UniversityOfGeneva
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Scientist creating rain-making lasers, Weezy and Fat Joe await royalty checks
We've heard of "making it rain," but actually making it rain -- with lasers, no less -- now, that's something to write home about. A team of researchers at the University of Geneva is coming ever closer to creating real-deal downpours by shooting beams from their Teramobile mobile femtosecond-Terawatt laser system into the sky above the Rhone River. While logging nearly 133 hours between the fall of 2009 and spring of 2010, the team observed that the beams actually triggered the creation of nitric acid particles, which bound water molecules together creating water droplets. Those droplets proved too small and light to actually be categorized as rain, but the discovery has apparently spurred the scientists on. Previous efforts to make it rain, known as seeding, have used rockets and jets to shoot silver iodide and dry ice into the sky. No word yet on when the scientists expect to successfully "wash the spider out."
Swiss scientists create dark clouds with a laser lining (video)
Lasers can tell time, shoot down missiles and power one heck of a TV. Now, scientists claim they can create rain clouds, too. Turning a 5-terawatt infrared laser on the sky in short, 100-femtosecond bursts, researchers at the University of Geneva managed to strip electrons from the surrounding air, causing the formation of "hydroxlyl radicals" and growing water droplets in their wake. Though some scientific peers believe the idea could never be used to generate real, useful rain compared to existing cloud seeding techniques, Geneva scholars have now duplicated the effect in both the lab and in the skies over Berlin, and we're sure it's only a matter of time before some nefarious villain figures the frickin' weather control technology into a suitably evil plot. Video after the break.
Haptics research underway so you can virtually feel fabrics
We're not really sure that there's going to be any consumer haptics devices outside the context of a video game anytime soon, but that hasn't stopped the European Union from funding the HAPTEX (HAPtic sensing of virtual TEXtiles) project. Haptics, of course, is the study of touch sensory feedback, and scientists at the University of Geneva are currently working on a project that will incorporate touch into your online shopping. So let's say that you're looking online to buy pants, but you're not sure if you want corduroys or jeans -- in case you didn't know what those materials felt like, you'd touch a device that would allow you to feel the various textures. The project is due to end exactly one year from now, so that's when we'll find out if the €1.66 million ($2.11 million) that EU taxpayers shelled out was really worth it -- and what devices, if any, will come to fruition.
