The Cheese Slicing Laser 337
purduephotog writes "Xiaochun Li of The University of Wisconsin-Madison has come up with the ultimate gift for those high-tech wine and cheese connoisseurs: A cheese slicing laser. More detailed information is available at Optics.Org."
Gold-fingahhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
fast food industry (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice. And people wonder why US obesity rates are so high?
Innovation, Shminnovation (Score:3, Insightful)
Saying that it makes a great gift made it sound like something already in production, or at least imminently so.
If it can't yet slice through a block of cheese, then it's hardly a cheese slicer, is it?
Granted, I suppose there's something to be said for having slices of cheese cut into neat shapes. Oh, wait, my bad. There really isn't. As far as I'm concerned, shaped cheese is just one luxury that kids today will have to do without. When I was young, I got a normal square piece of cheese put in my sandwich, and that was if I was lucky!
Re:Much better than Stainless wires (Score:1, Insightful)
I think the wires don't have to worry about losing their jobs for a while.
According to the article, they've focused (no pun intended) on 2.5 mm thick slices. To go up to a few inches would be a much different task. It requires a much longer focal length, if it is possible indeed.
I would suspect in this scenario that water-jet cutting would be the better solution. It can cut inches of steel, so I doubt even the most aged of cheddars would pose a problem ;-)
Why only cheese? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems to me the higher energy costs in these factories would be offest by the gain in work hours that would have before been used for cleaning, disinfecting, sharpening, replacing etc of the blades.
Lots of food processing uses (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:As a student at UW-Madison... (Score:2, Insightful)
From memory, the purpose of technology is to make things easier for us. This technology will help the cheese/dairy industries and lead to some nice economic stimulation. Although a cheese laser may sound kind of stupid, it's a perfectly legitimate techology.
Re:A Raclette Laser (Score:2, Insightful)
Nitrogen, probably.
Re:Interesting Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
You're obviously not accustomed to the arbitrary, uninformed outrage expressed by the typical U.S. muttonhead... er... citizen.
We've got people screaming bloody murder about "frankenfood" who learned everything they know about genetics from "The Hulk" and "Spiderman". They SHOULD be screaming for studies, they ARE screaming for a ban.
I'd be surprised if someone DOESN'T try to outlaw this or classify it as a military weapon or something similarly idiotic. "Somebody think of the children!" they'll scream as kids keep shining laser pointers in each others' eyes as a "joke".
Re:Bets (Score:4, Insightful)
Two things:
First, why not open up one of your CD-ROM, DVD, Gamecube, other optical drive and see what's in there? Or look at the many laser pointers and derivative products on the market? Way too late for "first consumer laser".
Second, who said this is consumer? Only the Slashdot summary, as far as I can tell. It sounded to me like pure industry use only, because it's slow, so slow it's not even useful to the industry in the present form. So it's not even a "consumer laser".
Well, at least you got "laser" right...
Or maybe... (Score:3, Insightful)
If I'm not mistaken, these are the same sort of lasers used in tatoo removal and/or laser eye surgery. Both procedures are crazy expensive, and a large part of that cost seems to be due to the laser.