While most of America is busy shitting their pants in anger over the government shutdown, today Star Wars fanatics have a reason to cream their pants in delight, for scientists now have the technology to create an actual motherfucking lightsaber. More via the Guardian:

Harvard and MIT physicists writing in the new edition of Nature say they have discovered a way to bind photons together in order to form a new molecule which behaves almost exactly like George Lucas's deadly devices.

"Most of the properties of light we know about originate from the fact that photons are massless and do not interact," said Harvard university physics professor Mikhail Lukin. "What we have done is create a special type of medium in which photons interact with each other so strongly that they act as though they have mass, and bind together to form molecules.

"It's not an in-apt analogy to compare this to lightsabers. When these photons interact with each other, they're pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what's happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies."

We're still waiting on the hoverboard, though.