Beam me up. More fun with death rays.
Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. 'Transparent aluminium' previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion...
The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is ten billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world... The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city. -- Pysorg.com
In other news, scientists now believe the probability of some form of microbial life existing now on Mars is now non-negligible. Scientific American.
Now all we have to do is put an X-Ray laser on a Death Star and get it to Mars before the microbes evolve the ability to use The Force.
The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is ten billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world... The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city. -- Pysorg.com
In other news, scientists now believe the probability of some form of microbial life existing now on Mars is now non-negligible. Scientific American.
Now all we have to do is put an X-Ray laser on a Death Star and get it to Mars before the microbes evolve the ability to use The Force.