in a collaborative project led by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, report that while there is at least one significant obstacle to overcome before achieving the highly stable, precisely directed implosion required for ignition, they have met many of the demanding challenges leading up to that...