Clocking in at just over one petawatt (1 quadrillion watts), the creatively named Texas Petawatt Laser is capable of focusing more than two thousand times the amount of energy created by all the power plants in the country into a beam of unlimited destruction benign scientific inquiry. Dr. Ditmire at The University of Texas at Austin claimed the laser would be used to study the extreme conditions present in strange stellar bodies like brown dwarf stars. He then steepled his fingers and cackled madly. (via Engadget)