A lesson in laser safety from the Salk Institute

I'm in San Diego through Monday, attending the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. This pic comes direct from the lab tours I went on Wednesday afternoon. Starting Thursday, I'll be updating you with highlights from this annual gathering of the world's largest general scientific society. Or, at least, the highlights I get to see. One of the wonderful/frustrating things about AAAS is that there always seems to be at least three lectures I'd love to hear running simultaneously. Together, we'll learn some cool stuff this week—and still only scratch the surface.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

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rstoner

Is there any interest in a boing boing/AAAS meetup one of the nights? Possibly following the ‘Annals of Improbable Research’ on Friday.
IWood

Crap like this is why I’ve had coherent beam-scattering sclerae installed. Anti-personnel non-lethal directed energy weapons? Fuck that shit.
fullerenedream

We had the same warning sign on the door of the physics lab I worked in at Dalhousie :)
frydicecream

I was wondering why there were so many people walking around the Salk campus yesterday when I left work. I just assumed it was some UCSD tour or something. Which labs did you go into, if you know their abbreviated names like PBL or MNL.
Ranting Nerd

I kept trying to put that up outside my lab room in grad school but a squeamish labmate kept ripping it down. (My version of the sign was complete with a retinal scan of someone who’d gotten retinal burn — and man that took a long time to print out on the crappy color printers of the time.)

Good times….