Warp Factor Mr Zulu

Siemens has achieved a transmission speed of 107 gigabits per second over a single optical fiber.

They have developed a new transmission and receiving system that is able to process data directly before and after its conversion into optical signals using electrical processing only.

Current systems handling very high data rates have to split signals into multiple lower data-rate signals and later reconvert them from optical to electrical, a process that adds to costs and reduces network capacity.

107-gigabits-per-second transmission could send two DVDs in a second.

Fully immerisve scratch and sniff VR still on track.

The Walls have eyes.

prism 200 is a handheld through-wall radar, which has been designed to be used by police, special forces or the emergency services.

It provides quick and covert intelligence on the movement and location of people in a room or building - without the need for invasive sensors.

Stealth ninja gear now mandatory.

Nano Tools

By manipulating carbon nanotubes inside scanning electron microscopes, 21st-century nanosmiths have begun crafting a suite of research tools, including nanotweezers, nanobearings and nano-oscillators.

To design the nanoknife, the NIST and CU scientists welded a carbon nanotube between two electrochemically sharpened tungsten needles.
In the resulting prototype, the nanotube stretches between two ends of a tungsten wire loop.

For those hard to get places.

Can You See Me Now ?

A consortium of 11 European countries have approved 57 million euros (74.1 million dollars) to fund the design of what will be the world's greatest optical telescope.

The so-called Europe Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) is budgeted at between 800 million and a billion euros (1.04-1.3 billion dollars).

A design approved by more than 250 ESO astronomers at a four-day meeting in Marseille, southern France, at the start of the month calls for an optical/infrared telescope with a 42-metre (136.5-feet) -diameter composite mirror, the largest in the world. The mirror will comprise 906 hexagonal segments, each 1.45 metres (4.7 feet) in size. Their light will be channelled to an "adaptive optics" system, chiefly comprising a smaller mirror whose shape can be distorted by tiny actuators and helps to correct for image fuzziness that occurs when light passes through Earth's atmosphere.

If all goes well, the E-ELT will start operations in 2018, and will be more than 100 times more sensitive than the present-day largest optical telescopes, led by the 10-metre (32.5-feet) Keck telescope in Hawaii.

It could hugely advance knowledge of planets around other stars, the earliest moments of the Universe, "super-massive" black holes and enigmatic phenomena called dark energy and dark matter.

The initial design sketched for the telescope was an OWL ("OverWhelmingly Large") design with a 100-metre (325-feet) mirror. But this was scaled back in 2005 because it was too costly and too complex to build on ESO's budget timescale.

My wish list now to include Inferometry Array of Space based OWLS.