All posts tagged: lasers

Drones armed with lasers to tackle illegal rubbish dumps | UK News

Drones armed with lasers to tackle illegal rubbish dumps | UK News

Published by Sam Flores

More than 30 “drone squads” equipped with laser mapping technology are being deployed by the Environment Agency (EA) to tackle the increasing number of illegal waste dumps across the country. The EA is facing mounting criticism over its ability to catch gangs behind the sites – which see criminals avoid millions of pounds in landfill tax. Despite new measures announced today, environmental organisations say technology alone won’t fix the issue. It comes after Sky News obtained photos of tonnes of rubbish being dumped at a site in Epping, Essex, just two weeks ago – despite an EA investigation beginning 12 months earlier. The site near Epping was blockaded by the EA on Wednesday following the arrests of two men at the site, who were spotted by a member of the public when their lorry got stuck in mud. Image: The dump in Epping has been blockaded. Pic: Environment Agency The EA has revealed the deployment of new so-called “drone squads” with 33 trained pilots and drones equipped with laser technology to create detailed maps of …

Data centres could store information in glass for thousands of years

Data centres could store information in glass for thousands of years

Published by skeptic

Close-up of a piece of glass with Microsoft Flight Simulator map data written into it Microsoft Research An automated system for storing large amounts of information in glass could change the future of data centres. Our world runs on data, from the internet and readouts of countless industrial sensors to scientific data from particle colliders, and all of it must be stored safely and efficiently. In 2014, Peter Kazansky at the University of Southampton in the UK and his colleagues showed that lasers can be used to encode hundreds of terabytes of data into nanostructures inside glass, thus creating a data storage method that could last longer than the age of the universe. Their method was too impractical to be scaled up to industrial size, but Richard Black and his colleagues at Microsoft’s Project Silica have now demonstrated a similar glass-based technology that might lead to long-lasting glass data libraries in the near future. “Glass can withstand extreme temperatures, humidity, particulates and electromagnetic fields. On top of that, glass has a great lifespan and doesn’t …

The El Paso No-Fly Debacle Is Just the Beginning of a Drone Defense Mess

The El Paso No-Fly Debacle Is Just the Beginning of a Drone Defense Mess

Published by skeptic

A shocking but ultimately brief airspace closure over El Paso, Texas, and parts of New Mexico last week is stoking unease among pilots and the broader public about the status of United States anti-drone defenses. As low-cost UAV equipment proliferates around the world, analysts have repeatedly warned that destructive attacks perpetrated using drones are inevitable. It is challenging to develop nimble and safe countermeasures, though, given that things like jamming or attempting to shoot down a drone are difficult—or even impossible—to carry out safely in populated areas, much less densely populated cities. In the case of the El Paso incident, the Federal Aviation Administration originally set the airspace closure to last 10 days, but ultimately lifted it after eight hours. The Trump administration initially said the move was related to possible incursion of Mexican drug cartel drones, but the New York Times and others reported that it came from FAA concerns that Customs and Border Protection officials were using a Pentagon-provided anti-drone laser weapon in the area despite questions about potential dangers to civilian aircraft. …

Nanoparticles help low-powered lasers remove melanoma tumors

Nanoparticles help low-powered lasers remove melanoma tumors

Published by Jenni Sidey

A near-infrared light beam appears harmless, as it is a low-frequency type of light that does not have a dramatic effect but rather passes through tissue unnoticed. However, under some circumstances, this same beam can create enough energy to generate heat capable of destroying a tumor. The balance between the efficiency of power and safety has been a limiting factor for the use of photothermal therapy in melanoma. The traditional nanoparticles employed must use laser intensities that are far above what can be tolerated by human skin. Researchers at Oregon State University now have a solution for that issue. Researchers from the College of Pharmacy at OSU, led by Dr. Olena Taratula and Dr. Prem Singh, have created a nanoparticle system capable of killing melanoma tumors in mice while using laser power below the skin’s safety threshold. The basis for this system is a nanoscale energy relay that ensures that each photon is used to its fullest potential. Graphic depicting new therapy. (CREDIT: Parinaz Ghanbari) Safety Limits In Photothermal Therapy Limiting factors of safety in …

Are lasers the future of anti-drone warfare? | Weapons News

Are lasers the future of anti-drone warfare? | Weapons News

Published by Sam Flores

A drone appears on the grainy, gray-scaled image of the thermal camera. This is the type of drone used by groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Yemeni Houthis. Suddenly, a blinding whiteness overtakes the image. Seconds later, the wing of the drone snaps off, sending it tumbling down, exploding when it hits the ground. This is a video shared by the Israeli Ministry of Defence and arms producer Rafael, a hint towards the future of anti-drone warfare. In it, they are demonstrating one of their new weapons: a high-energy laser designed to take down aerial threats such as drones, but also rockets and even artillery shells. It’s called Iron Beam. Israel claims they have shot down several enemy drones with it already. Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list Laser weapons have been a dream for arms manufacturers and militaries since the invention of the laser in 1960. So far, they have remained a dream. But now they seem to be on the brink of a breakthrough. Technological advances have made lasers more …

Excitons Let Scientists Reshape Quantum Materials With Less Light

Excitons Let Scientists Reshape Quantum Materials With Less Light

Published by Jenni Sidey

Light can do more than illuminate a material. In some cases, it can temporarily change how electrons move through it. That possibility sits at the heart of Floquet engineering, a young area of condensed-matter physics that aims to create new electronic behavior on demand. “Excitons couple much stronger to the material than photons due to the strong Coulomb interaction, particularly in 2D materials,” says Professor Keshav Dani from the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit at OIST, “and they can thus achieve strong Floquet effects while avoiding the challenges posed by light. With this, we have a new potential pathway to the exotic future quantum devices and materials that Floquet engineering promises.” The time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (TR-ARPES) setup at OIST, here with study co-first author Xing Zhu, PhD student in the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit. (CREDIT: Bogna Baliszewska (OIST)) Turning a rhythm into new electronic behavior “Floquet engineering starts with a basic idea: a repeating push can create a bigger, more complex response. A swing rises higher when pushes come at the right rhythm. In quantum materials, …

Laser Breakthrough Sharpens Radio Telescope Views of Black Holes

Laser Breakthrough Sharpens Radio Telescope Views of Black Holes

Published by Jenni Sidey

Radio telescopes let you study the universe by collecting faint radio waves from distant objects. To see extremely small targets, such as the regions around supermassive black holes, those telescopes must work together. They have to observe the same object at the same moment and stay perfectly synchronized. That challenge sits at the heart of a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI. Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, known as KAIST, now report a major advance that improves how this synchronization is done. The team is led by Professor Jungwon Kim of KAIST’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. The work was carried out with collaborators from the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science, and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany. Their findings were in the journal Light Science & Applications. The group developed a new way to deliver ultra-precise timing signals directly into radio telescope receivers using light. The method relies on optical frequency comb lasers, a technology often …

Inside the wild experiments physicists would do with zero limits

Inside the wild experiments physicists would do with zero limits

Published by skeptic

In physics, breakthroughs are rare. Experiments are slow, expensive and often end up refining, rather than rewriting, our understanding of the universe. But what if the only constraint on scientific ambition were imagination? We asked five physicists to describe the kind of experiment they would do if they didn’t have to worry about budgets, engineering limitations or political realities. Not because we expect any of it to happen soon – though in a few cases, momentum is building – but because it is revealing to see where their minds go when the usual boundaries are stripped away. One researcher wants to launch radio telescopes deep into space to probe dark matter with cosmic energy flashes. Others are dreaming of completely new kinds of particle accelerator or lasers that push the at bounds of the possible. Some of these concepts are technically plausible. Others aren’t even close. That’s fine. They still point to the questions that keep physicists up at night, and the kinds of answers they would chase, if only they could. Radio telescopes in …