5mW Green Laser Pointers

You probably know that a laser pointer can transport data through the air across a room. But the question right now is: have you tried yourself? Well, to save you time and money in order to prove that it works, a team of engineers at the National Taipei University of Technology in Taiwan have successfully transmitted data using red and green laser pointers. The engineers replaced the standard batteries of the laser pointers with a power source that switched each laser on and off – approximately 500 million times a second.

They then connected a 500 Mbps data stream into each pointer and pointed both to a photodiode receptor/ light-sensitive detector, 10 meters away. The transmitted signals are then amplified and mutiplexed to produce 1 Gbps of data stream. After processing the results, it was found that the signals had less than one error per billion bits. According to New Scientist, it’s a sign of high-quality transmission.

The entire project costs about $600 – quite a price for a laser project. Hai-Han Lu, the project manager, said that hobbyists can do this project in their home, which means that you can do this too. Lu also attributes the red and green laser pointers for their cheap price and properties. While this technology is going to work on long-range transmissions, the Taiwanese engineers have proven the technology to be quite useful indoors. So, why not try building your own prototype or make this as your DIY project? Who knows, yours might even be better.

Here is a cool way of turning your iPhone into a handy laser pointer; it requires the Smart Dot kit that fits into the devices 3.5 mm audio jack and a free app downloadable from the iTunes Store. Once you have all of this, you are good to go, just simply point and press the Smart Dot button on the iPhone screen, to point out just about anything you want, but use with care as these devices are not toys.The app link is http://itunes.apple.com/app/smart-dot/id505932209?mt=8

Sports fans in Indonesia are outraged after members of the national football team complained of being distracted by fans with hand-held laser beams during a crucial match in Malaysia.

The issue dominated social networking sites Monday, briefly becoming the top item worldwide on Twitter. Malaysia’s sports minister said he is embarrassed by what had happened. Indonesia’s Antara news service said President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has asked officials to lodge a formal protest.

Indonesia’s players walked off the field for several minutes in protest before going on to a 3-0 loss Sunday evening in the first leg of the ASEAN Football Federation final. They said Malaysian fans were directing laser pens into the faces of players, including the goalkeeper, at key moments.

Malaysian Sports Minister Ahmad Shabery Cheek said he was “not happy at all” about his countrymen’s unsporting behavior, adding that he had been embarrassed in front of his Indonesian guests.

The issue registered among the most popular topics on Twitter after the match, with the phrase “malaysiacheaterlaser” ranking number one for almost an hour.

Antara reported that Yudhoyono, who watched the contest on television, telephoned Indonesia’s sports minister while the match was still in progress to instruct him to lodge a formal protest.

The second leg of the final takes place Wednesday in Jakarta

The largest laser in the world was turned on for a fraction of a second last week — and it unleashed the most powerful laser blast in history.
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) — a laser test facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. — turned on its 192 laser beams for a brief instant on March 15, unleashing a record-setting 1.875-megajoule blast into a target chamber.
The lasers were combined, gathered and focused through a series of lens into a 2.03-megajoule shot, said Ed Moses, NIF director — a record for the facility.
That pulse of energy lasted for just 23 billionths of a second, yet it generated 411 trillion watts of power, NIF said — 1,000 times more than the entire United States consumes at any given instant.
“It’s a remarkable demonstration of the laser from the standpoint of its energy, its precision, its power, and its availability,” Moses told Nature magazine.
But it’s barely half the battle. NIF hopes to dramatically increase the power of the laser shots by the end of year, intending to ultimately use the facility to harness the energy reaction that occurs naturally within the sun: fusion.
“This event marks a key milestone in the National Ignition Campaign’s drive toward fusion ignition,” Moses said.
In fission, atoms are split and the massive energy released is captured. The NIF aims for fusion, the ongoing energy process in the sun and other stars where hydrogen and helium nuclei are continually fusing and releasing enormous amounts of energy. In the ignition facility, beams of light converge on pellets of hydrogen isotopes to create a similar, though controlled, micro-explosion.
As the beams move through a series of amplifiers, their energy increases exponentially. From beginning to end, the beams’ total energy grows from one-billionth of a joule to a potential high of four million joules, NIF said — a factor of more than a quadrillion.
And it all happens in about five millionths of a second.
Because the laser is on for the merest fraction of a second, it costs little to operate — between $5 and $20 per blast, said spokeswoman Lynda Seaver. But the potential is enormous.
NIF’s managers hope by the end of the year to reach a break-even point, where the energy released is equal to if not greater than the energy that went into the blast.
“We have all the capability to make it happen in fiscal year 2012,” Moses told Nature.
Experts aren’t so sure, citing challenges that NIF and other types of fusion have had in the past.
Glen Wurden, a plasma physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, told Nature scientists should be wary of putting all their eggs in the laser basket.
“It’s premature right now,” he told the magazine, citing the troubles that have plagued a competing approach to fusion and its flagship project in France.

​Some yahoo with a laser pointer shined his beam into the left side of a 737’s cockpit around 6:20 p.m. Sunday at Lambert St. Louis International Airport.

The plane was still five miles out and 2,000 feet up at the time, but details on which airline owns the plane and what direction the plane was arriving from are being withheld, presumably to discourage other assholes from using the information to discern where they, too, can get a hard-on while potentially temporarily blinding a pilot and endangering passengers.

Look, morons, flying is difficult enough at this point.

There are security scans with long lines, you have to arrive two hours early to allow for all the time it takes for a frustrated TSA agent to explain to some dipstick that you can’t bring a whole bottle of shampoo with you anymore while we all stand around in our socks with our pants falling down, and the last time I went to Lambert to pick up someone there were a pair of cops pulling us over to search vehicles and check ID’s before you can even get into the damn parking garage. Keep this kind of ignorant shit up and we’ll end up having to park three miles from the airport and all ride a prison bus while in our underwear to the actual airport. Jackasses.

We have all seen cats go crazy while chasing laser pointers, but did you know fish will act the same way? This puffer fish is hungry for some delicious red dot…

A curious parrot has some fun with this laser pointer. It would be pretty cool to have a pet like that!The little parrot is so cute!