Show Name: CSI; Show Title: n/a; Season: 8; Episode: 17
Archive for May 15th, 2008
Metal Gear Solid 4 limited edition PS3 for North America detailed
Posted in May 15th, 2008
Filed under: Gaming
Ha, seems our Japanese gaming overlords aren’t the only ones looking down the retail barrel at the limited edition gunmetal gray MGS4 PS3. Sony’s official Playstation.Blog is reporting that the MGS4 Limited Edition PS3 Hardware Bundle will be available exclusively from Konami.com for $600. For that you get a 40GB gunmetal PS3, matching DualShock 3 wireless controller, Metal Gear Online, an exclusive Blu-ray disc with 2-hours of additional content (making of documentary and look at Hideo Kojima’s production team) and of course the MGS4: Guns of the Patriots Limited Edition game. Pre-orders from the “very limited supply” begin on Monday the 19th. Best set your alarms.
[Via Playstation.Blog]
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Air Force Bails Out on Social Network Ban
Posted in May 15th, 2008
Calling it a security nightmare when banning a military-themed social networking site in January, the Air Force now relents. But it may be too little, too late for the site’s operator.
EeePC keyboards different on black and white models
Posted in May 15th, 2008
Filed under: Laptops
Okay, this is pretty much for the crazy keyboard aficionados out there, but the crew over at Laptop says there’s a distinct difference between the keyboards on the black and white Eee PC laptops. They compared the ‘boards on a white 701, black 4G Surf, and white 900, and while the two white Eees had identical keys, the black unit featured different switches with deeper keypresses and more tactile feedback, smaller spaces between the keys, and rougher plastic. (Of course, if you actually use any keyboard for long enough, the plastic eventually wears smooth, so that’s probably not an issue.) We doubt the difference is going to really sway anyone’s purchasing decision — the tiny Eee keyboard isn’t exactly ideal for hardcore typists, after all — but if you’re looking for a tiebreaker between the black and white 700s, well, now you have one that will bore the pants off people at parties.
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Happy Birthday, Lasers: Wired.com’s Best Laser Stories
Posted in May 15th, 2008
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Lasers are like your favorite uncle who can do no wrong. You know, the one who’s always hip to the latest technology, does amazing magic tricks at all the family dinners, always photographs well, and has more than once saved baby Med-Tech from a burning house of boring. All the other technologies wish they were he, and Wired.com readers openly admit he’s their favorite.
So in celebration of one of our greatest news topics here at Wired.com, we’ve selected a compilation of the best recent laser appearances on our site. Thanks for the memories, Big L. (Have your own favorite laser news item? Let us know in the comments.)
Left:
Texans Build World’s Most Powerful Laser
Scientists have switched on the world’s most powerful laser, which for one-trillionth of a second is 2,000 times more powerful than all the power plants in the United States. The laser’s output tops a petawatt, which is a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) watts of power.
Photo: Courtesy Mikael Martinez and Texas Petawatt Project, led by Todd Ditmire
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(Continued from previous slide)
The power of a laser, its output in watts, is determined by the energy of the laser pulse, measured in joules, divided by its duration, measured in seconds (tiny fractions of a second in this case). So, to get high power, you can either turn up the energy or cram the same amount of energy into a shorter duration pulse — or do both. The problem is that turning up the energy makes it more difficult to get short pulses.
The solution to this problem requires an almost Rube Goldberg setup inside a 1,500-square-foot clean room. The most powerful laser in the world starts, poetically enough, with a “seed laser” that puts out a wimpy nanojoule of energy for a couple of hundred femtoseconds (that’s 10-15 seconds). It must be run through a series of amplifiers, compressors and stretchers before it can recreate the conditions inside the sun for a trillionth of a second.
Photo: Courtesy Mikael Martinez and Texas Petawatt Project, led by Todd Ditmire
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Beamz Music System Lets You Compose a Symphony With the Power of Freaking Lasers
If Dr. Evil of Austin Powers fame were more musically minded, he may have demanded something like the beamz — a musical instrument with “fricking lasers” attached to it. This large USB peripheral includes six laser beams that, when broken, activate elements of 30 songs stored on your computer.
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Laser-Etched QR Codes: Digital Graffiti For Gadgets
Forget stickers. Real geeks show their commitment with something more permanent: laser engraving. And Jason Fields takes your etching and raises you one QR code. Sure, it’s too big for most little QR readers to handle, and the gray on gray isn’t exactly contrasty, but Jason has squeezed in his “e-mail signature file, postal address, with links to my blog and twitter pages as well.”
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The Geekiest Van Conversion Ever
This is the Tele Atlas map machine, a Toyota van tricked out with tens of thousands of dollars worth of cameras, laser range detectors and global-positioning hardware. The laser sensors on the back (the devices labeled SICK) are used to determine the height of overpasses and buildings to help delivery vehicles find the route with the most overhead clearance.
Photo: Michael Calore/Wired.com
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The Ultrashort Pulse Laser in Action
Raydiance, a startup company in Petaluma, California, has developed a laser it says can cleanly cut just about any material you can think of — from human skin to glass — without throwing off heat or damaging the surface.
This glass slide is seconds away from being ablated by the Raydiance USP laser.
Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com
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A new patent granted to Lockheed Martin seeks to combine multiple lasers into a single, higher-power beam, which would, in theory, help achieve the power output needed for laser weapons. The patent outlines a method to “combine multiple laser beams into a single coherent beam without requiring insertion of optical elements into the laser beam.”
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This Laser Trick’s a Quantum Leap
Ph.D. student Elliot Fraval (left) and Dr. Jevon Longdel perform scientific measurements on light in the lab at Laser Physics Centre at Australian National University.
Photo: Tim Wetherell
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Navy Pushing Laser ‘Holy Grail’ to Weapons Grade
For decades, scientists have been slowly working on a laser that never runs out of shots — and can be “tuned” to blast through the air, at just the right wavelength. For most of that time, all they could get was a laser at light-bulb strength. But researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility finally managed in 2004 to assemble a “Free Electron Laser,” or FEL, that could generate 10,000 watts of power.
Now the Navy has started an effort to design and build a new FEL, 10 times as strong. That would bring the laser up to 100 kilowatts — what’s considered the minimum threshold for weapons grade. But it would also be just a steppingstone on the way to an energy weapon as powerful as any produced. If ray gun researchers can get the thing to work, that is.
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Stupid Laser Tricks: Make Your Own Piece of Jesus-Miracle Toast
They can do everything from nuclear fusion to vaginal rejuvenation, so you know it’s a mathematical certainty that lasers = awesome. Plus, your right to tinker with dirt-cheap lasers in your basement is all but guaranteed in the Constitution! With that in mind, here are a few of our favorite DIY laser hacks. (Disclaimer: If you are foolhardy enough to try any of these and end up maiming yourself or getting sucked into the Tron game grid, something else was probably going to remove you from the gene pool soon anyway.)
Photo: Gene Lee
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Laser-Guided Saw: Cool Tool or Novelty Toy?
It might not cut as effectively as a lightsaber, or even a real laser cutter, but at least your lines will be (theoretically) straight.
At $20, though, it’s probably too cheap to actually do its job. If you’ve ever used a cheap saw you know that the blade will flex and buck, leaving your supposedly neat cut looking about as straight as Earring Magic Ken. And the laser doesn’t even come with a battery. We say: Avoid. You’ll get a better result with an old popsicle stick.
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DIY Laser Lightshow for $80: Useless but Awesome
What’s cooler than a green laser? A green laser that paints semirandom moving spirograph patterns on your wall. Toronto-based hardware hacker Artur Petrovskyy shows you how to make one of your own from about $80 in parts in a new how-to on Instructables.com: Laser show for poor man.
Image: Instructables.com
May 16, 1960: Researcher Shines a Laser Light
Posted in May 15th, 2008
1960: Physicist Theodore Maiman uses a synthetic-ruby crystal to create the first laser.
Maiman began tinkering with electronic devices in his teens and even earned college money repairing appliances and radios. He was working at the Hughes Research Laboratories of the Hughes Aircraft company in Malibu, California, when he built the first working laser.
The laser is a device that produces monochromatic (all the same wavelength), coherent (all the waves in phase) light. Today they’re used in eye surgery, dentistry, range-finding, astronomical measurement, and welding and other manufacturing uses. You’ll find them at the heart of scientific instruments, communications networks, weapons, music systems and supermarket scanners. Lasers are everywhere.
The concept was already bouncing around in the research world in 1960. Arthur L. Schawlow of Bell Labs and Charles H. Townes of Columbia University had written a 1958 paper and patent application proposing an optical version of the maser, or microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.
Columbia grad student Gordon Gould jotted the idea in his notebook in 1957 and applied for a patent in 1959. He’d delayed because at first he thought he needed a working apparatus to apply. But it was Gould who coined the word laser.
Maiman made his own alterations to the Schawlow-Townes concept. He coated the ends of a ruby with silver mirrors, one coating thinner to let some light escape as a beam. He used a flash tube to energize the crystal’s atoms. Maiman enclosed the whole shebang in a polished aluminum tube.
Schawlow and the Bell researchers heard of Maiman’s realization of their concept with mixed emotions, but they soon bested him by using an arc lamp to produce a continuous, rather than pulse, laser.
Bell got its patent in 1960. Maiman applied for a patent for “Ruby Laser Systems” in 1961, but didn’t receive it until 1967. Gould spent decades mired in lawsuits before winning some patents in 1977.
The 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Townes for the laser and Soviets Nicolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov for their earlier work on the maser. Schawlow was acknowledged in the 1964 presentation speech and went on to share the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for his “contribution to the development of laser spectroscopy.”
Maiman was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize, but did not win it. He received many other awards before his death in 2007 at age 79.
Source: Scientific American