Fiber optics

New Fiber Optics Tech Smashes Data Rate Record

July 8, 2024
Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

A team of researchers in Japan and the United Kingdom have smashed the world record for fiber optic communications through commercial-grade fiber. By broadening fiber’s communication bandwidth, the team has produced data rates four times as fast as existing commercial systems—and 33 percent better than the previous world record.The researchers’…

May 15, 2024
Biotechnology & Biomedical

Neurosurgeon Vitor Mendes Pereira has grown accustomed to treating brain aneurysms with only blurry images for guidance.Equipped with a rough picture of the labyrinthine network of arteries in the brain, he does his best to insert mesh stents or coils of platinum wire—interventions intended to promote clotting and to seal…

14 Mar 24

Optical Fibers Could Illuminate the Moon’s Core

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

In addition to flags, spacecraft parts, and poop, Apollo astronauts left behind a quintet of seismic stations on the moon’s surface. In the 1970s, those stations gave selenologists (scientists who study the moon) early glimpses into what lurked under the lunar surface. In fact, that Apollo-era equipment helped establish that…

10 Jan 24

Single-Photon Source Reaps Gain for Quantum Internet

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

Producing photons one at a time on demand at room temperature is a key requirement for the rollout of a quantum internet—and the practical quantum computers that would undergird that network. The photons can be used as quantum bits (qubits), the quantum equivalent of classical computing’s 0s and 1s. Labs…

14 Aug 23

Fiber Optic Cables Are Natural Earthquake Detectors

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

Fiber optic cables are the vast underground nervous system that meets our growing demand for high-speed Internet and communication services. However, signals in the cables can occasionally suffer from vibrations from cars driving overhead, nearby construction, or even earthquakes. Researchers have previously proposed harnessing those perturbations to convert the thousands…

27 Jul 23

The Invention That Let Fiber Optics Span the Globe

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation, Mechanical, Production & Manufacturing

Plenty of big stories from the year 1985 had their moment in the sun and are now all but forgotten: New Coke, “We Are the World,” the rise of desktop publishing. But one at-the-time obscure invention from that year has long eclipsed the frothy headlines of its time, because it…

26 Jun 23

Novel 19-Core Fiber Hits 1.7 Petabits per Second

Electrical, Electronics & Instrumentation

Researchers in Japan and Australia have developed a new multicore optic fiber able to transmit a record-breaking 1.7 petabits per second, while maintaining compatibility with existing fiber infrastructure. The team–from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Sumitomo Electric Industries, and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia—achieved the…

New Fiber Optics Tech Smashes Data Rate Record

“Snake-like” Probe Images Arteries from Within

Optical Fibers Could Illuminate the Moon’s Core

Single-Photon Source Reaps Gain for Quantum Internet

Fiber Optic Cables Are Natural Earthquake Detectors

The Invention That Let Fiber Optics Span the Globe

Novel 19-Core Fiber Hits 1.7 Petabits per Second

Google won two major awards at MWC Barcelona 2025.

Expanding AI Overviews and introducing AI Mode

This MRI Can Run on Batteries

The Tiny Star Explosions Powering Moore’s Law