Laser

We got our laser (one of the lasers…) replaced in the Bruker timsTOF fleX MALDI 2 (I looked up the official weird capitalization just for you) on Friday. The laser, which costs something like as much as a nice car, looks like a gray metal box with a bunch of random cable connectors plus a flat metal plate that I guess must get Real Hot because a heat pipe and fan thingie gets bolted to it. Which is what real lasers normally look like. But back in the day we had this DNA sequencer that used an argon ion laser to excite the fluorescent dyes used in the sequencing chemistry, and that laser, holy crap, that laser was a shiny black metal cylinder with a bigger cylinder on one end and a gigantic power cable, and it looked exactly like a movie prop laser. Like it seriously looked exactly like a prop from Star Wars or Trek or whatever. The most laser prop looking real laser ever.