DIY palm-mounted laser has the ability to blind and set fire to skin

Does anyone remember in the movie Iron Man 2, somewhere towards the big battle at the end where Iron Man emits lasers out of his hands to destroy all the evil robots in one fell swoop? That was pretty cool wasn’t it? As it turns out, that technology might not be impossible to replicate after all, although at the moment it probably won’t be able to slice metal into two just yet.

Patrick Priebe, who is a big Iron Man fan, decided to construct a palm-mounted laser unit that is said to not only have the ablily to blind anyone instantly, but also be able to set fire to skin. Scarily enough, the laser that he uses is a 1,000-mw 445nm laser diode that is available commercially, and with guns being rampant as it is, let’s hope that laser wielding gangsters will be the last thing that we will have to deal with.

The good news is that he did not share any instructions on how to build it, and apart from the laser that he used, we also know that he used a 2mm thick sheet of brass which fitted nicely on his hand, to act as a heat sink which allowed him to shoot the laser continuously for three minutes before it required a cool down. Check out the laser in action in the video below.