It's a Laser!

By Alan

We all remember the fun scene from Toy Story about Buzz Lightyear bragging about his laser on his arm.

The word laser originally was the upper-case LASER, the acronym from Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. However, it’s a bit misleading, because it’s not just “light” that could come out, but nearly any kind of electromagnetic radiation. The “original” lasers were actually putting out microwaves.

Lasers can be very bright, they can be dim. They could be a single color (more singular than any other kind of light), and some lasers can be broad spectrum light (an interesting prospect).

We forget that lasers can do all kinds of things besides point forward and light something up.

It’s interesting that several brand new cool methods of using lasers have showed up in the news recently.

With Flyovers, a Solar Map of New York

Flying over New York for two weeks in the middle of the night, a plane shot out laser pulses in order to precisely measure every building, street, tree, curb, and everything. This effort was funded to update the emergency flood maps of New York, but it’s going to yield some incredible 3D maps of the city skyline, roofs, and rivers.

Mapping Ancient Civilization, in a Matter of Days

We’ve all seen Indiana Jones or some other stereotypical adventurer tromping through the deep jungle and suddenly discovering a temple or pyramid. We’ve been spoiled with seeing pictures of nice neat mowed grass surrounding Mayan ruins, and we forget the decades of work to clear the jungle overgrowing the stone buildings, courtyards, fields, etc. Someone is using similar technology to the New York flyby to look through the organic material of the jungle to penetrate and reflect the ground. It showed that the urban sprawl around the little meadow with pyramids was huge, with a population over 115,000 people. A massively large town. All hidden. Invisible, except to some frequencies of laser light.

Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been working for decades to prove the idea that nuclear fusion can transform the entire world. After 13 years of building a lab that has 192 (!!) lasers that are the size of a football field, they will focus their beams into a very precise spot to ignite a tiny pellet at an extreme temperature of 5,940,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s over 570 times the temperature of the surface of the sun.

Mosquito Zapping Laser

Scientist have figured out how to steer a tiny heat laser at mosquitoes and managed to kill them in mid-air. While this seems like something should have already been invented, it takes extraordinary precise miniature steering, focus, and timing to hit a bug flying in mid air, and also not punch holes in the wall, or zap someone in the eye.

[Okay, I have to admit that I saw all these articles about lasers showing up in the news, and thought it would be fun to talk about the different types. Well, the reason that the press has paid attention to lasers is because it’s the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser. I got to this point of the article, and stumbled across this article in Gizmodo that covers many of the same stories that I did. I wanted to state for the record that I didn’t just copy everything they did.]

Lasers are becoming household items.  They are showing up in our DVD players, in our TV sets, and of course, as the best possible cat toys. Ever.