OTTAWA - Trust a Canadian weather instrument to find snow. Even on Mars.
A Canadian university’s laser aboard a NASA Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds about four kilometres above the landing site, and vaporizing before reaching the ground.
“Nothing like this has ever been seen on Mars,” said Jim Whiteway, of York University in Toronto, the lead scientist for the Canadian weather station on the Mars Phoenix lander. “We’ll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground.”
Mars Phoenix landed in May at the edge of the Martian Arctic to investigate the soil, and especially to dig for water, in the form of ice.
Ice appears and disappears near the Martian North Pole as the seasons change. But how the moisture moves around is unclear, especially as Mars has very little atmosphere — less than one per cent of what Earth has.
Canada’s share of Phoenix includes lidar, a cousin of radar that uses lasers to scan the sky. Until now, it had found clouds, fog and blowing sand.
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If you were wandering round Bankside on Saturday night you might have been bemused to see words appearing on the facade of Tate Modern and wondering if someone spiked your drink. But there was nothing to fear as it was just MC Yan, who rocked China by being the first to use Chinese characters in his graffiti, bringing Laser tagging, the new, high-tech future of graffiti, to London.
Part of the Red Mansion Foundation’s Down Town Production exhibition. Graffiti produced by MC Yan, a conceptual artist, graffiti artist and rapper.
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Airline pilots have warned a serious crash is “likely” unless people are stopped from shining laser beams into the cockpits of planes during landing.
The British Airline Pilots’ Association (Balpa) said beams dazzled pilots and users were “effectively playing Russian roulette” with passengers’ lives.
Dozens of incidents have occurred during 2008, with some pilots handing controls over to co-pilots, Balpa said.
A pilot was temporarily blinded by a laser at Cardiff Airport in August.
Planes have also been targeted while landing at Newcastle, Exeter, Norwich and Heathrow airports.
Dave Reynolds, flight safety officer for Balpa, said a pilot would know his aircraft had been targeted when a spot of light began skipping around the flight deck.
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Interested in spicing up your home with a piece of quality art? No? How about a piece of insane and sort of creepy art? Yes? Great! Have I got the item for you.
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If you are anything like me, you think that laser pointers pretty much begin and end with the dinky little red-light pointers low-level execs buy for twenty bucks at the local electronics store. Oh how wrong I was.
Wicked Lasers is one of the world’s leading makers of laser pointers. Their laser pointers are the real deal. When I first heard about Wicked Lasers, I just thought “cool, a new toy.” My “new toy” arrived in a velvet-lined case. Fancy. The sleek, shiny metal case of the laser is roughly the size of a ballpoint pen and runs off two AAA batteries. Of course, upon receiving a new toy, I just had to play. I waved the laser pointer around a bit, marveling at the intense green beam (but never looking directly into the light).
Then I did my research and realized this was no toy. I have the Elite 125, which is one of the most powerful lasers Wicked Lasers offers.
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This is how the U.S. Army developed the first combat laser in the 1960s and 70s, but refused to deploy it because it was considered too cruel. It all started with the Advanced Propulsion Technology Branch of the Propulsion Directorate in the Army Missile Command at Redstone Arsenal in the 1960’s. Their mission was the development of advanced propulsion concepts such as liquid monopropellants, bipropellants, hybrids, air breathing etc. for application to Army missiles.
One morning, after a staff meeting with the Generals, Dr. Walter Wharton announced, “Men I’ve got a new and unusual project for you. It’s not propulsion, but needs all the technology and skills of propulsion. Here’s the pitch: Over the past two years, one of our Army contractors has failed to demonstrate chemical lasing in a hardware device.
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The river Thames is about to become the latest unlikely venue for conceptual art. A new annual exhibition, launching next week, is to place a series of seven installations by artists from around the world along the river’s banks and bridges, with the aim of transforming the viewer’s experience of the Thames.
The works will form a trail from Blackfriars bridge to Tower bridge, which viewers can follow on a free boat tour. Starting the trail is Ghost Bridge by the British light artist Keith Bowler - a light installation that emerges as night falls, recreating the old Blackfriars railway bridge with lasers.
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A collaboration of four UK partners could boost laser manufacturing and biomedical imaging technology within the UK. The Technology Strategy Board is spending part of its £7m fund for lighting, lasers and displays on a research project to improve the systems used for imaging biomedical samples.
The WhiteLase project addresses the need for high-brightness, efficient visible laser illumination sources by developing advanced white light (super- continuum) fibre lasers and their applications within biomedical imaging.
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Convera Corporation (Nasdaq: CNVR) (http://www.convera.com), a leading provider of vertical
search services for publishers, today announced the launch of search.optics.org (http://search.optics.org), a vertical search site for the global photonics industry, in conjunction with IOP Publishing.
“search.optics.org is a dedicated search engine that allows optics professionals to pinpoint useful information quickly and easily,” said Susan Curtis, publisher of search.optics.org. “Our community of optical scientists and engineers need to find the most relevant information available on public websites to complement the premium information that we provide to them through our magazines and websites.”
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Microsoft has unveiled a new peripheral system which it said will work on nearly any surface.
The company claims that its new BlueTrack mice and keyboards are more versatile, accurate and rugged than the current generation of laser-guided peripherals.
The heart of the new system is the use of a larger beam and an updated optical system.
The blue beam is said to be some four times larger than the current laser tracking system, allowing the BlueTrack mouse to work on surfaces such as carpets which had previously been difficult.
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