Slashdot Mirror
Solar Surgery
Chris writes "Scientists in Israel have developed a device based on a concave dish that intensifies sunlight by a factor of 15,000. By focusing this light into an optical fiber and delivering it to an operating theatre, the team says its solar-surgery setup promises to be a low-cost alternative to laser surgery." Everyone who used to operate on GI Joe figures with a magnifying glass is cheering for this to be commercially successful.
I used to cook bugs with my magnifying glass.
"I live the smell of burning ants in the morning."
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
Well, aren't you the big man.
And what happens when it's cloudy?
Now I only have to hope my surgery doesn't get rained out.
--
"That's Homer Simpson sir. One of your drones from secotr 7G."
Middle of surgery a cloud rolls in front of sun.
Doctor:Oh shit!
Nurse:Doctor, it looks like we won't have sunlight for another 20 mintues.
Patient:Can I get some more anestesia then?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The bargain basement is not the place to hunt for surgeons.
Alas, Babylon.
Everyone who used to operate on GI Joe figures with a magnifying glass is cheering for this to be commercially successful.
:)
And average-joe affordable...
**runs to dig out old GI Joes**
Snooze and you lose your sushi.
The ants of the world have finally gotten their revenge on us all. Repent!
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Next time a bug gets in your eye you can hit it with the magnifying sunlight technique.
ouch....
Patient: Doctor, I need the operation NOW! I'm going to die!
Doctor: The weatherman says no sunshine for a week! Sorry 'bout that!
apparently it wasn't then?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Humm... Sun Light? Does anyone else see a problem with this? This machine sounds like the Skin Cancer 2000.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
The Solex will be mine!
Scaramanga
Since operations now can only take place on sunny days, surgeons won't be able to golf as much.
You can take the hubble space telescope, point it at the sun, then put whatever you want to nuke in front of the part that views the images...
Numba fifteen! suck it, beeyotch!
After all, cutting things in pieces with maginifying glasses is an age old rite of passage.
Cheaper than Frikin laser beams!
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
Sounds like a great technology, but I'd rather not have to check weather.com before I went into surgery.
I'm sure you'll all slam me if I'm wrong,
but doesn't laser surgery use specify frequencies of light to localise the burning amongst other things?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
if you live anywhere but Seattle.
Go away.
This is a story with significant economical and scientific impact.
Maybe it should have been filed under "Science" and not a front page story, but nonetheless it's got significance.
Unlike *your* post...
"Sometimes the truth is stupid." - Lawrence, creator of Prime Intellect
When do we get to see the real-world equivalent of that?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
what the hell are you talking about? I do my operations in the microwave, and the GI joes don't complaint either.
If the world is in as bad a state as the picture you are trying to paint, why not end it all now. If you bit down on the cyandide capsule now, you'd be dead before you read to the end of this comment. Then we'd all be able to discuss laser eye surgery in peace.
I used a "
page magnifier when I was a kid....even on a cloudy day you could start a fire in about a second
this sig is deprecated
Looks like you are an idiot !
Doesn't seem to be any provision for selecting wavelengths. But I suppose if it works, it works.
But if someone has access to this thing, they probably have access to scalpels as well. The question remains, is this evolved ant-burner better than a scalpel?
Soon we will see film of Palestinians running around with smoke coming from the seats of their pants as they try to walk past hospitals...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
This device could help in countries where electrical power in unreliable and highly expensive, especially in war zones where nothing is reliable.
Please mod parent up as insightful.
Soon, I will mount a Beowulf Cluster of these atop my observatory on the volcano in the park, and blackmail the city for one hundred billion dollars with my Death Ray!
Bwah-hah-hah!
They best be putting those giant "WARNING: Sunshine in use" sirens up everywhere they use this.. There's a reason we stay underground...
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
This is a great invention for Vegans...all their cooking must be done in the sun. Now they have a natural alternative to pollution-spewing lasers.
Maybe now I can finally get that extra-dark tan I want.
...
http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/games/showca rds/A/ant_city.html
are YOU the editor? why do you freaking care where its placed! damn you people and your anal retentivness
Funny you should mention ants.
There's an old film(1973) called phase IV that's exactly what your going on about!!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
It seems to me that the real importance of this is the ability to be able to have a mobile surgery suite that can be taken to places where reliable electrical power does not exist, or perhaps field surgical hospitals in disaster areas. And yes, that IS big news to the poster that suggested that this was somehow misdirected priorities.
What about the opposite?
A surge in sunlight (solar flare, whatever else)...
Doctor: Oh shit!
Nurse: Doctor, it looks like you've gone through the patient, and through the operating desk, and floor. And the blood is pouring down into the coffee vending machine on the next floor! (sorry about the morbidness of that last bit)
Patient: (not very well at the moment, and not saying anything)
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Despite all the jokes on here about it, I think it has applications in 3rd. world countries where reliable electrical power isn't a given.
In countries like the United States, every hospital has backup power generators, uninterrupted power supplies, and so forth -- on top of being connected to a pretty reliable power grid. I can't see someone choosing sunlight over an electrically powered laser beam for surgery. The greater initial expense of the laser is quickly offset by money lost on surgeries that couldn't be performed due to weather conditions.
In a relatively undeveloped country, however, this might make a lot of sense! It could give new options to doctors who simply couldn't count on a laser-based setup to function reliably, or couldn't afford it to begin with.
It is interesting to use concentrated sunlight for surgery, but electricity is still a more reliable way to generate light. I would imagine that some high intensity incandescent lights could be concentrated similar to sunlight, and woundn't be dependent on weather and the earth's rotation.
Where this technology might be useful is in remote areas where electricity is not available. But where electricity is plentiful, this technology seems more like a novelty, like "Sun Tea".
The article was a little short on details. I work for some ophthalmologists, and they use different types of lasers for different purposes. The way it was explained to me, the main differences were in the wavelengths they use. Excimer lasers are good for LASIK and such, while argon or krypton lasers are used for retinal repairs. Carbon dioxide produces an infrared laser for photocoagulation or for cutting.
Since it's still in the nascent stage,it will be interesting to see what they eventually come up with, especially if they can isolate different wavelengths.
FIRE, FIRE, FIRE, he he he he he he
That's cool.
Try actually thinking for yourself. It's quite refreshing.
Couldn't this technology be used to enhance the effciancy of solar power?
I tortured Joe too, but he's as much of a doll as Barbie, enough with the figures/figurines stuff!
To all you lame yuppy idiots replying with "oh its cloudy" here are some questions you should have asked
.........
1. What is the annual amount of sunshine where this is to be used? [hint: chances are its high]
2. What is the cost of this device and its use say versus the laser setup [hint: chances are their low]
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
sergon in the second grade. before i even knew it!! had i realized that i coulda made some serious lunch money. well, i guess i put in my pro-bono time.
if it took them a med-school degree to figure that out maybe i need to start a med-school too. after all, i know all about mag glasses and insects, GI joes... by grade school. talk about the brains!! now all i need to add is the damn optical fiber. I even injected frogs with ink. how many years before *they* figure that one??
You know, I have one simple request...and that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads. Now evidently, my cycloptic colleague informs me that that can't be done. Ah, can you please remind me what I pay you people for?
:)
Honestly, throw me a bone here...what do we have?
A giant magnifying glass....
Sorry couldn't resist
heck it's friday!!!
A couple months ago, CmdrTaco complained about not being mentioned for SciAm's web awards. With comments posted by michael like "Everyone who used to operate on GI Joe figures with a magnifying glass is cheering for this to be commercially successful." he really should give up. Slashdot is a well-crafted repository for myth and urban legend much more than a conduit for anything remotely resembling the truly scientific. That being said, what do you do when some clouds blow over your hospital while in surgery?
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Consider the possibilities this brings to field surgery in wartime or in developing countries.
With this invention, certain surgeries that are not possible in areas without electricity or expensive equipment can be performed.
It's not as though they will be replacing equipment in hospitals in a town near you...
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
"The researchers have used this concentrated output to perform ex-vivo solar surgery on chicken breasts and livers, which has shown promising results." Didn't Alton Brown already do this?
Doctor: "Nurse what happened? I just hit him with a small burst of sun light and he went up in flames."
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
That's just annoying when clouds blow over half way into the incision.
"Failure of Windows operating systems is extremely rare. If it happens, it is usually due to operating system file c
I think the obivous issues with clouds and night issues and such will cause some serious issues with the usefulness of this. What surgeon wants a tool that only works 4-6 hours during the day, assuming there aren't any clouds. I don't want my surgery to be schedualed depending on the weather.
All you need is a good size, unexpected, solar flare during an operation and 6 hours later the surgeons will be trying to explain to you why you now have a second rectum! :)
You smell something burning?.......
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Hibbert: This is such a beautiful day, I don't know why we don't operate outside more often.
[Tennis ball falls from sky into open wound, ECG flatlines]
Hibbert: Time of death.. 10:15.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Forget about ants, I want to cook chicken. Do you think that those guys were practicing on dead chicken breasts, and not eating the results?
I've always wondered about the idea of having natural light in a large building. I wonder if you could concentrate the light this much, it would be economical to run one 'super fiber' down 30 stories, then split it out. I would love being able to get natural light instead of the flourecent stuff...
There are limits, though. The thing that a laser is real good for is high precision procedures (think Lasik) that will still require all the infrastructure to operate robotic machinery (computer, electrical power, etc.) Also, the big health issue in real poor countries is access to sanitation, trained health care workers, and vaccines (on that last, say what you will about Bill Gates, but he recognizes his philanthropy is better spent on vaccines than PDAs and gizmos for third world hospitals - the knee juerk techno solution I would've lunged at).
Still, this is a great development. Will it completely change health care in poor coutnries? No. But it is another (very useful) tool in the toolbox for health care in poor countries.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
This is like a WMD against the ant community. (Then again, so is a shoe).
It burns!
I'm the stranger...posting to
We won't be able to perform that emergency bypass operation until daylight.
But we're in Alaska!
Yes Sir, and that means we only have to wait another couple of weeks.
Will they get a PATENT for this?
That's interesting. It seems like a mirror with a 200mm diameter, focused into a 1 mm should have a power of about:
Pi * 100mm(sq) = 3141 mm(sq) units of sunlight.
Though I know nothing of optics and how this power might be boosted.
I'd hate to be *under the knife* when a bird suddenly cuts off my source of light.
I'd also like to be assured, before they put me under, that they can complete the operation while the sun is still up. "I'm sorry sir... but there was this bird... and, well... and then the sun went down... and... well... oh well.".
Hmmm, how about,
Big Assed Laser (BAL)
Metric Shitload of Fiber-Optic Cable (MSFOC)
Assorted Routing and Switching Equipment to Get the Light Into the Operating Room(ARSEGLIOR)
Very Large Concave Piece of Strudy Glass or Other Opaque Substance(VLCPSGOOS)
Now, is the costOf(BAL) less than the costOf(MSFOC + VLCPSGOOS + ARSEGLIOR)
?
This will not be much cheaper...
Oh, it's YOU again. Go away.
My sig sucks.
Are they asserting that the cost of laser surgery is centered around power consumption? I hope not. A laser powerful enough to vaporize a small turkey will only required a few tens of watts. You could get that from a lawnmower engine. What they really need is something that is easy to use with lots of idiot proofing. The cost of laser surgery is in the 6 years of medical school before anyone touches the device.
Way to go Israel.
Here we suffered our only major terrorist attack and we can't seem to get our country back on track. Israel lives with attacks everyday, but they're still turning out cool shit.
These guys are hardcore.
Would someone doing a rain dance during surgery be charged with attempted murder?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
When you think about it, if the laser is hot enough you can use it in army situations. ie, soldier get's his arm shot off, you can use it to cotterize the wound and stop the bleeding. Heck, strong enough you could be packing a laser to blind the opposition or paint a building for a laser guided bomb. I suppose it's only good for day attacks, or at least perhaps they can use a bunch of those really strong search lights and hope for the best...
-AlPhAbEt
If all other news reporting had to stop except the top six news items of the day we wouldn't have HEARD of:
The bombing of the asprin plant in attempt to hit Bin Laden - precursor to the attack on the Twin Towers.
Israel's handling of the Palestinian Occupation and the "Suicide/Homicide Bombers" - until the middle east was ACTUALLY at open war (which they aren't quite, unless you count the bombers and the missiling of the Palestinian infrastructure as war).
The friction between India and Pakistan until they were at actual war (which they also aren't yet).
Argentina's financial troubles (or Japan's, or Korea's, or ...)
let alone what attacks the US might be THINKING about.
The way you hear about what YOU consider important is for people to talk about EVERYTHING that THEY consider important - separated into appropriate venues for each class of topics, so you can find the ones you are looking for.
THIS venu is "News for Nerds - Stuff that Matters" (to Nerds).
It is for recent news - and time-limited discussions - about technical issues and other things that will immediately affect MY life (some of which MAY change the ground rules underlying regional and global wars as a side-effect).
It is NOT for an endless 15th-generation rehash of the establishment media's top six propaganda pieces about recent developments in decades, centuries, or millenia-old conflicts halfway around the world.
If you want a venu where slashdot-style discussions can be held on THOSE subjects, by all means START one. The slashcode is free and can be found here, or by following the "code" link on most pages of this site. Hosting is cheap until your traffic gets large - after which you have a lot of people you can dun for contributions or whose attention you can rent to interested parties to cover your costs.
Meanwhile get out of OUR faces. The imminent death of mankind has been predicted continuously for at least two millenia, and probably since language was invented. It hasn't happened yet. Most of us are only interested when an issue for Nerds arises in the latest developments, while the rest will visit other, more appropriate, venues when they ARE interested.
Once you get your site set up, its existence will be "News for Nerds" and suitable meat for an item announcing its presence, and an advertisement in a sigline on YOUR postings - which will remain visible if your postings here are on-topic for THIS venue and thus don't get moderated down.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
As I understand it, currently standard lenses are used to focus light onto solor cells to get more power out of them. If the current lenses were replaced by this 15000x focusing lens, would the extra power generation offset the more expensive lens? Even simply using it to heat water and spin a turbine might be useful. They mentioned the laser on the other end was measured at 8 watts which seems a bit too low to be useful for power generation.
;)
Dont suppose solar panal manufacturers read slashdot and could answer my question?
Catch Bin Laden and we can try it out...
I personally thought it would have been a good idea for Timothy McVey to have attached 288 (or however many people he killed) small bombs all over his body (ranging from firecrackers, to pretty large cherry bomb/m80's) on timers, and make them go off over three days or so at random occurances. Make a few of them stronger, so they would take off a limb or something eventually. Pretty sick, but wasn't he?
Think of all the fun things you could do to Bin Laden if you caught him. Forget taking him to the authorities, kill him yourself. Would any jury convict you? NOPE, do whatever the hell you want- and people will just think that you didn't go far enough.
Ok, that's sick, but really, perhaps that's what Isreal has for us next, bombs to operate GI Joe style on Bin Laden.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
You could get skin cancer while having skin cancer removed.
"Derp de derp."
Homer: I see the light! It burns!!!
Everyone who used to operate on GI Joe figures with a magnifying glass is cheering for this to be commercially successful. Especially me, as I hold Patent# 32419281411: "A method for melting and burning stuff with magnified sunlight." I'm gonna be filthy rich as soon as I sue them for patent infringement!!!
...ants?
This just in. Device prototype stolen by lone assassin who charges $1 million her hit. British secret service sending their top agent to retrieve.
http://www.leoslyrics.com/listlyrics.php?sid=%A0C% C9H5%B9%A8H
Whats next ?! the wheel ?
I don't know about elementary school, but it looks like a They Might Be Giants Song. http://www.crosswinds.net/~lyricsarchive/round7/gr eg7.html
There are several ways to solve this, and one of them is extremely clever. Let the light pass though a lens (rather than strictly using mirrors for all your lenses). Different frequencies (colors) of light will refract slightly differently (well, the ones off-axis), unless you have chosen the lens material carefully to avoid this. (Yes, think of the pretty rainbow that a prism makes from sunlight.) These different colors will focus at different distances from that lens. By positioning the end of the optic fiber at different distances from the lens, you selectively pick up different wavelengths.
There was a Japanese company, which made (makes?) large sun-tracking Fresnel lenses, for placement on rooftops. At the focus of the lens, an optic fiber (maybe more of a light-pipe) collected the light, for piping into your building, so that you could have sunlight in your house. They took advantage of this spectrum-separating effect to exclude UV and IR as desired from the pipe.
(Those systems, although certainly quite a fine nerd-toy, were ghastly expensive, IMO. Sorry.)
"Coherent" light means that all the photons have a definite phase relationship to each other. Sunlight doesn't have this property.
And while we are far from the sun, the sun still takes up about half of a degree of arc in the sky. That's a pretty sizeable amount, it is not at all the case that "the divergence is so small as to not matter."
SPF 15,000 Sunscreen??
You're right of course. Parallel rays and phase coherence are not the same thing. I was sloppy. Coherence and parallelism are properties of laser light, but coherence isn't a property of sunlight.
A half a degree of arc is significant for some of the precision applications of lasers, like holography and laser guidance and navigation, but they are close enough to parallel to be concentrated by a lens or a concave mirror and the light from a flourescent or incandescent bulb cannot be so concentrated. This is more than adequate for a solar substitute for laser surgery.
My high school physics teacher became a bit of a laughing stock when he left a concave mirror in the back seat of his car and left his sunroof open. The focal length of the mirror was pretty close to the height of his car roof. The burned line from the front to the rear of his car roof is fairly ample proof of this property of sunlight.
Laugh all you want at the invention, but consider this scenario:
Patient: Doctor, I need lazer surgery but can not afford it.
Doctor: Well, you're in luck. Instead of screwing you over because you can't afford it, you can use this new low-cost technology
Also, it's in development. How do you know it will need direct sun contact and it wont just charge some solar batteries or something instead? Once the solar-source is charged then it can be used in cloudy conditions.
Wasn't this something that happened in "Man with the Golden Gun"?
I read up on this a while back. :)
Now, if I could just get my hands on one
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
Which brings me to a question - just how "hot" would the temperature be at the focus of the device? I would think you would need an active water cooling system to keep from melting the glass of the fiber optic (unless the temp is below that of melting glass) - not enough technical details in the article to know for sure.
Also, as far as this device is concerned, could such concentrated sunlight be used to optically pump a dye (or similar) laser?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I can cut cleanly now the rain is gone
I can laze allll the tu-umers in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that stole my sun
It's going to be a bright, RICH sunshiny day...
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
Smithers: Well, Sir, you've certainly vanquished all your enemies: the Elementary School, the local tavern, the old age home...you must be very proud.
Burns: [stuffing money into his wallet] No, not while my greatest nemesis still provides our customers with free light, heat and energy. I call this enemy...the sun.
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
Smithers: Well, Sir, you've certainly vanquished all your enemies: the Elementary School, the local tavern, the old age home...you must be very proud.
Burns: [stuffing money into his wallet] No, not while my greatest nemesis still provides our customers with free light, heat and energy. I call this enemy...the sun.
And now Monty can add free surgery to the list of services provided by his nemesis!
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
This discovery has many useful applications in space, as well. When the dish is facing the sun directly, you will get much more power than you could get on Earth. This has a wide area of applications, including:
1. Laser tag! (sports)
2. Water heater (relaxation)
3. Space surgery (medicine)
4. Blinding sattelites (punk activities)
5. Putting materials under extreme heat stress(science)
6. Cook food/paste (very handy)
7. Mini steam turbine (energy)
8. non-contact soldering with auto shut off (no mistake repairs)
9. It sounds very light, too (cost effective)
10. Blasting space dirt (national security)
NASA should definately throw this on the next craft and have some fun.
not sure how they work, but could this be used to super charge solar cells?
-- 20721
Remember when your G.I. Joe's arm was melting and pieces of it were dripping off?
Will your skin make that same cool sound as it drips to the ground using this machine?
bloody good lateral thinking!!!!
an *excellent* solution
200mm dish
sun = 1KW/M^2
so power available is:
0.01*3.14*1000 = 31 watts
but you will only couple about 30% of this energy into the fiber in a useful spectral range so that gives a 10 watt lightbulb.
you can run a ten watt light bulb off a battery and you could even charge the battery off a solar panel or a car.
as for precision. once the light is in the fiber, it makes little difference whether its froma laser or a light bulb. in fact the broadband light bulb will be easier to focus reliably than the monochromatic laser (due to the absence of speckle).
what you lose by going to a buld is the pulsed light source that you can get from a laser. Pulse light is better for some applications like retina welding.
Hmmm, but how do you predict the weather conditions... the weatherman isn't always 100% accurate, and it would be hell if something went bad partway through.
Scalpel...
Probe...
Solar ampli... oh crap where'd that cloud come from. Can anyone get me some duct-tape, or maybe a little epoxy?
Why not just use the sunlight for powering a laser via solar cells instead? You get just the wavelength you want, and could conceivably have a battery backup.
What about the fact that medical lasers are set to a specific wavelength because of the properties of its interaction with skin tissue vs. diseased tissue? sunlight is "broadband" if you will. If they put a filter in there to restrict it to a narrow range of wavelengths they'll lose out on power.
Get your own priorities, and look up that word before you use it again. You are rambling about people dying in the middle east, when this technology could very well save them. You shout on a medium where everyone has the same voice, expecting to be heard more clearly. If you think something should be done, then you are clearly not doing anything. And you're yelling in outrage about the attacks nearly a year later? You've definately put yourself at the wrong end of your priorities. Get some friends to talk to and cool down. Making snide posts will do nothing but shut off the world to you.
Really!? Why can't they pipe some real sunlight into my cubicle? Into my lab? Especially on those bitterly cold, Great White North winter days when the sun shines so bright and glares off the snow it hurts? Or beautiful Friday afternoons like today? I don't need a surgical laser, just some more ambient so I don't have to turn on another flourescent over that dead-tree copy of the API or scematic I'm using. Is it too much to ask to cut my power consumption on sunny days?
Any real trouble making geek fried ants with their large eyeglasses. Thats what I did anyway... you posers... :)
right, I wasn't going to bring it up, but the whole "parallel rays" thing kinda bites the dust as soon as they are concentrated by a concave mirror, and on the other side of the argument, a point source of light like a lightbuls can also be directed, and focused by cunning parabolic mirrors, witness those big-assed search lights.
.sigless since 2003
I've never been a Gates basher (don't bite the hand that feeds you - I don't work for M$, but I make a living as a programmer in ASP/COM+). I have a lot of respect for a guy who can start out as a simple millionaire's son with 3 years of Harvard behind him and become the richest man in the world.
That said, the Newsweek 02/04/02 article is still worth a read (even for those pre-disposed against Mr. Bill) - the logic behind his endowments is excellent, he's not just dumping money and hoping for the best. He's requiring that the countries receiving funds invest in themselves as well, and he pulls funding if they fail to keep their end of the bargain.
I've always wondered if laser output directed through a convex lens was still parallel.
Note that the article states that the collector must track the sun as it moves, and this implies some sort of motor. Hence I would not go so far as to say that this could be used anywhere without power. Sure, it could run on batteries, but for a military application why not just use the laser medical pen from this slashdot story? It seems that keeping a supply of small 3V lithium batteries (probably industry standard) would be a lot easier than keeping batteries for a motor that must move a somewhat bulky device.
Also, I don't think this will ever see use in poor countries. First, the geography must be just right for there to be enough sunlight, this eliminates a lot of places. But also, the article states that these things will cost about $1000 USD. Now if you're trying to budget the supplies for a operating room and have little to spend, do you buy a bunch of $5 scalpels and hemostats, or a single $1000 device that works under limited conditions and with which hardly any surgeons have experience? I'm not a medical professional, but the field has operated just fine for a very long time without (sunlight|laser) beams, so I'm pretty sure that everything this does can be done with plain old sterilized surgical stainless steel, for a lot less cash.
Light only has differing focal lengths when passing through a refractor (eg. a lens). Reflection (eg. mirrors) (which was mentioned in the article as the method of collection) has no different focal lengths for various wavelengths. I hope this clears things up.
Could something like this be used to make solar power more efficient?
Does that count as prior art when they patent it?
Of course they weren't parallel after hitting the mirror, because then the mirror wouldn't be concentrating just redirecting. The point was that if they are parallel when they hit the mirror, then can all be directed to the same focal point thus concentrating the light. If they weren't parallel when they hit the mirror, they would reflect off in various directions.
TMBG found it on a educational record that would have been played in an elementary school.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
fuck that! pipe it into high effiency low density solar cells! Maybe then even the UK can use the sun's energy (uh patent pending (TM)(C) GPL! you money grabbing fuckers)
and I just got me a load of fido optics off ebay!
Looks like I can now set up a bono fiday sergury!
Thanks Slashdawt!
Yes! I *am* cheering for this GI Joe Magnifying surgery. Insightfully clever. The humor was both subtle and heartwarming. It is the author's natural exuberance that makes him so darn endearing. However, I will truly be excited when, finally, the AMA endorses surgery techniques based on my research which involved firecrackers and gardner snakes.
If there's anything that temporarily obstructs the sunlight during surgery, I could imagine things getting pretty bad for the patient.
Nevertheless, it's a hell of a lot better than no (pseudo-)laser surgery at all ;)
Hrm. It seems like we still don't know what the long-terms results of laser eye surgery are. Shouldn't we at least find *that* out before jumping on the next bandwagon? ...that is, assuming this technology can be used for eye surgey. Ahem.
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - G.B. Shaw
You're an idiot, so I'll spell this out:
mgessner@yahoo.com, You Have Been Trolled. You Have Lost. Have A Nice Day.
I am not sure on this on, so if any of you know what I am talking about help me out...
I recall a wave table experiment from my 2nd year high school physics class where plane waves were generated at one end of the table and there was a half barrier at the other end, and the waves refracted at the corner, the point was that the degree of refraction was dependant on the frequency fo the wave...
Is this partly responsible for soft shadows as well?
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Just my 2cents
I'm an orthopaedic surgery resident and as far as I know the only specialty using lasers are the opthomology guys (eye surgeons) mostly for LASIK and zapping bleeders in diabetic retinas. Some of the liver transplant guys use it also, but this is kinda rare stuff.
We (orthopods) used to use it , but discontinued its use since it kills the cartilage (thermal necrosis).
In most cases a simple knife or scissors works very well
..........FULL STOP.
(Sorry Bob, couldn't resist!)
How about using this amplified light and focusing it on, say, a solar panel? It seems to me that the reason there are great spanning arrays of solar panels is because they don't receive enough light (due to their design, not due to the lack of sunlight). If something like this was used to amplify the amount of light that went into a solar panel, what would stop solar power from becoming a widespread reality?
[insert witty comment here]
Doesn't that increase your UV radiation exposure by a factor of 15,000X, too? Sounds like a cancer risk to me unless they have a filter for that.
Way to go Israel.
This solar scalpel is gonna be a boon to mohels. Reduce the rate of infection by having the ultimate scalpel, a beam of light, anywhere in the world.
"The Bris will be in eight days... weather permitting."
Fire and Meat. Yummy.