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.”
Wikileaks has released many quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress, which should be in public domain legally. Among as much as 6,780 reports, I find 3 of them are on lasers. You might be interested in reading them.
Designer Eugene Cheong brings you “Maestro,” laser and mp3 guitar learning aid. You put mp3s into the device via SD card, the songs are converted into guitar tablature, and the tablature is projected, with laser lights, onto the guitar fretboard as you play.
The system utilizes a ceiling-mounted laser pointer, an I/O bridge with servo module, two servos, a webcam, an X10 module and a buzzer. When the buzzer sounds, the dog is alerted that it is time to play. Using the iPhone, the user can turn the lights on and off and move the laser around the room for the dog to chase. When you have finished damaging your dog’s mind, the buzzer can be sounded a second time to indicate that playtime is over.
Seventy-six years after the invention of the modern sprinkler helped revolutionize farming, a professor of environmental engineering is pointing a laser beam across an alfalfa crop in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, looking for a better way to conserve the millions of gallons of water sprayed each year on thirsty crops.
Jan Kleissl and a handful of his students at UC San Diego have rigged up a contraption called a large aperture scintillometer to study exactly how much irrigation water is lost to evaporation and the peak times that water disappears.
Although the Airborne Laser (ABL) was fired from a stationary plane at a target on the ground just a few metres away, the test marked a milestone for the weapon, developed by aerospace firms Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
So starts a recent article on airborne laser from New Scientist. The most useful information for me is the following time line.
It took Norma Margeson a few minutes to learn to control the skinny metal robot. But instead of viewing it as a machine, she soon warmed up to it as a companion.
Researchers have uncovered a pond-sized crater in the woods of central Alberta, Canada, carved out by a meteor that slammed into Earth about 1100 years ago. The technique they used to pinpoint the pit–a laser take on radar–figures to help scientists find evidence of hundreds of similar impacts that have remained hidden until now.
Transport Canada is trying to find out who has been pointing laser pointers at airplane pilots over the last few days.
There have been at least six instances recently where pilots landing at Montreal’s Trudeau airport have been distracted by a green laser pointer.
The device, which can be purchased for $100 and has a range of three kilometres, can blind airline pilots, so Transport Canada considers it a serious safety risk.
