The Navy has successfully tested its shiniest new toy: the Laser Weapons System (LaWS), which recently "tracked, engaged, and destroyed" a drone in mid-flight. It's not our first laser gun, but it's certainly our best.

The system is similar to the Navy's Phalanx close-in weapons system, which mounts a radar-guided 20mm Gatling gun on a swivelling base. Except with, you know, a giant friggin laser instead of bullets. There's no word yet on when we'll actually deploy these, but hopefully it'll be before enemy UAVs start perching. [Wired]

Now this is interesting. Smokescreen, written by Chris Smoak, is a "Flash player written in JavaScript" that takes Flash objects and converts them to JavaScript in real time.

What's that mean? Well, it means it can allow Flash to work where it isn't supported, such as on the iPad. Here's how it works:

It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio and turns them in to base64 encoded data:uris, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG.

It's impressive stuff! You can check out a Homestar Runner demo on their site, and it runs beautifully.

One problem, however, is that the whole thing is pretty hefty, clocking in at over 8,000 lines of JavaScript and 175KB, which may make performance on phones and iPads difficult. But the code is set to be open sourced in the near future, so it should be tweaked to run like butter on mobile devices with a little luck. Awesome stuff. [ Marco.org]

Okay, time to play a little game. Looking only at the profile pictures—and not the job descriptions—which of these Deans Property employees is the IT guy? Hint: it's definitely not a trick question. [Deans Property viaBuzzfeed]

Two mad geniuses have invented a rocket car, powered only by the dark magic of Mentos and soda. It's already the second-most popular vehicle class in the country, ahead of open-wheeled racing.

Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-hXcRtbj1Y