Outside the small town of Paducah, Kentucky, a wealth of uranium is locked away in thousands of storage cylinders filled with ...

Military planners spent years treating high-energy lasers as a science project. In 2025, that changed, as directed-energy systems moved from test ranges into real air defense networks and forced ...

Nuclear power provides about 9% of global electricity today, and that fraction could tick up as countries look to build new ...

The concept of using light as a weapon dates back over 2,000 years to ancient Greece, where commander Hippocrates used polished mirrors to set Roman ships ablaze. For a long time, laser weapons were ...

(THE CONVERSATION) Nations around the world are rapidly developing high-energy laser weapons for military missions on land and sea, and in the air and space. Visions of swarms of small, inexpensive ...

Britain this week showed off a new laser weapon that its military says could deliver lethal missile or aircraft defense at around $13 a shot, potentially saving tens of millions of dollars over the ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Adam Frank is an astrophysicist exploring our place in the Cosmos. View from inside the OMEGA target chamber during a direct-drive ...

Instantly turning a material from opaque to transparent, or from a conductor to an insulator, is no longer the stuff of science fiction. For several years now, scientists have been using lasers to ...

Laser technologies support precision welding, cutting, and inspection processes throughout EV battery production.

The mechanism that can cause a rapidly expanding plasma—the superhot state of matter harnessed in fusion energy systems—to spontaneously generate its own magnetic fields was identified through a new ...

There are many different types of lasers—almost as many as there are applications for the same—but what ties them all together as a class is that they depend on the same physical effect: stimulated ...

They’re the bane of pilots and moviegoers, but lasers have become an essential part of everyday life. They facilitate everything from high-speed communications, to vision-saving surgeries, to ...