The Air Force and Boeing achieved a directed-energy breakthrough with these tests. MATRIX—Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments—performance is especially noteworthy because it demonstrated unprecedented, ultra-precise and lethal acquisition, pointing and tracking at long ranges using relatively low laser power.

I’m sure that description would get Governor Tarkin wet. Boeing — along with the Air Force and the Army — also tested the Laser Avenger, a kinetic-laser hybrid weapon that fires a high power death ray coupled with a 25mm machine gun.

Obviously, the kids in the funny uniforms are happy with their new toys, but I would like to see if they can do the same with a small thermal exhaust port only two metres wide. [Boeing via PopSci]

That’s not to say the company was making false claims in order to boost their ASX listing… Laser TV did become a reality in early 2008, when Mitsubishi showed off their Laservue TVs at CES.

Laser TVs are essentially just rear projection TVs that use lasers to provide the backlight. Using the Arasor chip, the laser-powered TVs are able to reproduce twice the colour range that LCD and plasma can, while using less power and being thinner than traditional rear projection screens.To date, only the Mitsubishi Laservue TVs have launched with the technology, and sadly they’re not available in many global markets, including Australia.

It seems unlikely that we’ll ever see laser TVs in Australia. But we can always hope that the technology might be enhanced in future TV sets so that one day, all TVs have freakin’ lasers in them.

History of TV is Giz AU’s month-long look back at the development of the world-changing medium and its influence on our daily lives.

Tests have concluded that foods labelled with the low-energy carbon dioxide laser beam show no signs of increased decay when compared to their stickered counterparts. The system has already been employed in New Zealand, Australia and Pacific Rim countries, but the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is in the final stages of approving the procedure for US agriculture. Honestly, fruit branding cannot come soon enough. Truly, this is a problem of national importance. How many more stickers must we eat? [Physorg via Inhabitat]

It’d have essentials like wireless broadband connectivity and a battery, but I’m hoping that by 2020 we’ll have cooler stuff than a laser-projected keyboard. Their time has come and gone already, no? Less of that, more interactive holographic display technology, please. More wacky 2020 shenanigans at: [Ericsson via MobileandNotebook]

When you transmit information through turbulence—motion in the atmosphere caused by turbulent cells or “wind”—it’s distorted just like the information coming from the light reflected off a distant, twinkling star to your eye. It’s fuzzy. You have to overcome that by using adaptive optics to rectify the distortion and get a better quality signal.

That’s what Dr David Hughes, from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, says. He claims that the technology has been tested successfully with both stationary and flying situations, which means that they can easily implement it in the battlefield, with not too much effort. [The Register]

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons is in an uproar about the things people are doing in their bathrooms. It’s not that those surgeons are just worried about losing money on procedures, they’re bound to gain clients from all the DIY mess-ups anyway, but they appear genuinely concerned about regulations and safety. And I agree, because somehow former Gizmodo intern Benny Goldman letting the Jezebel team cajole him into a bikini wax doesn’t seem so insane when you read about people ordering Botox from websites called Discount MedSpa and putting videos of their DIY injections onto YouTube (Warning: the clip may make you cringe).

We all like to look pretty, but there are safer ways to get rid of hair, folks! And somehow it’s better to have wrinkles than order Botox from a website that looks like it was made in Microsoft Word. [Wired]

Basically, and I use the word loosely, the researchers understand that fruit flies are able, to a degree, to avoid things that have caused them pain in the past (in this case, they were electrically shocked when flying into a specific area). But then the researchers genetically engineered some flies so that their dopamine-producing brain cells manufacture a laser-sensitive protein. When shone with a laser in a particular area, though the stimulation produced no pain, the flies avoided that area with almost the exact same frequency as they had when there was pain involved. Says one of the researchers:

Miesenböck concludes that stimulating dopamine release in these 12 neurons has the same effect as applying electric shocks to flies. In other words, these flies feared that [area] as if they had been conditioned to associate an electric shock with it. “Stimulating just these neurons gives the flies a memory of an unpleasant event that never happened,” he says.

And as for what I know you’re all wondering: Can this experiment be extended to humans? Well, maybe, and maybe not. A biochemical researcher named Wayne Sossin points out that it’s sort of unethical to genetically engineer humans, making the hypothesis pretty difficult to test, and that the original fruit fly test only works for short-term, not long-term, memory. So false memories of the sort we expect from sci-fi (or should I say syfy? Answer: I should not) may not be immediately forthcoming. [NewScientist]

Indications this may be a joke:

1. I’m not totally sure you can laser-etch corn.
2. There’s no way Kellogg’s has or deserves a monopoly on flakes of corn.
3. A Kellogg’s “food technologist” claims that “in recent years there has been an increase in the number of other brands trying to capitalise on the popularity of Kellogg’s corn flakes”. Corn flakes are not a new invention, you guys. Why the sudden popularity?
4. Corn flakes requires tons of sugar to be palatable anyway, and the combination of sugar and milk is sure to erase the delicate laser etching.
5. This appeared in the Daily Mail, which I don’t know anything about — but it is British, and my damnable xenophobia has convinced me that all British publications not called the Guardian are lying tabloids.
6. LASER-ETCHED CORN FLAKES LASER-ETCHED CORN FLAKES.

It’s pretty hilarious, regardless of whether it’s true (and the above six points indicated it is not). Way to be exciting, Corn Flakes, even though you have neither marshmallows nor peanut butter! [Daily Mail via Geekologie]

Apparently quite a few key observatories use lasers to adjust telescope optics for atmospheric turbulence. Those same lasers can damage Earth-observing satellites and so regulations on their usage have been getting stricter and stricter over the years. Now astronomers have had enough. They are happy to consult with the Air Force each time they point a laser at the sky to make sure that a satellite isn’t in the path, but it seems that the turnaround time is too long. I don’t see why they don’t just change it to a “We’ll have your analysis delivered in less than 30 minutes or you can point your lasers wherever you want” rule. [New Scientist]

Designed by Andy Kurovets, this concept uses a laser mounted inside the wrist band and angled over the flat part of the wrist to reveal digital time. Very slick, undeniably futuristic. [Yanko Design]