Episode 3 – Lasers, Lasers Everywhere

LASER: Materials Science Podcast

This week on LASER we discuss Light Sabers, building Atomic Force Microscopes out of LEGO, a short film from IBM Research Labs, water on Mars, and blasting asteroids with tiny laser satellites, with only a little off-topic discussion of webcomics and scifi movies…

2:00 After the introductions we start talking about new research that has been compared to Light Sabers! (here’s another link)

12:00 the discussion turns toward America’s Next Top Scientist, and webcomics.

16:45 Some neat people at the Lego 2 Nano summer school in China built an AFM out of Lego!

31:00 some labs look depressingly outdated to the uninitiated, but are still awesome.

35:20 5 seconds of silence for you to watch A Boy and His Atom from IBM Research Labs.

39:00 we decide that Mars is made almost entirely of atoms. and begin discussing the mars rover Curiosity and the water it found.

44:30 Correction: Olympus Mons is the Largest volcano in the solar system, but there are lots of other volcanoes on Mars. It is so large because there are no active plate tectonics on Mars, so the volcano just keeps getting bigger and bigger instead of moving around and creating different volanoes. There is some geothermal heat on Mars, but not as much as we have on Earth.

46:15 “Nukes solve everything!”

50:30 a paper on the arXiv suggests using short laser pulses from satellites to deflect Near Earth Objects (NEO).

60:30 You could probably stop listening, we argue about sending nuclear waste into space.

63:30 we ARE on iTunes now!!! Give us a rating and write a review of us!

Intro: Open – Crying (Get Olde)
The Future Soon –Jonathan Coulton (Other Experiments)
Particle Man- TMBG (Severe Tire Damage)
Too Epic For Words- 10-4 Elanor (…Too Bad…)
Outro: Dreams are Maps – The Wild (Dreams are Maps)