A quarter-century ago, American rocket scientists proposed the “Star Wars” defense system to knock Soviet missiles from the skies with laser beams. Some of the same scientists are now aiming their lasers at another airborne threat: the mosquito.
In a lab in this Seattle suburb, researchers in long white coats recently stood watching a small glass box of bugs. Every few seconds, a contraption 100 feet away shot a beam that hit the buzzing mosquitoes, one by one, with a spot of red light.
When U.S. troops train, they often use a kind of Laser Tag system, to record simulated kills from rifles and artillery. But these days, American forces face less conventional threats, like suicide bombers. Which is why the Navy has funded a patent, for a simulated suicide bomber vest.
The Iowa Department of Transportation is using a mix of new and old technology to count traffic in a busy area along Interstate 80-35 in Des Moines. D.O.T. spokesperson Karen Carroll says the high-tech laser system counts the vehicles.
Carroll says the system puts two lasers across the road and counts traffic as the vehicles cross the lasers. She says they decided on this system because it would be costly to have to shut down and tear up the road to install the traditional loops under the roadway that measure traffic. Caroll says its’ called the “AxleLight” laser system and is able to tell the type of vehicle by the number of wheels and the distance between each wheel.
AN ambulance rescue helicopter has been attacked by laser pointers while transporting a badly injured man to hospital in Sydney’s southwest.
The crew had to alter their route to approach Liverpool Hospital safely, after a laser beam was pointed at the helicopter last night, a NSW Ambulance spokesman said.
Imagining dinosaurs in the flesh is tricky since the prehistoric subjects died out some 65 million years ago, but a new tool is helping to fill out the skeleton of T. rex and one of the largest-known duckbill dinosaurs, among other beasts.
Paleontologists used laser imaging technology called LiDAR for the first time to create 3-D computer models of five dinosaurs, including two of Tyrannosaurus rex, a spiny predator called Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, the ostrich-like Strutiomimum sedens and the plant-eating Edmontosaurus annectens, a hadrosaur or duckbill dinosaur.
High-powered laser pointers that have been used to distract aircraft pilots will be banned in South Australia.
Lower-power pointers that are used in boardrooms will be exempt from the ban.
The Attorney-General, Michael Atkinson, says high-powered lasers will be a prohibited weapon, attracting up to two years’ imprisonment or a $10,000 fine.
“We want to stop idiots misusing laser pointers, high-powered laser pointers, that is laser pointers generating more than one milliwatt of power,” he said.
“We’ve had to consult widely because there are legitimate uses for laser pointers which generate less than one milliwatt of power and indeed there are some legitimate uses for those that generate more than a miliwatt, surveyors, astronomers and also for engineers.”
