Seven
That's my prediction of the number of commenters who will mention sharks before the first comment shows up.
Beings or creatures able to emit beams of focused energy from their own living bodies: fiction, right? Comic-book, X Men stuff, right? Wrong. Boffins in America have announced that they have successfully produced laser light from living cells under laboratory conditions, paving the way - they say - for living lasers to be …
"grown within human patients, or for the production of living machinery able to interface with optical communications networks"
I'm sure Captain Cyborg, dear old Kev, is watching with interest. It's been a while since his last publicity stunt...sorry, research project was all over breakfast TV. With any luck he'll miss the fibre ports and accidentally plug himself in the mains!
My thought exactly was "and now for the shark cells!"
But there's a minor drawback: the cell itself ain't capable of producing light. I'ts still GFP, which needs to be excited to re-emit light. What this does is it takes in energetic but un-coherent light and re-emits less energetic but coherent light (aka LASER).
Also I'm really disturbed by the growing use of the verb "lazing" these days.
Goggles for, well, d'uh, LASER.
Using GFP modded cells as a gain medium is novel. But the idea of Injecting gene-modded cells into a patient for 'imaging'! Apart from the legal and safety issues - where exactly do you apply them to form a laser cavity and to what end? O er....
Apart from media whoring to generate publicity - this seems like a pointless demo. A candidate for an Ignoble Prize.
Why would I need frikking sharks when I could get the laser attached to my own head instead?
Also, consider the groping we'll get at airports if people could fit lasers to their heads.
(other parts of anatomy apart from the head that the laser could be attached to are left as an exercise for the reader)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auton
"The Autons are an artificial life form from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, and adversaries of the Doctor. Autons conceal deadly weapons within their hands, which can kill or vaporize their targets."
A somewhat more credible cause of mass blindness in the next remake of [Day of the Triffids] also can be considered. Deadly plants... hmm. "Terror of the Autons: Although the Nestene did use standard Autons for this operation, the assault relied on deadly plastic daffodils." http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Auton But I think those spat out plastic film that stuck on your face and suffocated you. Probably mostly annoying to real-life makers of plastic flowers, and of plastic dolls, big squidgy inflatable plastic chairs, etc., which also appeared.
For those of you wanting to upgrade your sharks, you have obviously missed the potential of this technology, it's a cell sized laser.
Why bother with the expensive overheads of sharks (obviously they were needed 'cause the laser was big and so is a shark), ditch them and move on to my newly created production run of 'flying fish with laser beams in their eyes' this doubles their effeiciency of being able to kill any smartly dressed, quipping secrent agent that staumbles across your hideaway.
I was expecting from the pre-amble that they'd created a full-on biological laser. But it isn't really, all the special lasery stuff is done by regular laser tech. It's just that the original light source is biological (which isn't new). I'm sure it's a huge technical achievement and everything, but it doesn't quite live up to the article title.
So it was a laser, but only if you added the other parts of a laser to it? When I worked on lasers, the mirrors were a pretty fundamental part of the laser, especially how reflective they were.
I've had myself altered into being a car. Honestly, you just need to add a few parts to the outside of me, and I'm a car. What's more, with these parts on the outside of me, driving around as a car, I survive the whole experience and can continue to drive around...