A veritable Death Star for virus scum? A joint-research study by various universities have developed a new procedure utilizing a low-powered laser to kill viruses.

The procedure uses the laser to emit a pulse of light over target biological samples, creating mechanical vibrations in the virus shell, or capsid. This causes the shell to disintegrate, which in turn destroys the virus.

The laser's power setting for the tests was at 50 megawatts per square centimeter. This is reportedly too low to harm any nearby human tissue and blood, and is further too low to cause the target microbe to mutate.

The latter effect was a detected problem with standard UV treatment; The radiation from this procedure sometimes caused the virus to mutate and develop a resistance, while the UV light also risked damaging the surrounding tissue's DNA. Microwave treatment also didn't appear to work that well, as the surrounding moisture in the tissue diffuses the energy too much for it to affect the virus.

Light pulse tests were conducted on M13 bacteriophages, where it was found that a single light pulse destroyed the target.

Kong-Thon Tsen  of the Arizona State University indicates that this new procedure could be used to help disinfect blood and biological samples in hospitals. We imagine first on the list is disinfecting blood packs. Tsen further added that the procedure could also be used as a new means to treat patients carrying blood-borne disease.

For example blood dialysis allows us to irradiate a patient's blood outside the body and potentially cleanse it of infectious virus particles before reintroducing it into the patient. In this way, we could reduce mortality associated with diseases like hepatitis C and AIDS.