Word: lasered
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What good is a brilliantly intense, tightly focused beam of light? It can make a dandy weapon or torture device, as Sean Connery found to his dismay in the James Bond film Goldfinger. But while laser weaponry never really took off, lasers certainly did. Today they are used for, among other things, dentists' drills and delicate eye surgery, recording and playing back compact discs, measuring the distance to the moon, creating and viewing holograms, industrial cutting and welding, sending voices and data through the air and down optical fibers, surveying roads and building sites, generating energy in controlled-nuclear-fusion...
...military, however, hasn't given up trying to make the laser into a weapon. Ronald Reagan's ill-fated Star Wars program called for orbiting X-ray lasers to zap enemy missiles, and the Army is still experimenting with battlefield lasers. While they won't slice enemy soldiers in half, they can temporarily blind troops...
...physicist Theodore Maiman builds a working laser...
Installation was straightforward, Blum says. It took him about two hours to link up the two computers and a laser printer in his home office. The necessary power cords, adapters and software all came in one box. He plugged power cords into the backs of each computer and the printer, attached the sandwich-size adapters to the opposing ends and plugged them into regular electrical outlets. (The $150 kit also came with extra power strips.) He then installed the software, provided on one CD-ROM, into both PCs. "This was definitely something we were looking for," he says...
...briefed on the likelihood of espionage at Los Alamos three years ago. Nor was this the first case of Chinese snooping at U.S. weapons labs. During the 1970s and again in the '80s, Taiwanese-born American scientists delivered to China the secrets of, first, the neutron bomb and then laser technology...