cial fuels because disruptions of military supply chains could leave the laser inoperable in combat. Solid-state lasers could overcome that logistics issue because they could be powered by generators using standard diesel fuel.
The ATL developers have also thought about solid-state lasers. “Everything we learn here about how to take this laser through the beam-control system and onto a stationary or moving target from the air is relatable to solid-state lasers,” Fitzmire says. The beam-control system could be modified for use with solid-state lasers by changing optical coatings to work at the solid-state wavelengths. The challenge then would be to develop a suitable high-power solid-state laser able to operate on a vibrating aircraft platform.
Outside observers are skeptical that ATL will pave the way for practical laser weapons. “It’s more of a harassment weapon than anything else,” says Philip Coyle, senior advisor at the Center for Defense Information (Washington, D.C.) and a former director of military testing. He says the laser would not be effective against hardened targets such as tanks, and that targeting individual soldiers would raise ethical concerns about blinding weapons. He suggests that laser weapons might be useful only against “very soft targets” such as pick-up trucks and tents.
or looking for a certain subpopulation that behaves differently. “Often we want to do something with the cells, in some cases simple or in others complex, like creating genetic differences, perhaps associated with a disease,” Voldman said. “The trick is in figuring out how to get the ones you want, particularly when they are very small. A microscope can
be used to see them, but how does one go about manipulating them?”
The primary traditional methods of cell manipulation are fluorescence-ac-tivated cell sorting (FACS), which enables high-throughput sorting based on fluorescent probes (rather than visual inspection), and laser capture microdissection (LCM), which allows a user
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Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge, MA) are patenting a microscope-com-patible device that combines microfluidics and laser optics in a potentially simple, effective and low-cost alternative for bioscience applications, such as cell sorting.
Cell sorting is an old and ubiquitous problem, according to Joel Voldman who heads the MIT research team, whether isolating one cell in a thousand
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