Word: laser
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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BILL CARTER, FBI spokesman, addressing concerns that a spate of laser lights trained on pilots while they were landing could be the work of terrorists. An investigation is under way, though some officials suggested the incidents might be nothing more than people playing with new Christmas toys...
...those strutting pros and hardened fans in today's hoop arenas, and the chemistry is ripe for agitation. Games aren't mere athletic contests; they are in-your-face productions. Laser-light-show introductions, clatter-making Thunder Stix and scoreboard exhortations for more noise contribute to an atmosphere of confrontation. Players shooting free throws used to be accorded an almost respectful silence. Now fans attempt to distract them by jeering and waving towels. It doesn't work, but that doesn't stop the fans' behavior...
...cold Chicago day in the late 1990s, physicist David Grier was fiddling around in his laboratory with a cheap piece of plastic and a laser. Grier and a graduate student named Eric Dufresne were trying to build a new kind of "optical trap" - a device that splits a laser beam and uses it to capture particles of a single substance. Multiple traps, used in tandem, could let the scientists play traffic cop on a molecular level, separating a substance into component parts - removing bacteria from blood, for example. But first they had to make it work. For a year, Grier...
...Soon after that jaw-dropping development, Grier co-founded Arryx. With a product called BioRyx, Arryx has now perfected the laser-beam splitting technique into what it calls a set of "optical tweezers." But we prefer the traffic-cop analogy: picture a busy time-lapse video of crisscrossing highways, bridges and underpasses, and you get an idea of what matter looks like in a BioRyx under a microscope. BioRyx picks up different substances and tells them where to go. The technology today is used for everything from analyzing blood to separating the sperm cells in bull semen that produce bulls...
...sick of wearing glasses, but the LASIK people turned you down. Here's help: the new Verisyse corrective lens, which treats nearsightedness too severe for laser surgery to fix. The lens is implanted between the cornea and the iris through a 6-mm incision. If there are complications (infection, cataracts), it can be removed. A competing implantable lens, the Visian ICL, developed by Staar Surgical, still awaits FDA approval...