I'm pretty sure bringing liquid cooling to the server room on large scale is the next thing in this arena. Immersion in a dielectric coolant is one way to go. I've worked with Hardcore Computer and their Liquid Blades a bit, and am optimistic: http://www.hardcorecomputer.com/servers/liquid-blade/index.html

I think the better option than zapping the eye with lasers is a simple neural interface that turns on and off your left and right eyes alternately, at 60 Hz. That should be much better than glasses, and what could go wrong?

What do you know or think about other laser inertial confinement approaches that are actually intended to make a path to energy production (i.e. NRL's Nike/Electra KrF rep-rate lasers, direct ignition, etc)? See my comment above about HAPL.

This is 100% correct. The purpose of NIF is more or less to test nukes without testing nukes. The energy production bit is 90% greenwashing, 10% truth, because you can learn some useful physics (depending on what they release).

There are WAY better ways, cheaper too, to do research for laser-fusion energy production. One of these, the High-Average-Power Laser (HAPL) program, has been defunded by Congress and more or less disowned by the Dept. of Energy for the last 2 years, because they're owned by weapons interests and the institutional inertia of magnetic fusion.

HAPL differs in that it was cost-effective, had a roadmap to a demo power plant, and focused on things that are actually useful for energy production: repetition rates of 5+ Hz (NIF is hours), direct ignition designs and mass-production pellet fuel that don't require messy gold hohlraums, and KrF lasers instead of glass ones that produce deeper (more effective) UV light directly.

Look it up: http://www-ferp.ucsd.edu/HAPL/

Yes, I was somewhat involved, and more than a little sad that this cheap ($40M/yr) program got sidelined, though we haven't given up yet.

I wonder if there is some way a fluorescent material could be suspended in the flexible polymer along with the aluminum nanoparticles. That way it would absorb out-of-spectrum light and re-emit it at a usable frequency. Or would the fluorescent light be too weak to even reach the minimum energy to dislodge an electron?

If you watch it as a rental, you'll confirm that it was a so-so movie, because you will have missed the good part, which is having an entirely novel immersive experience in parallel with the main character's immersive experience.

To answer the grandfather post, and correct this one, this particular glider does use batteries to run its processor, sensors, comms, and the buoyancy change pump. It differs from the stock Slocum Electric gliders in that it has a larger battery pack. It was not recharged at all en-route - there is no power-generating turbine (that would cause way too much drag) - and in fact had a fair amount of juice left. The other energy-saving measure they used compared to normal glider ops is shallower dives, which require less pumping power than deep ones. There are operational thermally-powered gliders out there, and they can dive deeper, but have not made this long of a trip yet (though several gliders have gone Bermuda-Cape Cod and one of them may have been thermal, I'm not sure).

Yes, it does tell you much more, because you have vertical sections of ocean properties such as temperature & salinity, which are what drive bulk motion in the ocean. The glider is going very slow (.3 m/s) so the sections are essentially vertical, in the oceanic scale of things. And the GPS-derived direction it drifts between surfacings, as compared to its dead-reckoned course, gives a very accurate depth-averaged current that can be compared to satellite measurements & used to improve models in near-real time. The gliders are very useful.