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18 Dec, 2015 14:30

Real lightsabers: Careful not to singe your eyebrows (video)

Real lightsabers: Careful not to singe your eyebrows (video)

Star Wars has not only thrilled audiences for nearly 40 years, but it’s also sparked imaginations and inspired innovation.

Allen Pan, a crafty engineering whiz who tries “to make pretend things into real things” according to his YouTube profile, created a real-life lightsaber using an insanely long flame of butane.

It doesn’t cut flesh quite like the fictional energy weapon portrayed in the multi-billion dollar franchise, but thanks to his precise design and all-important sound effects, it makes the world’s coolest cigarette lighter.

If you want to build one yourself, apparently all you need is a nichrome ignition, twin-purpose valve control, syringe valve in a 3D printed enclosure, methanol-acetone fuel mixture, and butane propellant. Easy, right?

We might say ‘Don’t try this at home’, but then again, those parts aren’t exactly laying around the house.

Beyond the clever creations of the human mind, nature has been creating its own lightsabers for eons - and it’s been captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

The photo shows a yellow shaft of superheated material and gas being propelled out of a newborn star in the Orion B molecular cloud complex of the Milky Way - suggesting that Jedis may have created the universe with their lightsabers.

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