Dragon's Eye News

I'd seen mention of this group before but never a description of how their laser tagging actually works.  Until I read the article in the NYT that is.

As Mr. Powderly neared the museum’s entrance, he jumped off the cycle and pointed it toward a bare stretch on a garage door across the street. Mr. Roth pulled a laser pointer from his pocket, and as he moved the laser’s green dot across the wall, a line of what looked like thick, drippy paint lit up its surface, roughly following the motion of his hand.

This actually sounds pretty darn cool.

Joining the crowd of cyclists, Mr. Powderly followed them as they moved through the honking streets of Brooklyn. In search of a spot to project their graffiti, they settled on the handball courts of McCarren Park in Greenpoint.

Mr. Powderly positioned the cycle to face the court’s gray concrete wall. Within a few minutes, someone had drawn a detailed sketch of a bicycle, and another person had traced an outline of an American flag.

Do they wear dancing costumes?

Reuters reports that NIST has developed what may someday become a building block for quantum computing.

Suspended in laser light, thousands of atoms pair up and dance, each moving in perfect counterpoint to its partner. Porto's team isolated pairs of atoms in a lattice of light formed by six laser beams all fixed on one point, suspending the atoms in a uniform pattern. "There is no container. It is levitated by the laser beams."

It won't be coming any sooner than the last time I mentioned researchers teleporting atoms but researchers in Australia have proposed a way to teleport atoms from one location to another.

The full paper is available here as well as an animated description here.

What differentiates our scheme from what is usually termed quantum teleportation is that our scheme does not require the sender and receiver to share entangled states, as there is no measurement step involved in sending the information.

In this scheme the sender and receiver require a reservoir of extremely cold atoms, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).

BEC is a state of matter that occurs when atoms become very cold, (about 100 billionths of a degree about absolute zero).

Due to a phenomenon known as Bose-Enhancement, all the atoms like to act the same way. This causes the atoms to act as one macroscopic matterwave, rather than a collection of individual atoms.

The proposed European High Power Laser Energy Research (Hiper) facility -- a device intended to demonstrate the feasibility of laser-driven fusion as an energy source -- is entering the preparation phase after completion of a two-year study by an international team of scientists.

As reported by Photonics.com

Fusion energy is an attractive, environmentally clean power source using sea water as its principal source of fuel. No greenhouse gases and long-lived radioactive waste are produced. Demonstration of the scientific proof of principle is expected between 2010 and 2012 as part of an ongoing international program. What is now needed is to move from the scientific proof of principle stage to a commercial reactor. HiPER provides the critical next step along this route.