It’s literally a now or never sort of situation.
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00:00Lasers are becoming more and more useful for scientists all the time, but without focusing them, they scatter, and their usefulness diminishes.
00:11Now, researchers at the University of Maryland have achieved a groundbreaking landmark.
00:15They've been able to confine a self-focusing laser to a small framework of error.
00:19The most standard way of focusing lasers to a particular point are fiber optics.
00:23Lasers travel down the optical pathway and can be sent anywhere, but it requires the optical fibers to be connected.
00:29The new experiment used what's called an air waveguide, or where other laser pulses are used to corral the laser light.
00:35It turns out that pulses of lasers heat air, leaving a tube of lower-density air inside those heated molecules.
00:41So using this principle, researchers guided laser light down a 45-foot-long hallway, and it self-focused itself for the duration.
00:48In fact, this is what the laser light looked like at the endpoint, without the air waveguide.
00:52And this is what it looked like with the air waveguide.
00:54A market improvement, which the researchers say could mean someday soon.
00:58We could be sending messages via light, without fiber optic cables.