Science and Future Technology

'Li-Fi' provides a light bulb moment for wireless web Harald Haas says that the light spectrum can be used to transmit data and has far more capacity than traditional radio waves Story highlights German inventor Harald Haas has developed patented technology which uses light beams to transmit information Adding a microchip to a normal LED light bulb makes it blink at phenomenal speed sending binary code data Haas hopes his "Li-Fi" networks will assist increasingly crowded Wi-Fi radio networks The light bulb figuratively suspended above a human head has long been symbolic of the eureka moment that every inventor craves. But for German physicist Herald Haas, it's the bulb itself that provides the inspiration for his bright idea. Haas and his team at the UK's University of Edinburgh , are the brains behind a new patented technology that uses beams of flickering light to transmit digital information wirelessly, a process known as Visibl...

This Is What Facebook's Drone Looks Like More details have been revealed about Facebook’s ambitious Internet.org plan to hook up the entire world with the internet. CEO Mark Zuckerberg  posted​ a picture  on Facebook of its drone that will hover in high in the sky above remote areas and beam down the internet. The drone has had its first successful test flight in the United Kingdom, he said. “The final design will have a wingspan greater than a Boeing 737 but will weigh less than a car,” he wrote on  his Facebook ac​count . “It will be powered by solar panels on its wings and it will be able to stay at altitudes of more than 60,000 feet for months at a time.” The  New York Ti​mes  reports  the codename for the flying robot is Aquila, an eagle from classical mythology that carried Jupiter’s thunderbolts. It’s being dubbed as the “centerpiece” for the project, which plans to connect as many as five billion people to the internet. “Aircraft li...

Anthrax-Spraying Drones Are Probably Not Something  Congress  Should Worry About The US government has had a love-hate relationship with drones for about as long as the technology has been around. On the one hand, the CIA and military love using drones for spying on people and performing controversial  “targeted” aerial strikes  on declared enemies overseas. On the other hand, lawmakers in Congress have spent the past several years publicly questioning both  the overseas drone program  and the growing  use of small consumer drones  by ordinary schmoes back home for aerial photography and other recreational purposes. It’s the latter trend that has Pennsylvania’s Republican Congressman Scott Perry spooked. In a  hearing on Capitol Hill today , he raised the idea of someone attaching an anthrax-dispersal device to a consumer drone and using it to attack people. “I’m trying to determine for myself and maybe anybody watching or list...

This App Lets You Piggyback Facebook's Free Internet to Access Any Site ​In countries like Zambia, Tanzania, or Kenya, where very few have access to the Internet, Facebook is bringing its own version of the net:  Interne​t.org , an app that gives mobile users free access to certain sites such as Google, Wikipedia and, of course, Facebook. While the initiative has clearly positive goals, it’s also been criticized as an “imperialistic” push for  Facebook colonies , where novice Internet.org users will grow up thinking their restricted version of the web is the real internet. To fight against that possibility, a 20-year-old developer from Paraguay is working on an app that tunnels the “regular” internet through Facebook Messenger, one of the services free to use on Internet.org’s app. This allows Internet.org users to establish a link to the outside, unrestricted internet, circumventing restrictions. Matias Insaurralde has been working on this project since 2013, with t...

Anonymous' New Walkie Talkies Use Radio Waves to Access the Internet The hacktivist group Anonymous is working on a new communication tool to circumvent censorship and set information free, and it’s going low-tech this time. The project is called Airchat, and it will use radio waves instead of wifi, broadband, or phone lines to communicate data and messages between computers. It’s basically pirate radio for ones and zeros. The idea for Airchat was hatched because of the “lessons learned in the Egyptian, Libyan and Syrian revolutions, but also from the experience of Occupy Wall Street and Plaza del Sol,” explains the  project description on Github , posted under “Lulz Labs,” which was  spotted by  International Business Times . With social upheaval in Ukraine and Venezuela and other places around the world, a safe anonymous way for dissidents to organize movements and share information is as relevant as ever. The radio communication works much like ...

SATELLITE BROADBAND FOR ALL Thanks to European telecoms satellites equipped with powerful, high-frequency Ka-band communications, affordable broadband Internet access via satellite is becoming a reality. To compete with terrestrial broadband, however, satellite-based broadband providers need to be able to offer service packages which are both appealing to and transparent for customers as well as being commercially viable.  In the Lift Off project, support by ESA under the ARTES Programme, the Italian company OpenSky developed a set of pilot services targeting both the business and consumer markets. Together with its partners at the University of Rome, the Lift Off team commenced by establishing a set of consumer profiles based on market research. Given the fixed cost of satellite bandwidth and need to share bandwidth between customers, “unmetered” usage is not economically viable with satellite-based broadband, so the challenge was defining and imposing acceptable ...

Satellite radio   type of digital broadcast, which transmits audio signals over large areas with greater clarity and consistency than conventional radio. A satellite radio service works by transmitting its signal from a ground-based station to one or more  satellites  orbiting the  Earth . The satellite bounces the signal back to specialized receivers on the ground, commonly located in automobiles and home stereo systems. Because the signal is broadcast from outer space, it can reach across an entire  continent . Ground-based repeaters augment the signal in urban areas where tall buildings might cause interference. In the United States , satellite radio operates on the 2.3 gigahertz (GHz) S band of the electromagnetic spectrum ; elsewhere, it often uses the 1.4 GHz L band. Most satellite radio services operate on a subscription model. A consumer buys a proprietary  receiver , which is activated with the purchase of a subscription. Onc...

255Tbps: World’s fastest network could carry all of the internet’s traffic on a single fiber A joint group of researchers from the Netherlands and the US have smashed the world speed record for a fiber network, pushing  255 terabits  per second down a single strand of glass fiber. This is equivalent to around 32 terabytes per second — enough to transfer a 1GB movie in 31.25 microseconds (0.03 milliseconds), or alternatively, the entire contents of your 1TB hard drive in about 31 milliseconds. To put 255Tbps into perspective, the fastest single-fiber links in commercial operation top out at 100Gbps, or  2,550 times  slower. 255Tbps is mindbogglingly quick; it’s greater, by far, than the total capacity of every cable — hundreds of glass fibers — currently spanning the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, 255 terabits per second is similar to — or maybe even more than — the total sum of all traffic flowing across the internet  at peak time . How did the...