Eideard

This is a preview of the XM25 recorded a year ago

A new gun the US military hopes will help take on the Taliban has been unveiled. Called the XM25 it has been described by the US Army as a ‘game changer’.

It uses a laser guidance system and specially developed 25mm high explosive rounds which can be programmed to detonate over a target.

Richard Audette helped develop it for the US Army and says it’s a big leap forward because it’s the first small arms weapon to use smart technology. “The way a soldier operates this is basically find your target, then laze (laser) to it, which gives the range, then you get an adjusted aim point, adjust the fire and pull the trigger.

“Say you’ve lazed out to 543 metres… When you pull the trigger it arms the round and fires it 543 metres plus or minus one, two or three metres.”

It means the weapon can be used to target insurgents hiding behind walls or in ditches without the need to call in air strikes.

Haven’t yet read comments on effectiveness – though it surely sounds like solid technology. The prime consideration, as always, is how well does it hold up under combat conditions

A judge in Pennsylvania Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit brought on behalf of a girl claiming she was hurt by a bar-code scanner at a convenience store…

Dominica Juliano and her guardian, Ginnisue Juliano, claimed a clerk at a Country Fair store in Erie waved the hand-held scanner over the girl’s face during a June 2004 visit to try to get her to smile. The lawsuit claimed Dominica, who was 12 at the time, suffered facial burns that led to serious psychological problems, the newspaper said.

The scanner could not have caused the injuries because it is an LED light and not a laser.

Who was more of a crook? The lawyer who told these folks they could win this suit? But, then, they went looking for a lawyer, right?

Federal agents seized computers, papers, books and electronic equipment from the home of a former Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear scientist, who last year sought to work on a fusion project with Venezuela but believes the U.S. government is wrongly targeting him as a spy.

P. Leonardo Mascheroni told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his home that four FBI agents searched his home for 13 hours. The agents, he said, led him to believe they were investigating him for espionage.

“I am not a spy,” Mascheroni said. “If I were a spy, a long time ago I would have gone away from the United States with all my knowledge. Instead, I stay in my house all the time and am working all the time and presenting all the time to Congress. Is that what a spy does?”

FBI spokesman Darrin Jones confirmed the agency is pursuing an “ongoing investigation” in Los Alamos, but declined further comment Wednesday. No charges have been filed against Mascheroni.

Meanwhile, Mascheroni’s wife, Marjorie, a technical writer at the lab, was placed on administrative leave while the lab conducts an internal investigation, according to the lab.

P. Leonardo Mascheroni joined the Northern New Mexico lab in 1979, and worked in its X Division, which designs nuclear weapons, until 1987. He was laid off in 1988.

Lab spokeswoman Lisa Rosendorf said he lost his job during layoffs that were prompted by budget cuts, but his supporters at the time said he was blackballed by the lab.

Mascheroni’s pet project is using a hydrogen-fluoride laser to generate a fusion reaction. He’s followed a dogged path trying to convince US government agencies to get his method a trial.

That’s the sum total, folks.

The Boeing Company and US Air Force announced yesterday that their Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) has successfully destroyed its first sizable ground target–“an unoccupied stationary vehicle“–during a test at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Boeing describes their device as a high-powered chemical laser that, once installed aboard an aircraft like the C-130H Hercules transport plane used in yesterday’s test, offers “speed-of-light, ultra-precision engagement capability that will dramatically reduce collateral damage.” Said Gary Fitzmire:

“The bottom line is that ATL works, and works very well. ATL’s components — the high-energy chemical laser, beam control system and battle manager — are performing as one integrated weapon system, delivering effective laser beam energy to ground targets.”

We’re doomed! Doomed I say. Dooomed!

Thanks, Jägermeister

It was an idea born out of curiosity in the physics lab, but now a new type of ‘laser’ for generating ultra-high frequency sound waves instead of light has taken a major step towards becoming a unique and highly useful 21st century technology.

Scientists at The University of Nottingham, in collaboration with colleagues in the Ukraine, have produced a new type of acoustic laser device called a Saser. It’s a sonic equivalent to the laser and produces an intense beam of uniform sound waves on a nano scale. The new device could have significant and useful applications in the worlds of computing, imaging, and even anti-terrorist security screening.

Where a ‘laser’,(Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation), uses packets of electromagnetic vibrations called ‘photons’, the ‘Saser’ uses sound waves composed of sonic vibrations called ‘phonons’.

In a laser, the photon beam is produced by stimulating electrons with an external power source so they release energy when they collide with other photons in a highly reflective optical cavity. This produces a coherent and controllable shining beam of laser light in which all the photons have the same frequency and rate of oscillation. From supermarket scanners to DVD players, surgery, manufacturing and the defence industry, the application of laser technology is widespread.

The Saser mimics this technology but using sound, to produce a sonic beam of ‘phonons’ which travels, not through an optical cavity like a laser, but through a tiny manmade structure called a ‘superlattice’. This is made out of around 50 super-thin sheets of two alternating semiconductor materials, Gallium Arsenide and Aluminium Arsenide, each layer just a few atoms thick. When stimulated by a power source (a light beam), the phonons multiply, bouncing back and forth between the layers of the lattice, until they escape out of the structure in the form of an ultra-high frequency phonon beam.

A key factor in this new science is that the Saser is the first device to emit sound waves in the terahertz frequency range… the beam of coherent acoustic waves it produces has nanometre wavelengths (billionths of a metre)…

Professor Anthony Kent from the University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, says “While our work on sasers is driven mostly by pure scientific curiosity, we feel that the technology has the potential to transform the area of acoustics, much as the laser has transformed optics in the 50 years since its invention.”

Wowee, zowee. I remember the first reports of a “maser” – a room full of electronics and ruby crystal required to make the critter work. And look where that has proceeded!

Note to self: keep in touch with what this lot produces over the next few years!

World’s largest optical instrument ever built. This potassium dihydrogen phosphate crystal,
weighing almost 800 pounds, acts as the laser optic

The world’s most powerful installation of lasers will be dedicated in California on Friday before a throng of well-wishers. The new National Ignition Facility, or NIF, is touted as an important step toward maintaining the nation’s nuclear deterrent, developing fusion energy and conducting basic research. We hope its next few years will go a lot better than its problem-plagued development phase. There is a high risk of failure.

NIF, in a building the size of a football stadium, is built on an awesome scale… It will use 192 lasers to fire light beams through a complicated array of mirrors and amplifiers to pulverize a tiny target filled with hydrogen fuel. The resulting heat and compression are supposed to fuse the hydrogen atoms into helium, releasing transient bursts of thermonuclear energy.

When first proposed in 1994, the facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was expected to cost $1.2 billion and be completed by 2002. But technical, practical and managerial problems caused repeated delays and drove up costs to $3.5 billion or more. Now NIF will be coming into operation barely ahead of a competing laser facility under construction in France…

The latest focus, at least in promoting the project, has been the potential to achieve fusion energy, a carbon-free, widely available source of power should it ever prove attainable. The principal goal over the next year or two is to reach self-sustaining “ignition,” the point at which more energy is produced from fused atoms than is applied to make it happen. Scientists at NIF seem confident that they will succeed, but so many things have to go right simultaneously that many experts deem ignition unlikely any time soon. And even ignition is a long way from achieving practical, economical fusion power.

A more immediate payoff could come from basic research on processes that occur under pressures and temperatures typically found at the cores of stars or giant planets. Some critics view NIF as an expensive toy for weapons scientists. But the energy potential is alluring enough that all of us should root for NIF to succeed.

Has to be one of the most exciting places on Earth for a scientist to be working. Sure, the problem-solving may be incredible; but, the potential for benefiting all of humankind is enormous. Cost vs. output is peanuts – if it works.

Last month, a small robotic plane flew into the skies over New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range. Tracking the drone was an experimental Humvee, equipped with a laser. The real-life ray gun then took aim at the drone, and began blasting. Soon, the drone had a hole burnt through it — and was crashing down to the desert.

For decades, the Army and the Air Force have used laser prototypes to zap unmanned planes. But what makes this test, held last month, a little different is that the laser was small, and low-powered. Which makes the ray gun, at least in theory, fairly easy to fit into an existing combat vehicle.

The laser-equipped Humvee is a modified version of the Army’s Avenger air defense system. It uses more traditional means — eight missiles — to take out low-flying targets. So why use the ray gun? “Laser Avenger, unlike a conventional weapon, can fire its laser beam without creating missile exhaust or gun flashes that would reveal its position,” Boeing’s Gary Fitzmire contends. “As a result, Laser Avenger can neutralize these UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] threats while keeping our troops safe.”

For now, the company is funding the Avenger out of its own pocket, “to demonstrate that directed energy weapons are maturing and are relevant to today’s battlefield.”

We’re doomed. Doomed! We’re all doooomed!

A University of Michigan professor has created 3-D portraits of the president-elect that are smaller than a grain of salt. He calls them “nanobamas…”

Each one contains about 150 million carbon nanotubes stacked vertically like trees in a forest. A carbon nanotube is an extraordinarily strong hollow cylinder about 1/50,000th the width of a human hair.

To create the nanobamas, the researchers converted Shepard Fairey’s famous red, white and blue poster of Barack Obama to a line drawing. They shrunk it and printed it on a glass plate with a laser to create a mask. They shined ultraviolet light through the masked glass plate on to a silicon wafer to create the pattern. Then they grew the carbon nanotubes on the pattern, using a high-temperature chemical reaction.

The researchers photographed the nanobamas with an electron microscope. The faces are half a millimeter in size.

Professor Hart has an excellent eye for the beauty in nature and science. Take a look at his gallery when you have a chance.

Dozens of partygoers at an outdoor rave near Moscow last week have lost partial vision after a laser light show burned their retinas, say Russian health officials.

Moscow city health department officials confirmed 12 cases of laser-blindness at the Central Ophthalmological Clinic, and daily newspaper Kommersant said another 17 were registered at City Hospital 32 in the centre of the capital.

“They all have retinal burns, scarring is visible on them. Loss of vision in individual cases is as high as 80 percent, and regaining it is already impossible,” Kommersant quoted a treating ophthalmologist as saying.

Everyone involved in running the show is very busy blaming everyone else who was involved. Excepting, of course, those who’ve already skipped town.