Star Wars is Alive and Well

Somewhere, Ronald Reagan is smiling.  In the last several days, two different groups of scientists announced that they were able to shoot down something speeding through the air with a laser.


Let me repeat that: human beings can now shoot things out of the sky with lasers.


On February 12th, Boeing announced that it had successfully shot down a ballistic missile during a firing range test of its new airborne laser system.  The Cold War is over, but apparently that doesn't mean we've collectively stopped thinking about the danger of long-range missiles.  How this will affect the way we talk with or about Iran and North Korea remains to be seen, but I imagine our Iranian policies will be mostly unchanged.


Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons yet, and both Israel and the United States have had other anti-ballistic missile defense systems for quite some time.  The United States seems to be more concerned with preventing Iran and North Korea from selling their technology to other hostile governments or militant groups, and these new systems do nothing to prevent that.  However, these defenses drain a good deal of power from the threat of a nuclear attack, which makes saber-rattling from both countries even less intimidating than it already is.


On a different note, scientists working with the Intellectual Ventures Lab released video of a new system they've developed to fight malaria by frying mosquitoes in flight.  The system is so sensitive that it detects the wing speed of things that pass in front of it, and fries only the female mosquitoes as they go by.  This lessens (or possibly eliminates) the threat of diseases carried by mosquitoes, since only the females bite.  Below is the video release by IV Lab, shot at 6,000 frames per second.