lasers

January 23, 2015

Scientists Recreate the Conditions Inside Super-Earths in Lab

Shawn Hopkins lasers, Planetary Cores, Science, Super-Earths 0

Using laser-driven compression, a team of researchers have created an experiment that’s giving new insight into what it’s like in the cores of giant super-Earths and during the birth of earth-like planets. The experiment subjects synthetic stishovite, a high density form of silica, to laser-induced shock compression. It then measures the short-lived reaction using extremely fast diagnostics. What Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) physicist Marius Millot and colleagues from Bayreuth University (Germany), LLNL and the University of California, Berkeley found gave them a picture of the melting temperature of silica at around 500 GPa (gigapascal, a unit of pressure), roughly five million times the air pressure on Earth. This is comparable to the core-mantle boundary pressure of a planet about five times the mass of Earth or an Earth-like planet in the throes of the giant impacts involved in the final stage of its birth. “Deep inside planets, extreme density, pressure and temperature strongly modify the properties of the constituent materials,” Millot said. “How much heat solids can sustain before

January 15, 2015

Forget the New 3DS, Laser Tech Promises Giant Glasses-Free 3D Displays

Shawn Hopkins 3d, lasers, Prototypes, Science 0

Every review I’ve read of the new Nintendo 3DS and its head-tracking technology has been impressed with how it improves the 3D effect, but scientists in Vienna are working on a new approach to glasses free-3D that might make Nintendo’s device seem as the magic lantern is to today’s HD movies. The prototype 3D display developed by startup Trilite Technologies and the Vienna Institute of Technology uses lasers directed by moveable mirrors as pixels, beaming multiple slightly offset images with such precise angular resolution that the viewer perceives the image in 3D without glasses. Because it uses lasers, the display is vivid enough to be seen in bright sunlight. It’s also not, like traditional 3D, limited to displaying two images. It can in fact project hundreds of images, allowing a viewer to walk by a display and see what’s being shown from different angles as a full 3D object. This technique required the developers to create an entirely new video format. The developers see a lot of potential in the

August 26, 2014

Scientists to Test Whether Universe is Really a 2D Hologram

Shawn Hopkins Hologram, Holographic Noise Theory, lasers, physic, Quantum Physics, Science 0

Have you been feeling a bit flat lately? You think you live in a 3D universe, move about in 3D space, go to 3D movies in theaters that have three whole dimensions, but you might be wrong. Your experience of being a three-dimensional person might just be a result of the limits of your perceptions, like a character on a video game screen you have no way of knowing you’re flat. Instead, you might live in a 2D hologram, with all of the information about our universe encoded in two dimensions in tiny packets 10 trillion trillion times smaller than an atom (a size called the Planck scale), the “pixels” that make up our universe. At least that’s what the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is going to try to find out. They’ve developed an experiment that will test the theory, called the Holometer. In quantum theory there’s a built-in uncertainty to matter, because there’s no way to know both the exact location and speed of subatomic particles. If space

August 22, 2014

You May One Day Shoot Yourself With a Laser Beam to Test Your Blood Sugar

Shawn Hopkins Blood Glucose, Diabetes, lasers, Science 0

For those of you that are lucky enough not to have to deal with it, diabetes means a lot of sore fingers. Diabetics have to routinely draw blood to test their blood sugar. My poor grandmother sometimes has to prick her fingers several times a day with a spring-loaded lancet, which leaves them raw and sore. It’s a pitiful scene. And I know that she’s hurting, because I’ve recently developed diabetes symptoms and had to start pricking myself. You don’t always get the blood the first time, sometimes you have to do it more than once. And since I’m not a free bleeder I have to set the lancet launcher to “Vlad the Impaler” deepness to get enough blood to work with. As a person who types for a living, I can tell you that banging away at a keyboard with recently punctured fingers is a woeful way to work. So when Princeton University Researchers say they might be able to offer a way to take the blood sugar reading with