U.S. Airborne Laser Advances to 'First Light'
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A Boeing Co.-led team has  successfully fired for the first time a powerful laser meant to  fly aboard a modified 747 as part of a U.S. ballistic missile  defense shield, officials said on Friday.
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Work is underway to establish the first interplanetary laser communication link. The &#36;300 million NASA experiment, if successful, will connect robotic spacecraft at Mars with scientists back on Earth via a beam of light traveling some 300 million kilometers.
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A vital component of a new particle accelerator that will help unravel the fundamental nature of matter and energy has successfully been powered up on its first try.
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Burn baby burn Rayguns are, um, on fire lately, with the US Army dishing out early contracts in its monster truck laser cannon race, Boeing planning a rather unimpressive blaster-equipped Humvee and the famous American nuke-toasting jumbo jet continuing to make headlines. Now the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon war-nerd bureau which loves nothing better than a long shot, has joined in.â¦
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The FBI is examining a series of incidents in which lasers have been shone into the cockpits of aircraft.
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(InfoWorld) - Researchers from Intel and the University of California at Santa Barbara have found a way to build low-cost "laser chips" that could eventually shuttle data around PCs at much higher speeds than today's copper wire interconnects. The researchers combined the properties of a compound semiconductor material called indium phosphide, which emits light constantly, and silicon, which can be used to amplify and direct that light. They sandwiched the materials together to create a single device that can be manufactured using standard chip-making techniques. The breakthrough, announced Monday, is significant because it could help the interconnect technologies that carry data between components in PCs and servers to keep pace with the rapid advances in processing power of the chips themselves, the researchers said. "This could bring low-cost, terabit-level optical 'data pipes' inside future computers and help make possible a new era of high-performance computing applications," said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's Photonics Technology Lab, in a statement. The work may be several years away from commercialization, but the researchers expect eventually to be able to put dozens or even hundreds of lasers on a single chip, they said. Indium phosphide is already widely used to make lasers for fiber optic networks, but the cost of assembling and aligning the lasers makes them too expensive for the high-volume PC business. Silicon, on the other hand, can amplify and control light and could be used more affordably, but it is not an efficient generator of light itself. The researchers figured out a way to combine the two materials to build a "hybrid silicon laser" that can be manufactured using Intel's standard manufacturing techniques, keeping costs relatively low. To make the silicon laser they created a thin oxide layer roughly 25 atoms thick on the surface of each material. They then heated the oxide and pressed the two layers together, forming a single chip with a "glass glue" between them. Applying a voltage to the device generates light from the indium phosphide, which passes through the joining layer to be guided and controlled by the silicon. The laser light can send data between computer components at extremely high speed. This can be done using a "silicon optical modulator," which effectively turns the laser beam on and off at very high speeds to represent the 1s and 0s of computer code. Intel has already demonstrated a silicon modulator that can transmit data at up to 10Gb per second. Figuring out how to make the hybrid silicon laser was the last big barrier to using silicon-based optical devices in computers and data centers, the researchers said.
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One of the world's largest optical telescopes will peer into space for the first time on Friday.
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Unmanned aerial vehicles and other remote-controlled weapons are part of a high-tech arsenal the U.S. military is developing to help minimize casualties in battles with insurgents.
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Raygun lorries to beam enemy shells out of the sky US arms and aerospace manufacturer Boeing announced on Friday that it had landed a contract to develop truck-mounted laser cannons for the US Army.â¦
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Telescopes aboard the Hinode satellite have been returning some of their first results.
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Lasers may be the weapon of choice for sci-fi movie heroes when the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance. But back here on Planet Earth, lasers are at the center of a movie battle of another kind: the one
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The FBI and police are reportedly investigating three incidents in which powerful laser beams were aimed at commercial planes headed into Honolulu International Airport over the past two weeks. The FBI said the incidents were not terrorism related.
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A laser developed by a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist will be aboard the Mars Science Laboratory to be launched to the red planet in 2009.
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Tiny antennae focus infrared laser light down to 100 nanometers, providing a way for scientists to see cells at work.
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WASHINGTON, Dec. 30, 2004 - Aviation authorities are investigating the latest in a string of incidents in which laser beams have been directed into the cockpits of commercial jets while in flight.
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Researchers say they have created a silicon-based chip that can produce laser beams to send data between chips.
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Scratch that underwear off your wish list. The Laserpod ambient lighting system is one gift you won't regret getting this holiday season. By Amit Asaravala.