page 8
He also recommended police
pursue a case against Zim-
merman for manslaughter.
An arrest warrant and all
charges against Zimmerman
were turned down by the
state attorney’s office, citing
that they did not have enough
evidence.
Another variable in
this case is video surveil-
lance footage of Zimmerman
at the Sanford police station
that night approximately an
hour after the incident. Zim-
merman claims, as do the
police reports, that he was
beaten and bloodied in the
nose and back of the head,
but in this footage appears to
be a very clean and uninjured
looking man. He did receive
some medical attention and
was cleaned up at the scene,
but there are no clear signs of
swelling, injury, or blood on
his clothing.
Richard Kurtz, the funeral
home director who prepared
Martin’s body, said that it
was his professional opinion
that Martin could not have
been involved in a very vio-
lent altercation. According to
Kurtz, his fists showed no
signs of punching, and his
body showed no signs of
struggle. He stated that while
there was clearly an entrance
wound, he could not make
out an exit wound. If
Trayvon Martin was shot at
such close range, it is likely
the bullet would have gone
the entire way through his
body.
Another cause for concern
on the 911 calls from that
night. Zimmerman claims the
calls from help were from
him, as do at least one eye-
witness and the police re-
ports. However, Martin’s
mother claims she recognizes
the voice yelling for help as
that of her son. Tom Owen, a
forensic expert contacted by
the Orlando Sentinel to ana-
lyze these tapes, claims using
voice identifying technology
that he “can say with reason-
able scientific certainty that
it’s not Zimmerman.”
After public outcry
and a long series of protests
across the country demand-
ing the arrest of George Zim-
merman, the Department of
Justice is now involved in the
case, reinvestigating the inci-
dent.
MICHAEL PERSCH
Star Wars, Star Trek,
and even Austin Powers all
play with the idea of lasers -
machines that can shoot
beams of light that can de-
stroy anything with extreme
precision. This idea has
wake of World War II with
the dawn of the Nuclear
Age, but prospects of lasers
have grown far beyond
weapons, and in one in-
stance, are even working
right along the work of the
nuclear field. .
On March 15, 2012
the United States, in the lat-
est steps of a fifty year plus
project, fired its newest laser
beam in California. The la-
ser broke all current records
as it reached its peak of a
2.03 megajoule shot. One
megajoule is equal to 1 mil-
of gravity.
The shot was rec-
orded at the United States’
Nation Ignition Facility
(NIF) at the Lawrence Liv-
ermore National Lab. How-
ever, the goal of this facility
is not to develop a weapon.
The final goal of this project
is to create small star.
The - idea began
roughly fifty years ago, after
the United States created an
arsenal of weapons working
of the principles of nuclear
fission (breaking atoms
apart). We.then slowly im-
plemented this idea into our
current nuclear energy pro-
grams. This method howev-
er offers huge risks such as
meltdowns, radiation leaks,
and large amounts of nuclear
waste — examples include
the Three Mile Island melt-
down and last year’s nuclear
measurement used to meas-
ure energy. For comparison,
the standard example of a
single joule is the energy
required to lift an average
sized apple one meter
straight up against the force
NIF 1s working on
the opposite end of this idea;
they hope to use nuclear fu-
sion (bonding atoms) as a
form of creating energy,
much like the sun does. The
facility will use small
amounts of deuterium and
tritium in a fuel capsule.
They must also replicate the
conditions of this reaction
by generating temperatures
in the tens of millions of de-
grees, and pressures billions
of times greater than those
from Earth’s atmosphere.
While this process
may sound huge and bom-
bastic, the entire facility it-
self is actually what the la-
sers are built into. The target
chamber is only about 30
feet in diameter, and the fuel
cell being shot is the size of
a pea. Finally, after decades
of work and dozens of trials,
all that the laser needs to do
with fire for only ten bil-
lionths of a second.
The hopes of this
experiment would be to suc-
cessfully create a man-made
star in a controlled environ-
ment which we could study.
The process is expected to
use the energy of “500 mil-
lion million 100 watt light
bulbs”, according to NIF
website. They believe the
end result could potentially
release enough energy to
help break the United States’
dependency on foreign oil.
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