Homemade Iron Man Glove Fires Lasers

In his latest project, laser enthusiast Patrick Priebe, owner of a company called Laser Gadgets, constructed a homemade Iron Man glove that lets him hold some pretty impressive superhero powers in the palm of his hand.

He can shoot a laser from his palm that’s powerful enough to pop a balloon or sear patterns into wood. He can also blast another laser from his knuckles, fire an aluminum slug and with an accompanying Iron Man arm piece, launch a missile made from cardboard and plastic.

The glove’s lasers are pretty substantial. A blue, 700mW laser blasts from his palm and is activated by the flex of Priebe’s hand. A 300mW laser comes from the top of his glove, deploying through an attached controller.

Priebe used aluminum to make the glove and spray-painted it with primer, metallic red and candy red on top. He made the inside firing mechanism with brass.

 

Priebe constructed the glove in anticipation of the new “Avengers: Age of Ultron” movie. He said it took him about three weeks to make.You can watch the glove in action here.
 

How to Fit 1,000 Terabytes Onto a DVD

DVDs and Blu-Rays don’t get a lot of respect from technophiles, because the optical disks aren’t able to store as much data as a typical hard drive. A team at Swinburne University in Australia could change that, by making it possible to store an entire year’s worth of video onto an optical disk. That could be good news for movie buffs but would also appeal to big data centers that who prefer to store the tremendous amounts of information they save in the least amount of space.

Storing data on conventional DVDs and Blu-Ray disk involves a single laser that burns a mark into the disk’s surfacing, changing its chemistry. The mark represents a 1 or 0, which is the basic binary language of all computer data. But because the marks can’t be smaller than a half the wavelength of the laser beam, there is a limit, to how many marks can be burned into the surface of a disk.

The Swinburne team, led by optoelectronics professor Min Gu, did something different. They used two lasers instead of one.

Each laser beamed a different wavelength of light onto the disk. The first one was in the near-infrared and created a spot of light, just like an ordinary DVD laser. The second laser beam was violet and partially interfered with the near-infrared beam in a way that ultimately shrank the spot burned into the disk. The technique shrank the size of the spot down to nine nanometers, enough to put 1,000 terabytes on a disk. For comparison, a Blu-Ray disk can hold 50 GB of data and a typical DVD holds about 4.7 GB of data.

The lasers are similar to those used in current players, so building a commercial version wouldn’t require any new technologies. Not too far in the future, the behemoth storage capacity of the Blu-Ray disk might seem as quaint as the 1.4 megabyte floppy disk.

Sound Waves Focused Into Laserlike Beam

We’ve all seen laser beams — narrow and powerful beams of light used in everything from CD players to weapons. Now researchers have found a way to make sound waves that, like light waves in a laser, travel in step. They call it a phaser and it could open up applications as wide-ranging as precision timer circuits and better ultrasound scans.

The researchers from NTT Basic Laboratories in Japan call their device a phaser because it uses phonons, waves of sound that require a medium, such as a gas, liquid or solid, to travel.

To create the beam, they started with a tiny drum just a few nanometers across, and put it inside a cavity, which acted like a resonator. They vibrated the drum, which transmitted energy to the cavity, and created the phonons. The cavity confined the sound waves. At a certain frequency, called the resonant frequency, the material of the cavity relaxed in a very specific way, creating vibrations that transferred energy back into the drum. Those vibrations are at a specific frequency and if one connected the resonator to a solid material those vibrations would travel away in a narrow beam. That traveling wave is the “laser” sound beam. Since the sound waves are all in step with each other, they would go in straight lines and wouldn’t spread out.

Right now the device is confined to a circuit a half an inch on a side. And it can’t send out beams of sound over a distance, like the sonic weapons used in crowd control or against Somali pirates. That’s because in order for phonons to travel, they need the gas, liquid or solid they’re moving through to be consistent that entire way.

Although the word “phaser” is used to mean a laser-like weapon on the science fiction television show and movie Star Trek, it doesn’t mean that here. But like lasers, phasers end up in common use. For example a resonator could translate the beams of phonon vibrations into electrical signals, replacing the quartz crystals currently used in watches and clocks. And the high frequencies mean that it could provide a better picture than current ultrasound systems.

Laser Beams Shoot from Printer

Lasers are everywhere -- in DVD players, fiber optic communications and even displays. They are so useful it would be great if they were flexible and easy to make, but that hasn't been the case, until now.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. have developed a way to print lasers on a variety of surfaces, using a printer not too far removed from the one on an average desktop.

The team, led by D. J. Gardiner of the Center for Molecular Materials for Photonics, used liquid crystals similar to those used in liquid crystal displays. With the right kind of stimulation, the molecules in liquid crystals emit laser light.