Everyday Experiments

Just in from Discovery blogs: a fully operational high-intensity lightsaber - er, portable laser - is up for sale by consumer laser manufacturer Wicked Lasers. This baby boasts of being the first ever 445-nm direct blue diode portable laser in existence. For $200, you get your own Li-ion battery powered version of Luke Skywalker's bright blue lightsaber.



It cannot cut through flesh like it was butter, but the S3 Arctic Spyder III can cause instant retinal damage, permanent blindness, and skin cancer, among other things. Yes fellas, this lightsaber - sorry, Class 4 portable laser - is not a toy and should not be used for puerile entertainment.


So what's exactly the point in making a portable lightsaber with a hilt that looks exactly like the one from the popular George Lucas franchise? It seems that Lucas is taking the hint. Lucasfilms is now planning to sue Hongkong-based Wicked Laser if they do not change the design of the laser. (More on that story here.)

Have you ever wondered what great contribution you can make to further advance the understanding of human sociology?

Well, fret no more. The US Library of Congress has announced that it will keep an archive of all tweets made on the microblogging service Twitter since March 2006. Yep, that means all the tweets you've sent out - from the most mundane "I'm having enchiladas for lunch" to the most profound "just discovered Angelina Jolie's face is really asymmetrical" will be immortalized in the august archives of the largest library in the world. The LOC made this announcement in its very own Twitter and Facebook pages before the official press release was circulated to the world. A very fitting, a courant approach for a library that has been around since the 1800s.

Response will be most likely ambiguous from the over 75 million Twitter users worldwide. Tweet preservationists might rejoice, but everyday users guilty of sending out the craziest, most drunken, incriminating tweets can only collectively cringe with dread. Before you despair, here's a comforting thought - the LOC has promised it will only highlight the historically and culturally important tweets, like President Obama's "This is history" message. The rest will just go into the LOC's 167-terabyte online archive for the perusal of sociologists, researchers, and the occasional tweet voyeur.

Just in... another exploit vulnerability has been discovered in Firefox browsers, allowing the remote execution of arbitrary code (read: MALWARE). Everyone who uses version 3.6 or 3.6.2 of Mozilla Firefox should update their browsers asap. You can download an updated version of Firefox for free here. For more technical details about the latest release and the security bug discovered in Firefox 3.6.x, read the Mozilla tech notes here.

Have you logged on to your Gmail account lately? I was just about to log in to a Gmail account I use for my home-bound hobbies when I was stopped dead in my tracks. The Gmail login page looked as if it was written in txt language! wch mns tht th txt lkd lkd ths: