Andrei V. Rode didn’t flinch recently when enough power to run 2,000 homes blasted his fingertip. Although staccato bursts of laser light vaporized tiny dots of his flesh, he kept his finger in harm’s way. Rode, a physicist at Australian National University in Canberra, was testing something he’d been told: That the lasers he works with blast materials in such a novel way that they can evaporate his tissue without any pain.
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