Lasers

Macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness in the elderly, appears to be yielding to new laser treatments that seal off destructive blood vessels behind the retina. Although doctors caution that the treatments do not offer a cure, they say the therapies have in many cases arrested the downward course of a disease that ordinarily robs people of their sight. Next month, the U.S.

Someone should give 16-year-old sophomore pitcher Alonzo Garcia of San Fernando a psychological test to understand how he's able to deal with pressure and distractions so effortlessly. In his first varsity baseball game last month, he was sent to the mound in the alumni game. If you don't know anything about San Fernando alumni baseball players, they can be loud, a little obnoxious and don't care whether they say something that might make a varsity player cry. "Hey, Gomez, is this your ace?"

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.

From the outside, Plummer Elementary doesn't look much like a showcase school. The 60-year-old campus has drab green bungalows, a patchy lawn and graffiti scrawled on the "Please, No Honking" sign. The California Distinguished School logo above the front gate, out of reach of taggers, is about the only indication that something special is happening inside. The San Fernando Valley campus, in a working-class pocket of North Hills, was singled out by Los Angeles Unified Supt. John Deasy in a conversation we had last month about whether low-income, Latino students in this district are doomed to mediocrity.

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.

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.

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.

Doctors' offices are full of brochures listing new nonsurgical procedures that promise to tighten skin, eliminate redness or brown spots and get rid of fat. Though the machines have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the clearances don't encompass all of the cosmetic procedures that are popping up in doctors' offices; physicians can use approved products for off-label procedures. What follows is a sampling of some of those devices and cosmetic procedures that are associated with them.

Automatic braking systems — currently installed on some Volvo vehicles — could slice the number of low-speed crashes that happen in typical commuter traffic by a quarter if widely adopted, according to the Highway Loss Data Institute. The institute, which analyzes claims and damage issues for the insurance industry, reviewed the advanced forward collision avoidance system that has been standard in the Volvo XC60 midsize SUV since the 2010 model year. The system uses a laser sensor built into the windshield to automatically brake a vehicle and avoid a rear-end crash at low speeds.

Dental lasers are either an indispensable tool in a dentist's toolkit or an emerging-but-unproven technology. It depends on whom you ask. They came into use in general dentistry about 15-20 years ago but even now are used only by about 6% to 8% of dentists nationwide. The two main categories are soft-tissue lasers, used mostly for gum contouring and minor surgical procedures, and hard-tissue lasers, used to treat small- to moderate-size cavities. Experts agree that, as the costs of lasers fall, their use will spread.

Democrats have been focused like a laser on economic issues, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee said on Friday, in her first television interview since formally taking the high-visibility post. Wasserman Schultz, a Florida congresswoman since 2005, took over the position at the DNC this week. As chair, her duties will include fund-raising and in many cases being the national face for the party and a campaign surrogate in the 2012 presidential cycle.

For the first time in its history, the U.S. Navy fired a laser ray gun mounted on a warship, zapping — and setting fire to — an empty motorboat as it bobbed in the Pacific Ocean. The test demonstration, which took place off the Southern California coast near San Nicholas Island, could mark a new era in Navy weaponry, officials said. "This is very important to the Navy's future weapon systems," said Rear Adm. Nevin Carr, chief of the Office of Naval Research. "By turning energy into a weapon, we become more efficient and more effective.

MOVIES In lieu of the French duo Daft Punk playing live during "Tron: Legacy" with a 100-piece orchestra, Hollywood's legendary El Capitan Theatre will give us the next best thing: a laser light show before each screening. OK, so it's not vocoders or spacesuits from the band that scored the Jeff Bridges vehicle, but we have a feeling that lasers shooting around the theater will delight even the most steely of robot hearts. To further entice your electronic soul: One person will win a pair of tickets to Disney California Adventure Park before every showing.

Outer space may come indoors in Lakewood, but first it needs a permit. And that means a public hearing tonight on a proposal to open a laser tag game in the same mall that houses a bowling alley, movie theaters and skating rink. While Lakewood zoning ordinances require a permit for any indoor recreational facility, city spokesman Donald Waldie said, Laser Mania's application "calls for some sober reflection because it involves make-believe shooting as a form of entertainment."

It was just before midnight and hundreds of students in the Caltech cafeteria were digging into plates piled high with eggs, bacon, doughnuts, French toast and fruit. Nearby, several top administrators, including President Jean-Lou Chameau, whipped up omelets for the noisy crowd of future physicists and engineers. The idea was to make it easier to swallow the next item on the menu for these students: final exams. Caltech junior Jessica Davis, who was about to launch into a four-hour take-home exam in quantum mechanics, said she appreciated the social interlude and free food at the "midnight munchies" party last week.

Scientists are turning up the heat on cancer with a one-two punch of radiation plus fever temperatures that could shrink stubborn tumors. Drugs and radiation can beat back tumors, but some cancer cells usually survive the assault. So researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston fortified their arsenal with gold-covered nanoparticles that embed themselves in tumors and bake them to temperatures of 108 degrees when activated with an infrared laser. In their experiments, treating mice with heat plus standard radiation cleared breast cancer tumors better than either therapy alone.