What is the coolest thing you can do with light

Question: What is the coolest thing you can do with light
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Asked by Owen:-) to Andy, Chris, Harriet, Jess, Nikki on 11 Mar 2016.
- Christopher Blanford answered on 11 Mar 2016:
  
  Hi again
  
  Too many cool things to list. First, you can’t go wrong with lasers, especially high-powered ones.
  My favourites:
  1. using light to see around corners: http://phys.org/news/2015-12-amazing-camera-corners-video.html
  2. Using a camera to capture light at a trillion frames per second: http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/
  
  Chris
- Harriet Reid answered on 11 Mar 2016:
  
  Making real life invisibility cloaks! At the moment it only works for really small things, but scientists are making materials that bend light around them so they appear invisible!
- andy chapman answered on 13 Mar 2016:
  
  Well I would say seeing is pretty cool….
  
  However, i saw recently that scientists could engineer certain neurones in the brain (the ‘wires’ connecting all the circuits in your brian) to be turned on an off with light. They could then trigger certain circuits to be turned on or off using light (so no need to cut into you or give you drugs) and study what behavioural changes in the subject this caused. This may not sound like much but trying to ‘map’ the brain and understand the circuit (with over a trillion wires and connections working every second!) is a very big challenge. It is even more challenging because you need to try observe brains ‘passively’, that is but not poking it while you study it, as this changes it. We need to build some king of ‘window’ that allows us to look at it while its doing its thing without disturbing it.
- Jessica Groppi answered on 13 Mar 2016:
  
  Hi!
  
  In chemistry we can use light to make some reactions happen and to study molecules we can’t see by naked eye, but affect light in specific ways that allows us to understand their structure. We can harvest light to create electrical energy, light can be used in medicine to cure skin diseases. Those are pretty cool things!
  
  Jess.
- Nikki D'Arcy answered on 14 Mar 2016:
  
  I think the best thing you can do with light is turn it off so you can go to bed…!

Question: What is the coolest thing you can do with light

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