- Happy Birthday, Lasers: Wired.com's Best Laser Stories
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: Lasers are like your favorite uncle who can do no wrong. You know, the one who's always hip to the latest technology, does amazing magic tricks at all the family dinners, always photographs well, and has more than once saved baby Med-Tech from a burning house of boring. All the other technologies wish they were he, and Wired.com readers openly admit he's their favorite. So in celebration of one of our greatest news topics here at Wired.com, we've selected a compilation of the best recent laser appearances on our site. Thanks for the memories, Big L. (Have your own favorite laser news item? Let us know in the comments.) Left: Texans Build World's Most Powerful Laser Scientists have switched on the world's most powerful laser, which for one-trillionth of a second is 2,000 times more powerful than all the power plants in the United States. The laser's output tops a petawatt, which is a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) watts of power. (More in next slide) Photo: Courtesy Mikael Martinez and Texas Petawatt Project, led by Todd Ditmire : (Continued from previous slide) The power of a laser, its output in watts, is determined by the energy of the laser pulse, measured in joules, divided by its duration, measured in seconds (tiny fractions of a second in this case). view original article
Fri, 16 May 2008 06:00:00 +0200 - more Wired Top Stories articles
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