Laser gems

Some lasers are made from lab-grown gems, like specially-formulated ruby, garnet, or sapphire. When used in lasers, they're cut like plain cylinders. But they have all the hardness and brilliance of jewelry-quality gems, which means you can mess around with them if you like...As a laser scientist I think this is pretty much the coolest thing ever. As they explain, they start with the crusty, bubbly rind of a lab-grown titanium sapphire crystal that's left over after the researcher got the laser-quality material out of the middle. That crusty laser rind is still sapphire, though, and polishes up beautifully into a pretty pink gem not found in nature.What's particularly fun about this is titanium sapphire is like the Ferrari of laser gems, a high-end research crystal that can make incredibly short pulses of light. The short pulses are useful for high-precision timekeeping and quantum research, and can help researchers see through skin (only about a millimeter, but that's still useful…