The paper seems legit
www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphoton.2011.99.html#/supplementary-information
And actually, whats happening is that they've found that a certain protein can work in a LASER, which is fairly unexciting.
And then they've tried it with a cell genetically engineered to produce a lot of that protein, and it's worked, and not killed the cell, which is amazing (since the cell will keep producing the protein, this can essentially be self-repairing for that part of it, and should be cheap to get more of the LASER medium). You still need to put the cell in a normal LASER cavity (so that the light bounces back and forth, and all synchronizes up), so it won't just start shooting out beams on it's own, and the cell is essentially acting as a container for the protein that actually does all the work.
It's probably more noisy than other LASERs, but thats at the level of one part in a thousand, rather than one in ten thousand, so not too much of a problem (and it can be filtered out).
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Tedium Alduce me to interlow myself., Mon 13 Jun 2011, 10:27,
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Next week: engineering one of those cell to grow tiny mirrors
And implanting them into retinas so we can have laser eyes. You'd cook your own corneas, but it would awesome.
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Colonel Boris "...a desperate Buzzfeed imitation...", Mon 13 Jun 2011, 10:34,
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Do you really need to capitalise the word 'laser'?
It's been a naturalised word for decades
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flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Mon 13 Jun 2011, 10:43,
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*Quote fingers* Dr. Evil *Unquote fingers*
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unclepills Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think., Mon 13 Jun 2011, 11:40,
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