August 2008 Archives

By Jacqueline Hewett

What does .ORG mean to you?

Some Friday afternoon trivia for you: How many websites do you think end with the .ORG domain name?

According to a press release from the Public Interest Registry (PIR) that popped into my Inbox this week, the number of .ORG sites has just topped more than 7 million. It adds that the number of .ORG registrations has consistently grown 20% year-on-year since 2003. These figures make .ORG the third largest generic domain after .com and .net. For reference, optics.org must have been an "early adopter" as it was established in 1996.

So what's the secret of .ORG's success? According to PIR, the growth in .ORG registrations has been driven by trends such as "social networking, issue awareness, online collaboration and advocacy".

It lists three notable examples as:

(i) the launch of community sites such as freecycle.org;
(ii) the increasing number of wikis for collaborative content, made popular by wikipedia.org;
(iii) the growth in online political organizing.

PIR says that "the individuals and organizations that are precipitating these trends have found a strong sense of community within the .ORG domain. This has fueled the phenomenal growth of not only .ORG domains, but also the quality content and the sense of trust associated with the ".ORG" brand."

There is an interesting quote from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, in the press release. He says: "We can't imagine Wikipedia as a .com, .ORG is a core part of our identity and is available to anyone in the world. It is a great way for an organization to signal an ambition to be inclusive and global."

Tell us what you think by clicking on the word "Comments" below.

Does a website's domain name make a difference to you? In what way does ".ORG signal an ambition to be inclusive and global"? And how does that impression differ from .com?

Do you associate .ORG with a feeling of community?

For further reading on this topic, please see PIR's Get the .ORG advantage page.

By Tim Hayes at Photon 08

Photovoltaics (PVs) has been a frequent topic of conversation among the delegates here at Photon 08. Today, Ben Robinson of Dulas Solar and Stuart Irvine of Glyndwr University described the business economics of the sector here in the UK.

Not surprisingly, politics is also involved. The German and Spanish governments have initiated a feed-in tariff, rewarding PV installers for that part of the power generated which is returned to the national grid system. The result has been huge take-up of domestic solar power; in Spain PV installations grew by 480% in 2007.

Currently the UK lacks such a tariff, but Irvine read between the lines of the politicians' words on the subject. "A feed-in tariff is officially 'under review'", he said. "But the government won't be able to resist the pressure for long. The country's PV industry is potentially strong, with many elements of the PV supply chain heavily represented here, and the need for a tariff to promote PV take-up will only get stronger."

Robinson agreed, pointing out that recent developments in available PV systems have brought the cost per kWp down drastically in recent months. "Some utility companies are now hinting at a feed-in tariff on their own, even without government assistance," he commented. "Some version of a tariff is inevitable here. And essential."

By Tim Hayes at Photon 08

Sandi Wilson of the UK's Photonics Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) embarked on the daunting task of surveying the available roadmaps for photonics and related technologies, pointing out that it can be very easy for companies to get bogged down in the sheer volume of predictive data available in a growth field like photonics.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there is only limited consensus among the available roadmaps, and even the ones covering closely related topics can arrive at quite different conclusions.

To try and help, the Photonics KTN has written a Streetfinder report, an attempt to map out the roadmaps. It collates the available reports and their various conclusions into one place, along with the identity of their authoring organisations - not always obvious at first glance.

"Roadmaps are only as relevant as the people who get together to write them," said Wilson. "Hopefully we can help direct readers to the documents they really should read, and avoid the irrelevant ones."

By Tim Hayes at Photon08

Following on from the roadmap presentation, more information about the future came from Thomas Pearsall of the Paris-based European Photonics Industry Consortium (EPIC).

His organisation has just completed a comprehensive survey of how emerging nanotechnologies will affect photonics industries, a task that took more than two years to complete.

MONA (Merging Optics and NAnophotonics) identifies flat-panel displays, photovoltaics, imaging and lighting to be the four sectors where the influence of nanotechnology will be strongly felt.

For each sector MONA provides not only timelines and predictions, but also indications of risk and reward for companies thinking of exploiting the markets. And there are certainly risks.

"What's happening now in photovoltaics is nothing less than a revolution," Pearsall said. "But is this a bubble? I think the answer is probably yes. I'm seeing financial projections based on photovoltaic facilities not even built yet that extrapolate as far into the future as 2012. That smells like a bubble to me."

Do you think the current surge in photovoltaics is a bubble? When OLE spoke to Steve Eglash back in January this year, he said "No". But have things changed as 2008 has progressed?

By Tim Hayes at Photon08

"The diffraction limit no longer exists." Not in far-field fluorescence microscopy at least, according to Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Germany.

He demonstrated developments in stimulated emission depletion microscopy (STED) which can achieve resolutions beyond the normal limit predicted by the Abbe equation. His approach has been dubbed far-field optical nanoscopy.

"The strategy is to exploit selected states and transitions of the fluorescent markers in these experiments, so as to neutralise the limiting role of diffraction," Hell commented.

He expects far-field nanoscopy to enter virtually every cell biology laboratory in the near future, a testament to the fact that even well established physical laws don't necessarily last forever. "Abbe was not wrong," Hell said. "He just couldn't have known what was coming."

By Tim Hayes at Photon08

Over in today's Industry Technology Programme, there was a keen discussion about funding and commercialisation of new technology. Ashley Evans of the UK's Electronics KTN demonstrated the Fundmap website, created to help SMEs navigate their way among the 3000 different funding schemes, grants and financial initiatives available to them in the UK. SMEs can search by several criteria, including technology area, location, or position in their development cycle. Try it out at www.fundmap.co.uk.

Rob Rule of the IP Group, which specialises in developing and investing in UK university research, explained that the modern model for investment in academic research is driven strongly by issues, rather than technology - a change from the way things used to be, when it was the technology itself that was the key. No surprise then that IP Group's successful spin-outs include companies active in water science and bioscience, and that cleantech is a big part of their work.

Rule did sound a note of caution to academics looking to commercialise their work, however. "Many of the 70 or so projects we look at and assess each year are thrown out instantly," he said. "That's not because they are weak, but because the academics have compromised their own intellectual property, often by publishing it. Once the IP is compromised, we simply would not touch it."

Clearly the commercialisation of academic research is a tricky area to navigate, and not to be attempted without some knowledgeable guides.

By Tim Hayes at Photon08

Fujimoto: "OCT is on its way to becoming an accepted clinical methodology"

Photon 08 kicked off with a plenary talk from James Fujimoto of MIT, US, who described the current state of the art in optical coherence tomography (OCT). "OCT is on its way to becoming an accepted clinical methodology," he said.

Fourier domain analysis has already opened up new applications for the technology, and now high-speed high-resolution OCT is becoming a reality. "Fourier domain modelocked swept-source OCT can allow a 20 kHz sweep, and capture 20 images per second," said Fujimoto. "That's ten times faster than conventional OCT could manage, rapid enough to see transient biological processes and cell development in action."

The latest machines can acquire 3D data from a subject in less than a second, which is about the same length of time it took to obtain 2D OCT data not that long ago. Combined with advanced data processing, the result can be 3D graphical representations of animal organs and biological systems, a point Fujimoto proved with an OCT-generated movie of a trip through a rabbit's colon - quite a Fantastic Voyage.

By Jacqueline Hewett

Doppler LIDAR at the Olympics (Credit: Zhi-Shen Lui)

After 16 days of non-stop sporting action from Beijing, I knew I would be suffering from post-Olympic blues this week. That's why I decided to send a quick e-mail off to Zhi-Shen Lui of the Ocean University of China at the end of last week to see how his team got on using its Doppler LIDAR at the Olympic sailing regatta.

Here is Lui's response to my first and all important question: Was the Doppler LIDAR a success?

LIDAR wind map (Credit: Zhi-Shen Lui)

"Yes. The Doppler LIDAR worked very well during the sailing events," he told me. "The meteorologists were very interested in the horizontal wind field, especially when the wind was changing in speed and direction. The meteorologists used all the observations including LIDAR to decide when races should begin. Although we did not provide the data to the sailors directly, I think they could benefit from the efficient weather forecasting."

If you were following the sailing, here's my original post on the Laser sailing class, you'll know that the weather was incredibly unpredictable and some days there was no more than a breath of wind. I wanted to find out how the LIDAR performed in these light wind conditions. And it's positive news again.

"It is usually clear air when the wind is light," explained Lui. "Traditional methods like radar cannot obtain the wind under clear air conditions because there are not adequate backscattering particles. Doppler LIDAR has high temporal and spatial resolution and gives a very dense measuring grid (100m*100m grid over 25 square km) with high update rate of 10 minutes."

Good news all round, so much so that Lui and his team will be back in action in September when the Paralympics come to Beijing. A gold-medal winning performance for optical technology.

By Jon Cartwright, reporter on physicsworld.com

Infrared animals (Credit: Chris Lavers)

At first glance these images look like snapshots from that classic eighties film Predator.

It turns out, though, that the pre-eminent being responsible for them is not a brawny, gun-toting alien, but Chris Lavers, a technology lecturer at Britannia Royal Navy College in Dartmouth, UK. The images are infrared portraits of various animals dwelling at Paignton Zoo in Devon.

"I have been involved in thermal imagery for about 10 years now, and thermal imagery of wildlife with Paignton Zoo since 2002," writes Lavers in an email. "My interest is concerned with highlighting the plight of endangered species under pressure from both man and climate change, deteriorating environments, etc."

Lavers explains that thermal images can be used to observe animals without stressing them. "It enables a healthy baseline assessment of animals to be established and thereby aids veterinarian diagnosis," he writes.

Aside from giving giraffes, tortoises and other creatures a once-over, Lavers is also interested in using thermal imaging to copy some of nature's designs, such as iridescent butterfly wings. These could be employed in future stealth devices, he says.

If you want to see more of Lavers's images -- and are out and about in the south-west of the UK -- you can visit his exhibition. It starts on 15 September at Paignton Zoo, and moves onto the Living Coasts zoo in Torquay until the third week of October.

By Jacqueline Hewett

A lot of us here at IOP Publishing like astronomy, myself included, and try to keep up to date with the various missions that are exploring our solar system. For me, it's a combination of two things.

First, I am genuinely fascinated by the technology. I remember back when I was doing my PhD that even the vibrations generated by the air-conditioning unit used to cause problems. It amazes me that some of the sensitive instruments onboard these missions actually survive the take-off. I know they are designed to survive, but still, it just seems incredible.

The other part that I like is the human story and what I call "Apollo 13 moments" - those few minutes of waiting to see if the astronauts have made it home or did they burn up in the atmosphere.

A similar "Apollo 13 moment" happened on 14 August at the European Space Agency (ESA) on the Rosetta mission. This mission is dubbed "The Comet Chaser" and will attempt to make the first controlled landing on a comet.

On its way to the comet, Rosetta is going to fly past two asteroids, the first of which is called Steins, and it is using ESA's first optical tracking system to manoeuvre into the correct trajectory. Put simply, images from the spacecraft's cameras were used to calculate the asteroid's location and optimize the trajectory for the fly-by. The thrusters were on for two minutes to change Rosetta's course.

Steins is the tiny white dot at the centre of the concentric circles (Credit: ESA)

The camera onboard Rosetta is called OSIRIS (Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System). Optical tracking of Steins is continuing with daily imaging slots between 25 August and 4 September when Steins will be much closer.

According to Andrea Accomazzo, Rosetta Spacecraft Operations Manager, the optical navigation campaign is providing exceptional results, far exceeding expectations. "The exceptional quality of the OSIRIS scientific camera - namely its angular resolution - provided data as accurate as expected, and made our current trajectory calculations very precise."

Other colleagues share this sense of achievement - and relief. "It is the first time that we have used optical instrumentation onboard a scientific spacecraft for navigation, as opposed to the usual techniques based on analysing radio signals," said Trevor Morley, who leads the Rosetta Flight Dynamics Orbit. "The exceptional results are really encouraging and we look forward to using this technique again in the future, if and when it is possible."

I bet they had some sleepless nights leading up to that manoeuvre. What's it going to be like when they try to land on a comet in 2014?

By Jacqueline Hewett

Intel chairman Craig Barrett (Credit: Intel)

If you've been reading my recent posts on skills shortages and websites to get children enthusiastic about optics and have an idea that could help the situation, well, now is your chance to submit that idea to Intel, and maybe win some money in the process.

Intel has just launched a competition called the Inspire Empower Challenge and is looking for technologies to address four specific areas, one of them being education. For the record, the other three are healthcare, economic development and the environment.

Briefly, Intel is asking people to submit innovative technical solutions that could address one of the four global issues. The winner in each category will receive $100,000 (approximately £50,000 or EURO65,000) in seed funding to get their idea off the ground. The company officially launched the competition at its Intel Developer Forum, which is being held in San Francisco this week.

Here is what Intel says regarding the education category:

"Education remains the foundation for innovation and the advancements of societies in the face of global challenges. Through the use of technology, educators have been able to find new ways to teach people, improve the quality of education, and help young people prepare to compete in a 21st century knowledge-based economy. The ongoing focus should be on students and teachers, as well as the sharing of locally relevant educational content through computing devices and access to the Internet."

You can find full details and rules on the Intel Challenge website. As a first step, you have to register your interest by the 30th September, and then submit your idea by 31st January 2009.

Intel's chairman Craig Barrett is pretty outspoken on the issue of inspiring the next generation of talent, as you can see from this recent article on the BBC, so it comes as no surprise that Intel has launched this competition. And you can see just how active (or maybe that should be concerned) Intel is by visiting its website called Intel Inspire: Innovation Starts With Education.

By Tim Hayes

Photon 08 kicks off at the Edinburgh Conference Centre on the campus of Heriot-Watt University next week, and optics.org will be there.

As you would expect from the UK's largest optics conference, there is a lot going on, including:

Optics and Photonics 2008, the biennial conference of the Optics and Photonics Division of the Institute of Physics.

QEP-18, the latest in the series of conferences initiated in 1973 by the Quantum Electronics and Photonics Group of the Institute of Physics.

An Industry Technology Programme with sessions of particular interest to those in the optics industry.

Plus an exhibition of the latest optics and photonics technology.

Photon 08 runs from 26-29th August, and I'll be there to report from the show and bring you the latest news. If you're attending, visit IOP Publishing at Stand 40 and say hello.

By Jacqueline Hewett

Photo credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Just a quick post to give you an update on the Laser sailing class at the Olympics - and its great news for us here in the UK. Paul Goodison has won the gold.

I've been following the progress of the Laser sailors since phoning up the Royal Yachting Association last week and this morning I was delighted to see the BBC broadcasting the triumphant scenes of Goodison crossing the line and being met by his team-mates. There are also pictures on the Beijing Olympics website.

The result is all about points accumulated over a number of races. In the case of sailing, it's the person with the least number of points who is leading. So, going into today's double points medal race, Goodison led by 18 points and knew exactly where he had to finish to take the title. The full results page for the Laser class is here.

Goodison's is Britain's fourth sailing medal of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Penny Clark in the Laser Radial finished a very respectable 10th place overall. The full results page for the Laser Radial class is here.

By Jacqueline Hewett

Following on from my previous post about the lack of physics graduates and the skills shortage facing the industry, I wanted to pass on some news that I have just received from the Optical Society of America (OSA). The society has just re-launched its optics education website opticsforkids.org.

According to the OSA, the website has been developed to encourage interest in optics and is pitched at students in primary school through to high school as well as parents and teachers.

I've just had a quick look at the website and there seems to be lots on there. I particularly enjoyed the career match quiz which marked me out as an "optical scientist - someone who advances our knowledge and understanding of light by studying how and why it affects the world around us".

There is also a section called Future Scientists which looks full of stuff you could do to keep your children entertained on a rainy Sunday afternoon and get them interested in optics at the same time.

My favourite so far is the shimmering lenses experiment which involves cutting convex and concave shapes out of jelly. Yes, you did read that right: cutting convex and concave shapes out of jelly. Good luck attempting this feat and no eating the jelly before you have cut your convex and concave lenses out.

I reckon any activity like this can only be a good thing. We really have to try to get youngsters inspired and thinking about optics and science in general.

By Jacqueline Hewett

Where have all the graduates gone?

One of the most eye-opening and thought-provoking conversations I have had recently was with Dawn Ohlson of Thales UK. She's Thales's Director of Educational Affairs and is responsible for going into schools to inspire young children about science as well as encouraging students to join Thales once they have graduated from university.

The company's target is to take on around 100 graduates per year - how difficult do you think that task is? Thinking back to the number of people on my undergraduate physics course (that's a picture of me graduating with my PhD by the way), my first instinct was that it sounded tough but achievable. It turns out to be far more of an uphill battle than I ever imagined.

Ohlson told me that she sees thousands of CVs and typically employs one person for every 40 CVs. Suddenly, the 100 graduates per year milestone turns into a Herculean task. What's even more worrying is the extent of this skills shortage problem and the truly massive effort that will be required to turn the situation around.

"I do a lot of talks in schools and you often find that you are educating the teachers as well as the children. Children are not being enthused about science, with the knock-on effect that the pool of talent emerging from university is decreasing," explained Ohlson. "We are all fishing for the top 10-15% of a steadily decreasing pool."

Comments like this are a real worry and make me think that the problem simply cannot be solved in the short term. It's going to take at least a generation to reverse the shortage of skilled graduates. We have to inspire today's school children or else the size of today's problem will be an order of magnitude larger for the next generation of recruiters.

You can read my full interview with Dawn entitled Shrinking talent pool creates massive recruitment problems.

In the mean time, it leaves companies with a real headache. Just how do you find the right people? It's a topic we discussed with Finnish company Liekki in the past in this article entitled Global thinking tackles the skills shortage in the photonics industry.

"For us, the only solution is to recruit internationally - you have to look at your available skill pool on a global basis and adapt to that situation," Per Stenius of Liekki told us. "It seems that more and more companies recognize that the war for talent is on-going on a global scale. We have to embrace a multicultural approach if we want the best teams."

Feel free to leave your comments on this topic by clicking on the word "Comments" below. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts and experiences.

By Tim Hayes

You, robot

Is it a coincidence that Berlin, where the optics industry is so strong, is also the birth place of the most famous robot in movie history?

Babelsberg film studios in the city’s Potsdam region has been hosting film crews since 1911, when a studio with all-glass walls was constructed there. As Martin Roth of the Potsdam Institute of Astrophysics told me, Potsdam was also home to a cluster of astronomical observatories at around the same time. No doubt the astronomers and the film directors were equally desperate for Potsdam’s clean air and seclusion.

Berlin’s photonic strength is built on a tradition of applied optics, as I heard first-hand when I visited the city. So perhaps it’s not too surprising that the optical effects, lighting design and visual experimentation on show in Metropolis, the most famous silent film to come out of Babelsberg, were developed in a region that now features strongly here on optics.org and in Optics & Laser Europe magazine.

Courtesy of a chance discovery in Buenos Aires, Metropolis is being restored to its original length and will be seen in full for the first time in decades. The film has cast a huge shadow over science-fiction for the last 80 years, but it looks like we're only now going to see what director Fritz Lang and his team really came up with in a Berlin suburb in 1926.

By Marie Freebody

Martin Goetzeler, CEO of Osram Opto Semiconductors, Germany

I was lucky enough to speak to Martin Goetzeler recently and gained some interesting insights into his opinions on the global photonics market. As well as running one of the world's leading lighting manufacturers, OSRAM Opto Semiconductors, Goetzeler is also the president of Photonics21, a technology platform that aims to bring together European photonics professionals.

"We expect the 21st century to become the century of photonics, which means that it is very important to bring the photonics community together," said Goetzeler. While it is a bold statement, it is clear that he is not alone in the view that photonics is going to play an increasingly crucial role in the global market in the years to come.

Viviane Reding, European commissioner for information society and media, recently said, "Photonics is driving innovation in Europe." This statement is based on a recent photonics study, which was carried out at the end of 2007 by Photonics21. The study predicts that for the period 2005 to 2015, the global photonics market will experience an annual growth rate of 7.6%.

According to Goetzeler, the key markets in which he expects to see significant improvements in the next ten years are industrial manufacturing, lighting and projection systems, biophotonics, and optical networks.

For those of you working in these sectors, do you agree with Goetzeler and Reding? Do you see your business booming in the coming decade or are there other fields that are being overlooked? Are we really living in the century of photonics?

By Tim Hayes

Tommy can you see me?

Stadium rock and laser displays go together like heavy and metal, and when The Who took the stage at the VH1 Rock Honors show last month in Los Angeles, they did so backed up by some serious laser fire power.

According to Lighting & Sound International, the contract for supplying the lasers at the show went to California's YLS Lasers, who employed "three high-power YAG laser projectors, five optic-fed remote scanners, three table scanners and over thirty stage mirror placements to give lighting designer Tom Kenny and The Who what they were looking for."

YLS handles the laser displays for a whole range of public events, including stunt shows, corporate events, parades, amusement parks and casinos. Which proves that not only are lasers still considered a fine way to liven up a public shindig, but also that some photonics professionals have all the fun.

I wonder about the connection between this sector of the laser economy and the kind of laser science you can read about on this site. Advances in laser technology are happening all the time, all over the world; we write about them every day. Does this feed through into changes in the kind of lasers and optical effects you can witness at public displays these days? Does anyone know?

By Marie Freebody

Did you see the partial solar eclipse?

I'm sure I wasn't the only one who was eagerly anticipating the partial solar eclipse, which was visible from the UK last Friday morning. I happened to be at home in the usually sunny seaside town of Bournemouth, but was hugely disappointed to find a very grey and overcast sky prevented me from observing this special event.

A lucky optics.org reader fared much better, however, and sent us this great snap of the partial eclipse from Devoran near Falmouth, Cornwall. Clive Cassey took this image at 10:03am at the greatest occultation. Clive used 10 x 42 binoculars to project a 30mm diameter real image onto card, which he captured using his 3Mpixel digital camera.

I'm sure Clive wasn't the only optics.org reader lucky enough to have snapped the eclipse, so if you have any pictures of your own please do send them in.

If, like me, you missed the partial solar eclipse, then you can look forward to the next big celestial event - the Perseid meteor shower, which peaks on Tuesday 12th August.

The Perseid meteor shower is an annual event that has been observed for more than 2,000 years. Although the best time to look is during the dark hours before dawn on Tuesday, if you can't wait until then why not stop by Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, UK for its Perseid Meteor Shower party this Saturday.

A barbecue and a night time sky show - what could be better?

If you do manage to take any pictures of the meteor shower, then please send them in to us at marie.freebody@iop.org

By Michael Banks, News editor on physicsworld.com

When I was a PhD student, I remember having to go through a few rounds of thesis revision, which was usually greeted with a painful moan of once again ploughing through 200 plus pages of dry, technical language, with a few equations thrown in as well. But I never thought anyone other than a physicist really wanting to read it would persevere - even my mum only got as far as the abstract.

Well for all those Queen fans out there, guitarist and astronomer Brian May, who has recently completed his PhD in astronomy at Imperial College London, has now had his PhD thesis published as a book by Springer and Canopus Publishing Ltd.

May's thesis, and the book too for that matter, is snappily entitled "A survey of radial velocities in the zodiacal dust cloud" and covers the Zodiacal light - a faint diffuse cone of light seen in the west after sunset and the east before sunrise.

May built a Fabry-Perot spectrometer, which was deployed at the Observatorio del Teide in Tenerife to record high resolution spectra of the Zodiacal light in two observing periods in 1971 and 1972 with the aim of achieving the first mapping of the magnesium I absorption line in the night sky.

A quick search on Amazon.co.uk, shows that the book is available to pre-order before it is released on 1st September this year. Bargain hunters will no doubt be pleased that Amazon has shaved off £2.20 from the recommended retail price, so the book now costs £41.79.

I can see why someone would want to read May's previous popular science book "Bang! The complete history of the universe", co-authored with astronomers Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott. But I doubt his latest book will be a similar hit.

By Jacqueline Hewett

When we are searching for news, one of the keywords we use is "laser". This generally returns a long and varied list of potential news stories but in summer, and especially every four years when the Olympics are on, searching for "laser" often brings up news of sailing regattas. And the reason? The Laser class.

Paul Goodison sailing his Laser

So with the Olympics just round the corner, I called the press office of the UK's Royal Yachting Association this morning to get the lowdown on what a Laser is and the chances our Laser sailors have of bringing home a medal.

Laser 101: What is a Laser? The Laser is the world's most popular single-handed dinghy and made its debut at the Olympics in 1996. The boat itself has a single sail and must conform to rigorous design specifications leaving no room for technical gains. It's all about the sailor's skill. There is a video guide to sailing Lasers on the RYA website if you want to learn more.

The Laser is a single-handed dinghy for men while the Laser Radial is a single-handed dinghy for women. For the UK, we've got Paul Goodison going for gold after coming 4th at the Athens 2004 games and Penny Clark making her Olympic debut.

At the 2008 Olympics, the sailing will take place at the Qingdao Olympic Sailing Centre, approximately 340 miles south east of Beijing. The regatta kicks off on Saturday 9th August, with the Laser races starting on Tuesday 12th August.

Back in July, we covered the Doppler lidar system that will be monitoring the wind conditions across the lake at Qingdao. "The major users will be the meteorologists at the Olympic Sailing weather service," researcher Zhi-Shen Lui of the Ocean University of China told optics.org. "The wind is constantly changing speed and direction so athletes need to have the best information at the start of a run. The meteorologists will use Doppler lidar data as well as other traditional weather stations to guide the schedule."

I also learned that sailing is Britain's most successful Olympic sport. Fingers crossed for Beijing!