All posts tagged: lasers

Lasers From Girls, Julia Garner

Lasers From Girls, Julia Garner

Published by Daniella Wilson

Fans might have to wait a little longer to see if Julia Garner ends up playing Madonna in a biopic, but they don’t have to wait to see Garner and Madonna collaborate on film. The Ozark and Americans alum has a quick cameo in a club scene in Madonna’s star-studded Confessions II visual album, which premiered Friday night to a theater full of screaming fans at the Tribeca Festival in New York. The more-than-10-minute short film, which is set to the first six songs on Madonna’s upcoming Confessions II album sees the Queen of Pop being chased by a SWAT team of robot-like women carrying cameras as she moves from an apartment (hiding “in the shadows” as she sings on “I Feel So Free”) to a forest, where she dances with a number of scantily clad women and men with “lasers coming out of every orifice” (indeed, thin green lights shoot out from between their legs), to driving a car, to a nightclub to a very crowded bathroom, where Madonna and her celebrity friends (she …

Zapping Mosquitos With Lasers Is a Real Thing, Thanks to AI

Zapping Mosquitos With Lasers Is a Real Thing, Thanks to AI

Published by skeptic

As summer arrives, and mosquitoes celebrate another season of bloody conquest, you might be thinking, “Why do we even have all this AI tech if it can’t do a single thing about these airborne pests?” There are plenty of reasons to complain about artificial intelligence, but its failure to fight mosquitoes is no longer one of them. Using machine learning, inventor Steven Cheng has developed a lethal series of prototypes designed to hunt down and zap the blood-sucking pests with lasers. Cheng has been chronicling the project on X, where he shares videos of his mobile mosquito defense system. Built version 3.0 of AI mosquito defense system during the holiday. Now equipped with multi-sensor tracking, a redesigned high-speed gimbal, and a toy Gatling-style launcher for maximum mosquito elimination efficiency 0.6s full rotation.0.001° precision. pic.twitter.com/0io4G3SIxx — Steven Cheng (@stevencheng) May 28, 2026 Cheng said in his posts that he spent four months developing an “artillery cannon guided by computer vision + deep learning” as “the ultimate mosquito killer.”  It uses a Canon digital single-lens reflex camera with …

The world’s largest privately owned laser just turned on

The world’s largest privately owned laser just turned on

Published by skeptic

Fusion startup Xcimer Energy on Wednesday flipped the switch on its Phoenix laser system, which the company says is the largest privately owned example in the world. Xcimer’s approach to fusion power is modeled after the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which proved in December 2022 that a controlled fusion reaction could release more power than required to ignite it. The NIF trained 192 laser beams on a fuel target smaller than a pencil eraser. The energy from the lasers hit the gold target. As the lasers obliterate the gold target, their energy is converted into X-rays, which are focused on the fuel pellet inside, compressing it until atoms in the fuel fuse and release energy. The company is betting that more powerful, less complex lasers will help turn NIF’s concept for fusion power into something more profitable. Xcimer’s plans for a fusion power plant call for two lasers capable of firing in microsecond-long pulses. Light from those pulses will be fed through a compression system, of sorts, which will delivers the lasers’ energy to the …

Elon Musk’s Ex Says He Bragged About 10,000 Lasers in Orbit That Are “Not a Piece They’ll See on the Chess Board”

Elon Musk’s Ex Says He Bragged About 10,000 Lasers in Orbit That Are “Not a Piece They’ll See on the Chess Board”

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech If “always keep them guessing” was actually a strategy for success, Elon Musk might be president right now instead of Donald Trump. In a new 18-minute long TikTok video, former conservative influencer and mother of one of Elon Musk’s children Ashley St. Clair shared private conversations she allegedly held with the billionaire about the 2024 US election — and the details are bonkers, even by Musk’s unhinged standards. According to St. Clair, Musk once told her that he had “10,000 lasers in space, referring to his [Starlink] satellites.” These, per the influencer, were Musk’s “anomaly in the matrix,” seemingly meaning he viewed them as a kind of card up his sleeve to be unleashed at the right moment during the course of the US presidential election. “He says this is not a piece they’ll see on the chess board,” St. Clair continued. “I straight up tell him, ‘I would ask more but I really don’t want to be …

Shark lasers could help save vulnerable species

Shark lasers could help save vulnerable species

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Combining lasers and sharks may sound like a bad idea, but marine ecologists are banking on it to help save some of the planet’s most threatened species. By merging optical technology and geochemistry, a group of researchers in Australia are gaining far more accurate information on the snub-nosed speartooth shark’s (Glyphis glyphis) age, as well as the health of its environment. Just like a tree, you can tell a lot about a shark by its rings. But instead of concentric circles in wood, biologists study similar growth patterns in a shark’s vertebrae. For years, scientists estimated a specimen’s age by examining extremely thin slices of spine using methods like transmitted light optical microscopy. The general consensus was that each circular “band” roughly amounted to a single year. However, that  may not necessarily be the case. According to researchers at the University of Melbourne writing in the Marine Ecology Progress Series, there is a far more accurate way to assess …

Tennessee man uses lasers to make the world’s thinnest car

Tennessee man uses lasers to make the world’s thinnest car

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A YouTuber armed with a 1988 Ford Festiva and a workshop full of lasers may have created the world’s thinnest street-legal car—-though it required some serious work to get it there. Tyler Fever, who runs the YouTube channel Prop Department, took the already tiny Festiva and chopped it to pieces, ultimately creating a roughly shopping-cart-sized contraption that resembles something out of The Flintstones. Somehow, Fever even managed to fit two seats into that tiny vehicle. More surprisingly still, he claims he managed to get the little death trap fully insured. All of this, he says, was part of an effort to make what calls the world’s “most pathetic car” even more ridiculous.  “We’re going to make it even smaller and more pathetic looking,” Fever says in the video. I Built the THINNEST Street Legal Car Making a tiny car even tinier  Even unmodified, the Festiva certainly isn’t large. When it was released in mid-1987, it was already one of …

Quantum researchers created a new kind of laser built from sound

Quantum researchers created a new kind of laser built from sound

Published by Jenni Sidey

A tiny silica bead, just 100 nanometers across, sits suspended in a vacuum and vibrates under the grip of laser light. Those vibrations might sound like a small detail, but in this case they are the heart of a new kind of laser, one that works not with light particles, but with particles of mechanical motion. Researchers at the University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology have built what they describe as a squeezed phonon laser, a system that gives unusually tight control over phonons, the quantum units of vibration or sound. Their results, reported in Nature Communications, push phonon lasers into new territory by combining laser-like coherence with reduced noise in a levitated nanoparticle system. That matters because noise is a constant problem in precision measurement. Even ordinary lasers, which look steady to the eye, are never perfectly calm. Their output fluctuates, and those fluctuations can blur a signal. The same basic problem affects phonon lasers. “While a laser looks to the naked eye like a steady beam, there’s actually a lot of …

Scientists use lasers to convert leather into wearable power storage

Scientists use lasers to convert leather into wearable power storage

Published by Jenni Sidey

A tiger on a leather bag is not just decoration in this experiment. Its back and tail double as an energy-storing device. That small visual twist sits at the center of a new study from Jilin University in China. In this work, researchers used a CO2 laser to write conductive patterns directly onto vegetable-tanned leather. As a result, they created a set of flexible microsupercapacitors. These are tiny energy devices that can store charge and help steady electrical signals in wearable electronics. “Using a laser, we directly write conductive patterns onto vegetable tanned leather to create microsupercapacitors that can store energy and help smooth electrical signals so that wearable electronics run more reliably,” said research team leader Dong-Dong Han. The work, published in Optics Letters, points to a simpler route for making wearable electronics with fewer chemical-heavy steps and less dependence on synthetic materials. Instead of building devices on plastic, the team used vegetable-tanned leather. This is a natural material processed with plant-based extracts and already valued for breathability, flexibility, biocompatibility and comfort against skin. …

Engineer Says It’s Time to Rebuild the Twin Towers as Giant Data Centers With Anti-Aircraft Lasers on the Roof

Engineer Says It’s Time to Rebuild the Twin Towers as Giant Data Centers With Anti-Aircraft Lasers on the Roof

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech After their grisly destruction in a terror attack in 2001 — and the chaotic and deadly wars that followed — it can be hard to remember that the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, originally completed in 1973, were architecturally controversial for their impact on the Manhattan skyline. Now, a long-shot effort seeks to rebuild them in an unlikely locale: Chicago, where they’d be reborn as massive data centers. Behind the campaign is Raphael Chryslar, who might seem like an unlikely candidate for the project. Currently residing in Hatfield, England, he was just a toddler when the original Twin Towers fell. Trained in aerospace engineering — and a self-described author, photographer, entrepreneur, and aspiring architect and astronaut — Chryslar is clearly a superfan of the originals: he’s even gone so far as to get a tribute to the original World Trade Center tattooed on his arm. Called the World Tech Center, Chryslar’s project envisions nine buildings across a 35-acre …

New ‘vacuum ultraviolet’ laser is 100 to 1,000 times more efficient than existing tech

New ‘vacuum ultraviolet’ laser is 100 to 1,000 times more efficient than existing tech

Published by Jenni Sidey

The vacuum ultraviolet region is the area of the electromagnetic spectrum lying between X-rays and visible light. It is characterized by very short wavelengths between about 100 and 200 nanometers. For many years, it has resisted development into practical lasers using existing laser techniques due to an almost laughable limitation. Virtually everything in our environment absorbs vacuum ultraviolet radiation instead of allowing it to pass through. For example, air, materials containing organic molecules, and many solid materials absorb it. Many types of atoms also absorb vacuum ultraviolet light rather than allowing it to pass. Yet that same property provides scientists with a wealth of scientific information about the material interactions of whatever vacuum ultraviolet photons encounter. Producing sufficient quantities of vacuum ultraviolet light in an efficient and compact device for practical use has therefore always represented a challenge. Building a Vacuum Ultraviolet Laser Now, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder believe they have overcome this long-standing challenge by building a vacuum ultraviolet laser that is 100 to 1,000 times more efficient than currently available …