optics

The existing bandwidth between Asia and North America is crowded. Following FCC approval of a U.S.-China link last month, Google and five other companies have announced a Japan-U.S. link to be completed in early 2010.

The $300 million fiber-optic cable will stretch approximately 10,000 km (6,214 miles) under the Pacific. "Google's partners in the consortium, dubbed Unity, comprises Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and Singapore Telecommunications," Yahoo News reported.

Internet users in East Asia are familiar with sometimes sluggish speeds on transpacific transmissions. In my experience, connections are for some reason … Read more

Two weeks after the rash of severed submarine cables disrupted Internet service across India and the Middle East, International Telecom Union has issued a statement establishing one of the five recent undersea Internet cable cuts as accidental. The organization is not ruling out sabotage as a cause for the others.

Read the full report at Ars Technica: "Undersea saboteurs may have been responsible for cable cuts"

Let's say five fiber-optics communications cables are severed, some thousands of feet beneath the surface. How do you get them back up & running? Well duh, you don't replace the cable down there beneath the waves, you go get the cable and bring it to the surface. But now the question is, how do you retrieve the cable?

Read the full story at Slate: "How do you fix an undersea cable?"

An Internet cable running under the ocean has been severed, making it the third such cable to be rendered useless since Wednesday. The results? Up to a 75 percent loss of network activity in the area between India and Europe.

Read the full report on BBC: "New cable cut compounds Net woes"

A new connector that transmits information using pulses of light could replace the copper wires that connect computational cores in supercomputers. IBM's "silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator" takes up less space than traditional copper wires--and 90 percent less energy. At speeds up to 100 times faster than wires, it's a likely harbinger of smaller, faster, more energy-efficient supercomputers.

Read the full story at BBC: "Light to shrink computer clusters"

In theory, robots aren't designed to make mistakes. But a University College London (UCL) project team is hoping errors in how software "sees" optical illusions can make robots more like humans--mistakes and all.

Project leaders Dr. R. Beau Lotto and David Corney at the UCL institute of Ophthalmology say the study provides unprecedented insight into how the human eye can be fooled by lighting and shading. Instead of simulating the human brain, the software simulates learning patterns from past visual experiences.

The UCL Institute of Ophthalmology study recreated the vision errors using software that "learns" … Read more

An Israeli start-up has created a way to store a whole lot of data on optical discs using fluorescence.

The TeraDisc looks like a regular CD, except it's chartreuse and see-through. Mempile says its disc will start off able to store 600GB to 700GB and in a year will be able to write 1TB worth of data. There are two physical layers of plastic, but 200 virtual layers on the one-sided disc. That means 250 hours of high-definition content or 300,000 digital photos. HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc can currently hold about 50GB of data on dual-layer discs. … Read more

Update: I added some details about USB 3.0 device availability and performance.

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than 10 times as fast by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires.

Intel is working fellow USB 3.0 Promoters Group members Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, NEC and NXP Semiconductors to release the USB 3.0 specification in the first half of 2008, said Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's … Read more

Here's that final touch you've been looking for in the kitchen remodel war with the Joneses: efficient fiber optics (EFO), the "breakthrough in accent lighting technology," could be perfect for your undercounter needs.

You want green? This is the most efficient fiber optic lighting system in the world, according to developer Solon, Ohio based Energy Focus. "One 70 watt EFO lamp delivers the center beam candlepower of eight 50 watt Halogen lamps - replacing a total of 400 watts." The government agrees--it handed out $12.7 million in R&D support and awarded … Read more