At heart, a laser is really just an electron that's been pushed into releasing a little energy, in the form of a particle of light—a photon. The atom that electron comes from doesn't have to be anything fancy, or toxic. In fact, it can even be an atom of something you might like to put in your mouth.
Edible-laser pioneer Theodor Hänsch once said, "Anything will lase if you hit it hard enough," and to prove his point, he partnered with Arthur Schawlow in 1970 to build lasers out of a gelatin-and-dye mixture very similar to Jell-O.
That delightful fact is from a story in Popular Mechanics, written by Olivia Koski. It's all about edible lasers, specifically the steps involved in building a laser out of a gin n' tonic. Naturally, there's a catch. Turns out, the gin n' tonic laser is not the world's most efficient—a blast from a 20-watt carbon dioxide laser stimulates the electrons in the drink into emitting only 0.00001 watts of laser light. Which is also invisible to the naked eye.
But still, isn't it nice to know that "Pew pew" and "Nom nom" are concepts that can be combined?
Via Dr. Skyskull
Image is actually a demonstration of quinine in a gin n' tonic fluorescing under a black light. If you don't have patience/carbon-dioxide laser to pull off a gin n' tonic laser, this would make a nice substitute party trick. Some rights reserved by Todd Huffman.
I’ve had quite a few fun afternoons playing with dry ice from making spooky fog in the kitchen to exploding plastic bottles in the yard. But I’ve never had the opportunity to pour hot lava over dry ice. In this video, the lava is 1400 °C and the dry ice is -78C°. So cool! And […]
A Boston University team have developed an acoustic, 3D-printed metamaterial whose topology is such that it reflects 94% of human-audible sound; the researchers' demonstration involves inserting a ring of this stuff in a PVC pipe and blasting a speaker down one end: light and air emerges from the other end, but sound does not.
Scientists Lior Appelbaum and David Zada in Israel publish new proof that sleep serves to help our brains repair damage.
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Big systems need tight security – and the experts who can implement it. Cisco Networking Systems are the go-to providers for network infrastructure, but maintaining it takes a lot of up-to-date knowledge. If you want that knowledge right from the source, there’s an online course that can get you certified painlessly: The Foundational Cisco CCNA […]
Computer slowing down? There are a ton of reasons why that might be, especially if your unit has a few years on it. Junk files and programs can accumulate over time, some even left over from otherwise uninstalled software. This virtual debris can slow your PC down dramatically, but there’s a surprisingly quick fix. Lauded […]
