Researchers Develop Tool for Potentially Diagnosing Alzheimer's

Right now it is very difficult for doctors to know for sure if a patient has Alzheimer's disease. Plenty of other neurodegenerative diseases can cause dementia, so doctors are generally guessing when they diagnose patients. In fact, the only way to be sure is to cut the brain of the patient open after death and look for the amyloid beta plaques that are associated with the disease.

That may all be about to change.According to a study being conducted at the VA Medical Center in Massachusetts, a band of harmless lasers placed around a patient's head may be able to differentiate healthy brain tissue from tissue covered with amyloid beta plaques.

If the study confirms the results, it will be a huge boost in diagnosis of this terrible disease, and could allow doctors to get a jump on treatment, as well as prevent misdiagnoses that lead to treatments for the wrong illnesses. But while this technique could be used to spot the plaques in the brain, not all of the plaques cause Alzheimer's disease, so the device will still not have 100 percent accuracy. Still, anything is better than just guessing.

Powerful Laser For Fusion Research Nearing Completion

Discover Magazine has an article about the world's largest laser, currently nearing completion at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California. The laser, which has already shown the ability to fire four megajoules of infrared energy for up to 20 nanoseconds, is intended for fusion research.

The goal is to fire the powerful laser into both ends of a tiny gold capsule filled with two frozen hydrogen isotopes. The blast will create a plasma around the target in the center of the capsule, hopefully hot enough to cause the two hydrogen isotopes to fuse.

The researchers are currently testing the optics and expect to complete construction of the laser by March of next year. By 2010, they expect to reach a point where the fusion energy produced by the machine is greater than the energy used by the lasers, creating a net-positive energy fusion reaction.

Targeting Viruses With Laser Precision

According to a Discover magazine report, a physicist at Arizone State University, Kong-Thon Tsen, has developed a way to use lasers tuned to a specific frequency of light to kill viruses. It turns out that the outer shells of viruses are rigid and have certain frequencies that can set up an unstable feedback in the harmonic oscillations of the virus' shells, destroying them.

In test tubes, Tsen's group has used this technology to destroy the outer shell—or capsid—of HIV samples. And because the capsids of viruses are different, disrupting the HIV capsids should not have any side effects within the body.

None of this research has been tested in vivo yet, but within the next couple of years Tsen's group plans to test the technology on HIV in monkeys by zapping blood outside the body. Basically, the process will use dialysis machines to cycle the blood out, destroy the viruses without affecting the blood cells, and cycle the clean blood back into the body.

The research has not been published, and more work needs to be done. In all, FDA approval is probably more than a decade away. But this technology, if proven, could be used to destroy just about any blood-borne virus.

Boeing Fires High-Energy Chemical Laser

According to a report from the New Mexico Business Weekly, Boeing has for the first time fired its high-energy laser weapon from a C-130H aircraft, demonstrating its ability to precisely hit targets on the ground with minimal collateral damage.

I haven't seen any video footage of the event, but that's okay. I saw the movie a long time ago. One has to wonder if they went through extra precautions to make sure that Val Kilmer was nowhere near the site of their test....

Happy Birthday, Laser

Forty-eight years ago today, Theodore Maiman used a synthetic ruby to create the world's first laser. Maiman didn't invent the theory, but he did build the first working laser.

A number of brilliant minds have worked on laser technology over the past half-century, and without them we wouldn't have such things as DVD players, laser eye surgery, laser range-finders, laser welding, or optical computer mice. Sometimes it still amazes me how a single scientific or technological advance can lead to such great advances in our understanding of the universe and our quality of life.