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Cut Curiously Precise Holes With Femto-Lasers
paymenow points out "this story at Science News Online about femto-lasers and how their novel 'cutting physics' allows much more precision than previous lasers. The technology is now finding applications in various industries including, biotech, automotive and laser eye surgery."
Would increasing the pulse speed by 1kx have any effect upon the surrounding material, destructive effects that is. I realise that the pulses are fantastically short but surely going from a thousand fempto pulses a second (roughly 1 trillionth of a second on target) to a million (roughly 1 billionth of a second on target) should negate at least some of the benefits by dint of there being a shorter gap between the pulses to allow the highly ionised material to clear out. This didn't seem to be mentioned in the article so perhaps it's not an issue...
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Are those the kind that come out of hot chicks' boobs in Austin Powers?
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There is sort of an inherent problem with that. If the hole is too small to even hit any nerve endings, it's probably too small to let blood cells through.
:)
As it is, when my late grandmother was getting up in years, we had to prick her like three times with the heavy setting on the lanclet just to get blood.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
An even lighter touch is evident in recent work that demonstrates the femtosecond laser's potential for gene therapy. In the July 18 Nature, Uday K. Tirlapur and Karsten König of Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, described vaporizing tiny spots in the membranes of rodent cells immersed in a solution containing the gene for a fluorescent protein. The cells quickly repaired the holes--but not before the genes had apparently sneaked in, yielding cells that appeared normal except for their green glow
All the technology in the world, and what do they use it for? To make glow-in-the-dark rats.
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