Wicked Lasers has been making high-powered handheld lasers in China since 2003, and I finally got my pyromaniac responsible hands on one. While playing with the Wicked Fusion for several days, I tried to burn plenty of things (yes, including myself… real tattoos are expensive, y’know!), but I had the most fun pointing out stars and buildings. Okay, that’s not true: I spent most of the time just looking at the beam as it illuminated the dust floating around my apartment. It’s almost like having a tiny lightsaber.

Here’s an account of my first handheld laser experience — thankfully, I’m not writing this from a jail cell.

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An egghead at Raboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands’ third biggest party school) has published a paper describing a method of using dynamic, polarized light to write and retrieve hard drive data at blazingly fast speeds – up to 100x faster than conventional hard drive speeds.

Conventional hard drives use magnets to read and write data. This new method would use lasers to write data to magnetic hard drives, eschewing the need to develop a radically different storage technology.

One current roadblock is the fact that laser beam’s footprint is about 5 microns wide, much larger than other data tranferral methods. Daniel Stanciu (the aforementioned egghead) claims that they should be able to reduce the laser’s footprint to about 10 nanometers within a decade.

All the jargon aside, what does this mean for you as a consumer? A different egghead, Julius Hohlfeld of Seagate Research, says…

“This is one of the most exciting stories in magnetics. Lots of other researchers have tried to employ polarized laser light to write data but everyone failed because the magnetic alloys they used for the storage medium did not work. But the disk made of gadolinium, iron, and cobalt that Stanciu’s team used has succeeded. The next challenge will be to find a relatively cheap laser technology that can fire pulses lasting less than 100 femtoseconds.”

Long story, short: in a decade, you might have a super fast hard drive. Exciting indeed!

Lighting a Fire Under Hard Drives [ScienceMag.org]

HairMax Laser Comb [Product Page, via Ubergizmo]

Perhaps this is what Paul Simon was talking about when he sang about “lasers in the the jungle” — a crazy-powerful 95 milliwatt green laser from Wicked Lasers. I’ve seen these things before and my neighbor even shot mine up at a passing helicopter, causing us all to scamper into the house and cower in the basement. However, Oliver at MobileCrunch did no such thing and instead sings its praises.

I actually drove to Vegas from LA during my review and was able to stop a few times along the way where there was very little light pollution. I’d heard that a bright enough laser could extend visibly far enough into the sky that only the curvature of the earth would cause the beam to be obscured. I now believe that fact to be true – though the specifications on the Nexus claim that it is only visible for 38 miles.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the lasers began to take hold.

Can’t Get a Plasma Rifle? Wicked Lasers Nexus Model is the Next Best Thing [MobileCrunch]
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Phil Torrone is really the only guy I know who does what everybody else dreams of doing — playing with lasers, making rockets and jetting around the world telling people how to build stuff. Here is some video of the etching laser in action.

One more after the jump…
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