Lasers

Plantar fasciitis. If you haven't had to deal with it personally, just ask around. Chances are you know lots of people who can describe it in great detail: stabbing heel pain and agonizing steps followed by a frustratingly slow recovery. Plantar fasciitis - an inflammation of the plantar facsia, a thick band of tissue that runs along the arch from the heel to the toes - has become so ubiquitous that podiatrists can practically make the diagnosis before a patient even sets foot in their office.

The Navy plans to install a laser gun on a ship next year to zap dangerous swarming small boats and flying drones while in the Persian Gulf. Officials say the $32-million high-technology system offers the Navy a weapon a fraction of the cost of its traditional arsenal -- cruise missiles, as well as rapid-fire Gatling guns. PHOTOS: U.S. Navy 's Laser Weapon System "Our conservative data tells us a shot of directed energy costs under $1," Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder said in a statement . "Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to fire a missile, and you can begin to see the merits of this capability.

The rapid snapsnapsnap emanating from the skin of Jay Lee's nape is not just the sound of ink molecules in the dermis and epidermis being blasted apart by laser but of identity itself being transformed. Lee sits on the edge of an examination bed in the clinic, his head bowed like a penitent's. With the business end of a Medlite C6 laser, Dr. Alex Kaplan traces the supermarket-like bar code and number 187 tattooed on the back of Lee's neck.

A North Hollywood teenager was sentenced Monday to 30 months in federal prison for aiming a blinding laser beam at a private jet and a police helicopter last year. U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson imposed the penalty on Adam Gardenhire, 19, who pleaded guilty in October to one felony count of aiming a laser beam at an aircraft. The case is the second prosecution of its kind in the country since the laser law was signed by President Obama in 2012. According to court records, Gardenhire deliberately aimed a commercial-grade green laser beam at a privately owned Cessna Citation and a Pasadena Police Department helicopter on the evening of March 29, 2012.

Seventy-six years after the invention of the modern sprinkler helped revolutionize farming, a professor of environmental engineering is pointing a laser beam across an alfalfa crop in Southern California's Imperial Valley, looking for a better way to conserve the millions of gallons of water sprayed each year on thirsty crops.

Premier Laser Systems Inc. of Irvine said Tuesday it will slash the price of dental lasers used for treating tooth decay by more than 40% in order to clear out excess inventory. The company's FDA-approved Centauri lasers will be reduced to $24,950 from its current list price of $44,950. The new price will last until current inventory, the size of which was not disclosed, is sold.

For the first time, chemists have been able to precisely control the course of a chemical reaction, forcing one potential reaction of a starting material to occur to the exclusion of all others. Although the reaction they studied was simple and of no commercial or scientific value, Stanford University scientists believe their success will be the foundation for experiments involving more important chemicals.

Premier Laser Systems Inc. failed to properly record how it addressed complaints about its medical devices, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in an agency warning letter released Tuesday. A spokesman for the Irvine-based manufacturer of medical lasers and other medical products said the FDA's letter resulted from a series of misunderstandings and the agency has since sent the company another letter saying it's satisfied with the company's responses.

When Columbia University graduate student Gordon Gould developed the idea in 1957 of producing a beam of pure light that could deliver a high amount of energy to a spot as small as the point of a pin, he had no working model and no idea how it might be used. He named his invention after its process: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, or LASER. Gould developed the idea from a suggestion by Albert Einstein in 1917.

Laser pointers can be a fun tool for highlighting stars in the sky or for entertaining your cat, but misuse of green laser pointers may be dangerous. New research shows that shining a green laser pointer directly into the eye can cause long-lasting damage. Green laser pointers have become increasingly popular because of their brightness -- they can penetrate into the night sky and point to a faraway building during daylight hours. But they may also be more dangerous than the red variety.

Earth dodged a gigantic space bullet Friday when the 143,000-ton asteroid known as 2012 DA14 came within 17,200 miles of the Indian Ocean. Scientists and engineers are looking for ways to head off such close calls by targeting potentially dangerous asteroids well before they're in a position to do us any harm. A group called the B612 Foundation (a reference to the home asteroid of the Little Prince in the classic French novella) recently announced a mission to build a spacecraft that would track dangerous midsize asteroids, and a fledgling company called Deep Space Industries has floated a plan to build swarms of robots that could mine - and even destroy - space rocks.

Dressed in a black leather punk jacket, Al Walser leans conspiratorially across a glass table in a Mid-Wilshire office suite. It's stacked with paperwork, golf clubs and a placard deeming the space an Honorary Consulate of the Principality of Liechtenstein. This is the home of Cut the Bull Entertainment, the production, management and marketing firm of this year's most improbable Grammy nominee. "Have you read that book 'The Mouse That Roared'?" asks the aspiring music mogul from Liechtenstein.

A German tinkerer has combined his love of Iron Man movies and passion for laser gadgets to build a real-life version of the super hero's robotic arms, and he has sold the laser-firing device for more than $2,660. Patrick Priebe, 29, of Wuppertal, Germany, posted a video of his "Iron Man Laser Gauntlet" on YouTube on Saturday, showing a red and gold full-metal shell gadget for his arm equipped with two 1.2-watt blue lasers and another two 4-milliwatt red lasers. Priebe demonstrates the device and how it works throughout the first half of the video.

N. Joseph Woodland, a co-inventor of the system of thick and thin lines that became the ubiquitous bar code labeling nearly every product regulated by commerce, has died. He was 91. Woodland died Sunday at his home in Edgewater, N.J., from the effects of Alzheimer's disease and complications of his advanced age, said his daughter Susan Woodland. Woodland and fellow graduate student Bernard Silver developed the bar code at Drexel University in Philadelphia - then called the Drexel Institute of Technology - in the late 1940s.

The Mars Curiosity rover, cozy at the sandy, windblown patch of ground called Rocknest, pulled out its laser late last week, aimed it at a target about 9 feet away and started zapping. The goal? To find out whether frost accumulates on Mars' surface at night, according to Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory. "The idea was to take one measurement of Crestaurum at night and one during the day for comparison," the scientist and principal investigator for Curiosity's ChemCam instrument told the Los Angeles Times.

The Mars rover known as Curiosity zapped its first target with its laser eye this weekend, NASA officials announced. NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover has been stretching its limbs and testing its cameras since landing Aug. 5. Now, the rover has unleashed its laser on a nearby rock named Coronation, hitting the softball-size chunk with 30 pulses in a 10-second span. With more than 1 million watts of power in each 5-billionths-of-a-second pulse, the laser shots from the  ChemCam instrument vaporize the rock into plasma.

Northrop Grumman Corp., the third-largest U.S. defense contractor, said Tuesday that it planned to finish within 18 months a prototype of a battlefield laser weapon capable of shooting down mortars and rockets, Chief Executive Ronald D. Sugar said. "Laser weapons aren't Buck Rogers weapons anymore," Sugar said in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington. "They're becoming a reality. Almost every day our troops face mortar and rocket fire from insurgents.

LONDON -- Modern pentathlon has been in the Olympics since 1912, when Baron Pierre de Coubertin thought soldiers and cavalrymen needed their own event. He came up with the modern version (there had been pentathlon in the ancient Greek Olympics) that included fencing, swimming, shooting, horseback riding and running over the course of five days. De Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, probably didn't envision a Mexican food stand at the riding grounds hawking burritos and chips and salsa, but, hey, times change.

"I Feel Your Pain," Liz Magic Laser's captivating 2011 performance piece, begins with a couple nibbling popcorn in a theater and sharing a shy kiss. "Hey," the man asks his flushed companion, "can I read you what I wrote in my journal last night? It's about you. " The sweet, early moments of a courtship, clearly. But no. Actually the words are adapted from an interview Glenn Beck conducted with Sarah Palin in 2010, in which he muses, hopefully, about whether she is "the one. " What ensues over the next 80 minutes of Laser's work -- on video, in the New York artist's first L.A. show, at Various Small Fires -- is simultaneously absurd, disturbing, comical, creepy and revealing.