A laser that can scan a crowd and identify people who have been handling explosives is being secretly tested at British airports and railway stations.
The device - no bigger than a shoe box - could also be used by police and MI5 surveillance teams to identify Islamic terrorists outside mosques or community centres.
The laser can pick out suspects in large crowds and highlight explosive residue on their clothing and luggage.
It could also be used to guard against terrorists targeting the 2012 Olympics in London.
The Explosive Residue Detection system can be covertly attached to CCTV systems and automatically highlights people who may have been handling explosives or who recently fired a weapon.
Professor John Tyrer, of Loughborough University, who helped to develop the equipment, said: ‘When you handle an explosive, the chemicals -such as Semtex and TNT - leave traces. With this technology we are able to see this telltale residue and identify possible suspects.
‘Using laser technology we can see the explosives on people’s clothes, on their hands or on items like backpacks such as those used by the July 7 London bombers.’
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Laser illuminated HDTV has arrived, in the form of a 10” deep 65” display. It represents Mitsubishi’s effort to capture the top rung of home theater enthusiasts. For $7000 retail price, the L65-A90’s will treat you to a level of performance that exceeds any display HD Guru has tested to date in terms color gamut, brightness and low power consumption. In addition, its black levels were as deep as the darkest display previously reviewed. Complimenting the TV’s black level is its ability to resolve dark detail and not bury it (into black) as some other displays do.
Overall the L65A90 rates in the stratosphere of top displays, specifically the Pioneer Kuro Elite plasmas, the LED backlit Samsung 950 LCDs and the 65” Panasonic Premiere TH-65VX100.
Mitsubishi has announced it will sell additional models in the future, including a 73” in 2009. Lasers have been demonstrated by other companies for use in LCD flat panels and front projectors and while Mitsubishi remains hush-hush regarding other future products, after seeing the L65-A90, HD Guru has no doubt that we will be seeing a line of LaserVue HDTVs in the not to distant future.
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WERDER Bremen goalkeeper Christian Vander has become the latest player to be targeted by a fan with a laser pen during the Champions League clash with Panathinaikos.
Greek football has been plagued with such incidents in recent time, and Vander admitted he knew it was coming during the 2-2 draw.
It did not surprise me – I have heard about these attacks from a friend in Greece,” he said. “It seems to be fashionable here.”
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Four renowned symposia featuring the presentations of 3275 research papers by the brightest minds in the photonics industry, 85 conferences, 75 courses, 1100 exhibitors and a special two-day Career Fair are expected to make SPIE Photonics West 2009 the largest and most successful conference to date when it takes place Jan. 24-29 at the San Jose Convention Center.
Photonics West will present the latest innovations in therapeutic lasers, nano and biophotonics, biosensors, spectroscopic and microscopic imaging, and biomedical optics components, products, instrumentation and applications to the more than 17,500 paricipants. The highly regarded technical program, featuring presentations from top academic and industry researchers, is seeing 10 percent growth over last year, according to organizer SPIE, with more than 3300 scheduled presentations.
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In the past two and a half thousand years, the temples of the Acropolis have suffered fire, bombing and earthquake. Now, scientists are trying to save them from a new modern enemy: pollution.
Standing on a hilltop at the centre of Athens, a city of 4 million people, the Acropolis’ elaborately sculptured stones have fallen prey to a film of black crust from car exhaust fumes, industrial pollution, acid rain and fires.
A team of Greek engineers and restorers are using an innovative laser technology system to clean the surface of the ancient monuments, uncovering colours and ornamentation hidden for decades.
“It is very serious,” said Maria Ioannidou, director of the Acropolis Restoration Service, of the pollution. “It destroys sculptural, structural and painting details. One of our aims is to regain these cultural details using new technology.”
For years the team tested 40 different methods, including mechanical and chemical processes, to find the safest solutions to restore the white of the marbles without losing detail.
The winner was the brainchild of Crete’s Foundation for Research and Technology, which created a system that uses two laser beams of infrared and ultraviolet rays simultaneously.
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The Defense Department is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop lasers that can blast rockets, artillery, and mortars out of the sky. By the end of the year, military researchers promise, those lasers should be at battlefield strength.
But a new report from the National Academies of Science say it’ll take at least another $100 million more than planned to put together a real-life laser defense. And the lasers may have to be 400% stronger than previously thought.
The Academies’ panel loves the idea of the lasers on the battlefield. Such a “weapon system that could counter RAM [rockets, artillery, mortars] would be a tool of national importance. If one existed today, it would be in great demand in many places around the world,” the report notes.
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US arms goliath Boeing is pleased to announce it has been awarded an extra $30m by the US Air Force to keep its Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) raygun aeroplane in operation, following the original “technology demonstration” deal under which it was built. However, the technology appears yet to be demonstrated, as no inflight lasing has taken place.
The ATL consists of a 20-tonne weapons system installed in a C-130 medium cargo plane. It shouldn’t be confused with Boeing’s other, even more enormous laser-cannon aircraft, the jumbo-jet-based ICBM-toasting Airborne Laser (ABL). Boeing announced that the ATL had been completed last year, and said the first ground blasts had been fired in May - promising airborne zappings “this year”. Every significant ATL milestone, in fact, has been publicly broadcast so far.
Nonetheless, before revealing any airborne rayings, Boeing now says that it has already been given cash to keep the ATL available so that military customers can try it out for a while and see what it might be good for.
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Minuscule traces of cells can be detected in a mineral likely present on Mars, a new study shows. The results, obtained using a technique developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, could help mission scientists choose Martian surface samples with the most promise for yielding signs of life.
INL’s instrument blasts off tiny bits of mineral and looks for chemical signatures of molecules commonly found in cells. While other methods require extensive sample handling, this analysis relies on a “point-and-shoot” laser technique that preserves more of the rock and reduces contamination risk. In the current online issue of the peer-reviewed Geomicrobiology Journal, the researchers report they could detect biomolecules at concentrations as low as 3 parts per trillion.
High sensitivity is crucial for NASA’s search for life on Mars, says INL scientist Jill Scott, whose team collaborated with researchers at the University of Montana-Missoula on the study.
“The worst-case scenario is a false negative,” Scott says. “If you’re just missing stuff, that would be devastating.”
While other techniques also have achieved parts-per-trillion sensitivity, they often require scientists to first extract the organic cell remnants from the mineral. This type of preparation can use up large amounts of sample and potentially introduce contamination.
INL’s method is based on a technique called laser desorption mass spectroscopy. By focusing a laser beam on a spot less than one-hundredth the width of a pencil point, the researchers can knock microscopic fragments off the mineral.
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Engineers in China have built a laser digital cinema projector
The first laser TV is set to go on sale soon in North America, but engineers from the Academy of Opto-Electronics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Phoebus Vision Opto-Electronics, in Beijing, say they’ve already brought the eye-popping color of laser-generated images to the big screen with a digital cinema projector that uses lasers as the light source. The team combined several lasers with the MEMS technology used in digital projectors today. They describe the device in September’s Journal of Display Technology .
The technology “will be the next generation of cinema display,” says Yong Bi, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chief technology officer at Phoebus, which is commercializing the projector. However, others in the industry question whether laser cinema will be ready in time and inexpensive enough to catch much of the market.
Bi’s projector replaces the white light and color filters used in today’s digital projectors with several red, green, and blue lasers. The lasers illuminate a digital micromirror device, a MEMS chip invented by Texas Instruments. The chip has an array of microscopic mirrors that each correspond to a pixel on the screen. The chip turns the pixels on or off by tilting the mirrors to direct light either toward or away from the screen.
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The Dreamhive animation studio provided dynamic music video background imagery for Madonna’s recent “Hard Candy” world tour, visually backing up two of the singer’s latest music hits.
For Madonna’s “Hard Candy” world tour and promotional appearances, The Dreamhive created striking animated background imagery for two of Madonna’s most popular songs — “4 Minutes” and “Give it 2 Me”. The imagery was then played during Madonna’s exciting stage performances of the songs during the Hard Candy promotional and concert tours.
For “4 Minutes,” The Dreamhive created footage with a flashing countdown clock that paid homage to Madonna’s music video for the song. Using reference images from the original music video, The Dreamhive created a dynamic CGI version of the practical digital countdown clock, which they then rendered using custom real-time shading code. Additionally, The Dreamhive re-created and animated the “black onyx” effect element seen in the music video, and also generated new effect passes that were then composited into live-action footage shot during the original video production.
“It was a terrific and extremely cool experience, to be adding our visual effects into footage from the set of the music video,” comments Wes Grandmont III, Senior CG Supervisor at The Dreamhive. The Dreamhive’s images mimicked the strong pulse and irresistible hook of the song, and as the images played behind Madonna onstage for the tour, Justin Timberlake then frequently joined the singer for the rest of the “4 Minutes” piece.
For the disco anthem “Give it 2 Me,” The Dreamhive created CG laser work that had an evocative, poppy, 80’s look and feel, and which combined with a live laser show to create a pulse of green and pink light beams flickering disco-style across the dancing crowd.
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