Scientists in Japan have discovered a way to transmit data at a speed of 112 gigabits per second (Gbps) at a specific spectrum band that's vital for the build-out of next-generation 6G wireless networks.

To achieve this breakthrough, the researchers developed a new kind of terahertz wireless communication system driven by microcombs — special photonic devices fitted onto microchips that generate optical frequencies for wireless networks. When used with high-order modulation techniques — advanced ways to enable higher data-transfer rates in limited bandwidth — the team delivered these blistering wireless communication speeds in the 560 gigahertz spectrum band.

Achieving such speeds — at a frequency above 420 GHz for the first time — showed how this system can overcome the limitations of signal power and noise that plague conventional electronics at these ultrahigh frequencies, thereby limiting them to much slower data rates. The researchers outlined their findings May 16 in the journal Communications Engineering.

"This result represents a major step toward practical 6G wireless systems and ultra-high-speed mobile backhaul," said Takeshi Yasui, a professor in Tokushima University's Institute of Post-LED Photonics and co-author of the study, said in a statement.

Let there be light

Although 5G wireless speeds are notably fast, with average speeds of approximately 300 megabits per second (Mbps) in the U.S., work is already underway to engineer and roll out 6G networks across the world. In the future, scientists predict speeds to reach a theoretical maximum of 1 terabit per second — more than 3,000 times faster than today's average 5G speeds and 50 times faster than 5G's theoretical limit.

Commercial 6G networks are expected to launch by 2030 or beyond, but significant work is still needed to build out these networks. But to ultimately support the delivery of 6G, a fast backhaul wireless network that taps into super-high-frequency terahertz waves is needed. These sit in the spectrum band that goes beyond 350 GHz. Below that frequency, the electronic spectrum is already congested with 5G signals and lacks the frequency to deliver large amounts of data at next-generation speeds.

When conventional electronics are used to push into the terahertz spectrum, their electronic signals get blighted by a lack of power or "phase noise" — essentially, fluctuations in a signal — that make it hard to separate desired signals from unwanted ones. This leads to limitations in signal stability and the amount of data electronic signals can carry at frequencies above 350 GHz.

Photonics — the use of light to carry data — is therefore seen as a way to forge a path to 6G networks. But conventional photonic systems have required bulky laser systems that need precise optical alignment to work well, and they are still hindered by phase noise.

To address these challenges, scientists are exploring optical microcombs as a way to generate a series of precise lines of light. Their optical stability minimizes phase noise. However, they need precise optical alignment; in a real-world network deployment, vibrations could disrupt such alignments and thus interfere with established connections.

In the new study, the researchers noted that these microcombs didn't "simultaneously achieve stable signal generation and high-order modulation for high-speed data transmission."

Building bonds

The breakthrough comes from directly bonding an optical fiber to a silicon nitride microresonator – a microcomb photonic structure used to convert laser light into millions of precise laser lines. Combining fiber optics with microcombs bypasses the challenge of precise optical alignment, whereas in more conventional photonic systems, laser light needs to be carefully aligned across multiple axes and stages through the use of optical microscopes so it can be directed into microchips.

To send data using the microcomb system, the researchers generated two optical signal carriers — with high stability and a high signal-to-noise ratio — by injection locking the microcomb with lasers. They coded data into these signals using the QPSK and 16QAM high-order modulation formats — essentially, a way to squeeze as much data as possible into a single wave transmission. Then, they converted the optical signals into the 560 Ghz terahertz wave through a technique called photomixing, before transmitting them to a receiver.

In experiments, they achieved 84 Gbps speeds with QPSK and 112 Gbps speeds with 16QAM. The results mean the team researchers made a compact and stable terahertz signal source capable of data transmission speeds exceeding 100Gbps via a transmitter that's just 0.2 inches (5 millimeters) across. For comparison, a conventional microcomb system is 17.7 inches (450 mm).

They also integrated a temperature control function into the microresonator so it could withstand temperature fluctuations, therefore more reliably reproducing the required optical resonance characteristics.

The researchers plan to find ways to further curtail phase noise and boost the output power of their systems to deliver even faster data-transfer speeds. But the study opens a way to create a technological foundation for an ultra-high-speed wireless backhaul network. Such a network could bypass the need for underground fiber-optic cabling as the backbone for high-speed networks and lead the way to practical 6G deployments.

Whether it disrupts access at work or makes your favorite show buffer at its most suspenseful moment, the inconvenience of an unreliable internet connection is something we've all experienced. Large-scale outages over the years have served as reminders that the internet can also face more widespread issues and bring everyday tasks to a halt. But would it ever be possible for the entire internet, all across the world, to go down?

The internet is often called a "network of networks," including those linking devices across homes, businesses, public spaces and more. For the entire internet to go down, therefore, many pieces of infrastructure would need to be impacted within a short time.

"It is possible but would require significant resources and/or huge coincidences which makes it a highly unlikely, but possible, event," George Cybenko, a professor of engineering who specializes in information systems and theory at Dartmouth College, told Live Science in an email.

Quite a bit of "heterogeneity, randomness and distributed asynchronicity" were built into the internet from the start, so a whole-system failure is very unlikely and would be extremely difficult to cause, Cybenko said. "We have local networks as well, say within a home or a business, that could continue to function even if the global nature of the internet has failed," he explained.

When information is shared over the internet — for example, as a text message is sent from one smartphone to another — it is broken into small packets of information, each of which is routed through the quickest available path through the network. That means that, even if one of these routes is compromised, the message can still travel because it has a long list of alternatives, according to The Open University.

This design consideration alone protects the entire network from completely failing due to either physical damage — for example, if an undersea cable were cut or a large internet hub lost power — or software damage, whether caused by systems issues or hackers. Even when a large infrastructure provider, like Cloudflare, goes down, the disruption may last only a few hours and cannot spread to other providers or systems.

If a larger outage were to occur — for instance, from a powerful and unexpected solar storm — repairs could take time to resolve. However, many governments and large companies have plans for how to recover from a large internet outage and resume operations as quickly as possible, which often include tools like cloud storage systems and backup power generators, Cybenko said.

Conversely, some governments have shut off the internet in times of massive protests. This is accomplished by dismantling or destroying internet infrastructure like power grids and fiber optic cables, or throttling — intentionally limiting the processing speed of an internet connection via broadband providers, according to the World Economic Forum. But even those intentional outages can be resolved relatively quickly.

"It is surprising how rapidly people can recover [the internet] — it continues to befuddle people how resilient the internet is," William Dutton, a senior fellow and advisory board member at the Oxford Internet Institute and the University of Oxford's first professor of internet studies, told Live Science.

In the meantime, though, the impacts of such an outage could go much further than inconvenience. Critical infrastructure, such as hospital IT systems, often depend on the internet, and essential services, like power grids and traffic management, could be shut off indefinitely.

"The more central the internet becomes to so many different functions, from health care to even warfare, the more critical it is that it be secure and that it be reliable," Dutton said. "These kinds of outages and so forth are obviously concerning, even for short periods of time."

Since the internet's invention, fears have circulated that as it continues to expand, its foundations run the risk of being strained or overloaded. But Dutton said this is a common misconception.

"The more you add nodes and so forth, the internet actually becomes more resilient — growth actually makes it stronger rather than weaker," Dutton said. "It's certainly possible, but I doubt that it will collapse at all."

Late one evening, UCLA graduate student Charley Kline sat in front of a refrigerator-sized computer and sent the message "lo" to a rack of computers operated by systems engineer Bill Duvall at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), hundreds of miles away.

This message itself was nothing special; it was meant to be the word "login," but the system crashed before it could be completed. However, the transmission was revolutionary, because it formed the foundation for the internet.

The two computers were part of a four-computer network that made up the first Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).

The notion of computers communicating was part of a grand vision to "augment human intellect," but ARPANET was ultimately funded for a more practical purpose: to enable the U.S. government to communicate in the wake of a nuclear attack. Although telephone lines would likely be intact in that case, the major switching centers could be destroyed, the military worried.

In 1964, RAND Corp. scientists Paul Baran and Sharla Boehm sent a memo proposing a solution: a "distributed network" that involved "hot potato" switching so that no single node would be crucial to the system's functioning.

From there, the military agency funded a project to create such a network. For the system to work, it needed a way to break up messages from a sender into smaller portions that were then reassembled at the destination. Boehm and Baran simulated this process, which would eventually become known as packet switching, using a program written in the computer language Fortran.

Even before ARPANET was realized, however, the scientists involved in the project clearly saw the potential of the concept. Baran, for instance, envisioned that by the year 2000, people would be able to do their shopping from home using a TV.

In 1968, ARPANET was approved, and by the summer, scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara; SRI; UCLA; and the University of Utah began building the infrastructure to allow their computers to communicate using these packets.

For the first transmission, each computer at these locations had a separate, "mini-computer" called an interface message processor (IMP), which would evolve into the routers of today. The IMPs were meant to break up the messages into smaller chunks and send them to the IMP at the receiving end, which would then reassemble them and echo them to the receiving terminal.

On the storied evening the message was sent, Kline and Duvall were on the phone with each other, confirming when each letter arrived. But the system crashed because the Stanford computer was expecting the data to be transmitted at 10 characters per second, while ARPANET had an unprecedented speed of 5,000 characters per second. This overloaded the "buffer" in the Stanford computer, according to BBC Future.

"It was like filling a glass with a fire hose," Duvall told BBC Future.

Duvall identified the problem and got the system up and running an hour later.

Almost immediately, researchers realized the potential of the system.

"As of now, computer networks are still in their infancy, but as they grow up and become more sophisticated, we will probably see the spread of 'computer utilities,' which, like present electric and telephone utilities, will service individual homes and offices across the country," Leonard Kleinrock, a computer science professor who was in charge of that UCLA node, said in a statement at the time.

ARPANET would be tied to its military roots until 1981, when the military spun off its own MILNET. And while the term "internetwork" was coined in a 1970s paper to describe a standardized protocol for transmitting and receiving data, the internet itself technically wasn't born until 1983, when ARPANET switched over to that protocol.

On the afternoon of Oct. 9, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was in Boston when he had a three-hour chat with his assistant and fellow inventor, Thomas Watson. It would not have been noteworthy — except that Watson was across the Charles River, in Cambridgeport.

This was the first two-way telephone call transmitted across outdoor wires, and it would eventually pave the way for a global network that would transform how people communicate.

Bell and Watson had spoken via their device as early as March of that year, soon after Bell's improved "telegraphy" device was patented. But the crackly command — "Mr. Watson, come here; I want to see you," was issued over only a short distance.

In contrast, the call that October day lasted a few hours and was transmitted via long telegraph wires.

Bell was in a crowded field of inventors who were dreaming up new ways to transmit sound via electricity. A few decades earlier, Antonio Meucci created — and took preliminary steps to patent — a "telectrophone" to communicate with his bedridden wife in another room. In 1861, German inventor Johann Philipp Reiss coined the term "telephon" to describe a device of his own, which converted sound waves to an electrical signal and back. His transmissions faithfully reproduced melodies, but words were too garbled to be understood. And around the same time as Bell, Elisha Gray developed a similar water-microphone-based design.

Key to Bell's ability to transmit a voice was the notion of transmitting multiple frequencies simultaneously, which he did by using what he called an "undulatory" — or variable — current, rather than the pulses of intermittent current that Samuel Morse had used for his telegraph.

"The rate of oscillation in the electrical current corresponds to the rate of vibration of the inducing body — that is, to the pitch of the sound produced," Bell's patent states. "The intensity of the current varies with the amplitude of the vibration — that is, with the loudness of the sound." In short, the features of the current encode features of the sound.

Bell's first prototype used a diaphragm, an inductor (an iron core encircled by a coil of wires), a permanent magnet, and connecting wires. When a sound wave hit the diaphragm, the pressure waves caused that diaphragm to vibrate. These vibrations moved the inductor, altering the magnetic field it produced, which, in turn, caused current to flow in the coiled wire. That current was then transmitted via wires to the receiver, which had the same elements in reverse.

That first long-distance conversation was galvanizing, but the first telephone line, which was laid in April 1877, only connected a merchant's shop with his home. Phone lines were initially rented in pairs and were used to connect discrete locations. But the opening of "central exchanges" and switchboards around a year later enabled calls to be routed between locations, dramatically improving the usefulness of the invention.

It would be decades before the first transcontinental and cross-continental calls were made, and the first undersea trans-Atlantic phone cables were laid in 1956.

The telephone industry helped spur a number of other modern innovations, including switches, the transistor that would usher in the computing era, fiber-optic cables for data transmission, and communications satellites.

Engineers have used artificial intelligence (AI) and cheap, off-the-shelf hardware to convert the amplitude of Wi-Fi signals into estimates of a person's heart rate.

The accuracy of this system, called Pulse-Fi, is remarkably consistent across body positions and distances, the researchers wrote in a study published Aug. 5 in the proceedings of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT).

The results show that reliable heart rate information can be extracted in a contact-free way using pre-existing Wi-Fi infrastructure and hardware, study authors Pranay Kocheta, Nayan Bhatia and Katia Obraczka told Live Science in a jointly written email. Obraczka is a professor of computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz), Bhatia is a doctoral student in computer science at UC Santa Cruz and Kocheta is a high school student who conducted the research during an internship.

Many at-home technologies, like chest-strap monitors and smartwatches, monitor vital signs, including heart rate and breathing rate. However, these devices require constant contact with the individual and are expensive, prompting the need for noncontact technologies.

One such technology can harness the information in Wi-Fi signals, which are radio waves that carry data between an emitter and a receiver, such as between a router and a computer.

The "channel state information" (CSI) provides the amplitude and phase of the signal as it journeys between these two devices, including when it passes through obstacles such as moving chests. Because the signals warp when passing these barriers, researchers can filter the CSI data to capture the vital signs.

Various examples now exist for Wi-Fi heart rate detection, but Kocheta and his team argued that several limitations remain. For example, many rely on now-defunct hardware. To address these limitations, the researchers developed a new system called "Pulse-Fi."

Capturing vital signs

To collect the data needed to evaluate Pulse-Fi, the team placed seven people — five male and two female — between two single-antenna ESP32 devices. These microcontroller devices released Wi-Fi signals, with one acting as an emitter and the other as a receiver. The participants' actual heart rate was collected at the same time via a pulse oximeter attached to their fingertip.

Each individual participated three times: once at 3.3 feet (1 meter) from the EPS32s and then from 6.6 feet (2 m) and 9.8 feet (3 m) away. Each measurement window lasted five minutes.

The team then developed a machine learning pipeline to estimate the heart rates from the CSI. The initial step was to extract the amplitude information, which relates to the individual heartbeats, and then remove the messy parts of the signal stemming from obstacles in the environment.

Next, the engineers added a filter to remove signal frequencies outside the 0.8-to-2.17-hertz range, which corresponded to 48 to 130 beats per minute (BPM). Then, they added a second filter to smooth the signal further.

The team then estimated the participants' heart rates using a long-term-short-term memory recurrent neural network, a form of machine learning that adds "memory cells" to the processing of sequential data, which provides the context needed to pick up dependencies in the data. In this instance, these dependencies relate to elements such as resting heart rate and exercise-induced spikes in BPM.

The team was surprised to find the heart rate estimates remained accurate across the different distances from the ESP32 devices. Pulse-Fi under- and overestimated heart rates by an average of 0.429 BPM at 1 meter, 0.482 BPM at 2 m and 0.488 BPM at 3 m away.

The researchers then used pre-existing Wi-Fi CSI health data to test how Pulse-Fi fared with different body positions and activities. The data came from 118 Brazilian adults holding 17 stationary and active positions, including sitting still, walking in place and sweeping the floor, for 60 seconds. The participants were 3.3 feet (1 m) from the Wi-Fi emitter and receiver as well as from the Raspberry Pi 3B+ used for collecting CSI data.

They compared the neural network heart rate estimate against smartwatch readings and found that Pulse-Fi was unaffected by the person's body position. The typical error was 0.2 BPM.

Wireless beats

This early-stage technique is theoretically interesting, said Andreas Karwath, a health data scientist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. who was not involved in the research.

However, he said a key limitation of this research is that the same data were used for the training, validation and testing of the model. The researchers shuffled the data each time, but Karwath said this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"It's like predicting someone's disease by learning from the person and then predicting the person," he told Live Science. "That doesn't make sense."

In a response to this critique, the researchers said that while their analysis did involve shuffling, they have since tested the model in real time, where the Pulse-Fi was trained only on past data and then evaluated on a completely new input signal and environment. This research has not yet been published.

Karwath also explained that the smartwatch and oximeter used to collect the heart rate information for the neural network to be compared against are not always 100% accurate, so their data may be biased.

Kocheta, Bhatia and Obraczka acknowledged this limitation about the smartwatch. However, "the pulse Oximeter is generally considered to be a certified medical device which is very accurate," they said.

The team is now expanding the Pulse-Fi testing to track the heart rates of multiple individuals in a room at the same time to see how well the model copes with crowded environments.

The authors said that no explicit personal information is involved in the data processing pipeline and all heart rate estimates remain in the hardware. As such, there are no data privacy concerns with the technology. Karwarth predicted that the technology is at least five to 10 years away from being deployable.

Scientists in China and the U.S. have developed a tiny 6G chip that could make slow and unreliable data speeds in the countryside a thing of the past — and it's hundreds of times faster than your smartphone's current download speeds.

5G is the current gold standard for wireless communications, and it typically uses frequencies below 6 gigahertz, although this varies from country to country. The top-performing cellular network in the US in the first half of 2025 offered a 5G download speed of 299.36 megabits per seconds.

On the other hand, 6G, which experts say will be ready in 2030, is expected to use multiple frequency bands and has the potential to be 10,000 times faster than 5G. The trouble with tapping into 6G, however, is that devices will need multiple components to tap into the different radio-frequency bands — something that modern devices lack.

But now, researchers have integrated the entire wireless spectrum covering nine radio-frequency (RF) bands — from 0.5 to 110 GHz — into a chip measuring just 0.07 by 0.43 inches (1.7 by 11 millimeters).

The new chip is also capable of achieving a data transmission rate of more than 100 gigabits per second, including on low bands used in rural areas, where speeds can be notoriously slow. Communication also remained stable across the entire spectrum, the researchers found. They revealed their research in a study published Aug. 27 in the journal Nature.

To put this data speed into context, 1,000 smartphones embedded with the chip could stream an 8K ultra-high-definition video simultaneously without weaker performance, according to Chinese state media Xinhua.

Related: Wireless data speeds hit 938 Gbps — a new record and 10,000 times faster than 5G

This "one-size-fits-all hardware solution," as the scientists described it in the study, could be reconfigured dynamically to switch the frequency band depending on when this is required.

This is important because devices tapping into 6G are going to utilize different wireless spectra — from microwave, millimeter wave (mmWave) to terahertz (THz) bands — the researchers noted.

High-frequency mmWave and sub-THz bands — between 100 GHz and 300 GHz — will be used for applications that require extremely low latency, such as high-speed artificial intelligence (AI) computing and remote sensing. But sub-6 GHz and microwave bands are still needed to provide coverage across wide areas, the scientists explained in the study.

A light-based approach to 6G

The problem with current wireless hardware, the scientists said in the study, is that it's designed to operate within a narrow frequency. As it stands, rolling out 6G would require several different systems for different bands, which would make wide-scale deployment costly and complex.

The researchers' new chip could potentially replace multiple systems by taking a dual electro-optic approach — using light to generate stable signals across the RF spectrum. A broadband electro-optic modulator converts wireless signals into optical signals, which are then passed through tunable optoelectronic oscillators — these circuits use light and electricity to generate radio frequencies, from the microwave band to the THz band.

The scientists made their chip from thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN), instead of traditional lithium niobate, which is used to modulate light at high speeds. TFLN has become the go-to for next-generation telecommunication hardware because of its ability to deliver higher bandwidths at a lower latency.

When 6G is rolled out and more people demand more data, cellular networks will inevitably become crowded — like 5G networks are at peak times. Higher traffic could lead to congestion and slower data speeds.

The new system avoids interference by using what the researchers describe as "adaptive spectrum management." Normally signals are crammed into one or two frequency bands, but with this new chip, signals can switch between multiple frequencies without data transmission being compromised. This could reduce the likelihood of signaling issues at big events or in crowded spaces, where tens of thousands of devices connect to a network simultaneously.

"This technology is like building a super-wide highway where electronic signals are vehicles and frequency bands are lanes," study lead author Wang Xingjun, associate dean of the School of Electronics at Peking University, told Xinhua.

While Wang and his co-authors believe their 6G "full-spectrum" chip has the potential to be embedded into all compatible devices, plenty of work needs to be done to build out the infrastructure for the next generation of wireless communications.

Google has harnessed motion sensors on more than 2 billion smartphones to create an earthquake early-warning system that's as effective as standard seismometers, a new study reveals.

Between 2021 and 2024, the company's Android Earthquake Alerts (AEA) system captured more than 11,000 quakes through smartphone accelerometers and issued more than 1,200 alerts to Android users across 98 countries.

This system has led to a tenfold increase in the number of people with access to earthquake alerts, from 250 million in 2019 to 2.5 billion today. The researchers published their findings July 17 in the journal Science.

"Earthquakes are a constant threat to communities around the globe. While we've gotten good at knowing where they're likely to strike, we still face devastating consequences when they do," Google representatives wrote in a statement. "What if we could give people a few precious seconds of warning before the shaking starts? Those seconds can be enough time to get off a ladder, move away from dangerous objects and take cover."

In recent decades, earthquake alert systems have been rolled out in countries such as China, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and the United States. Yet these systems, built using seismic stations as nodes, are expensive, meaning that most earthquake-prone countries have only regional coverage and many others have none.

Related: Predicting earthquakes is currently impossible. GPS data could help change that

To fill this coverage gap, the Google researchers designed the AEA system to use smartphone and smartwatch accelerometers to detect fast-moving P-waves, which typically precede more destructive S-waves during an earthquake. Using this sensor network, AEA can estimate the size of an earthquake and where it will hit, and then send warnings to users in the danger zone.

Breaking new ground

The researchers faced many challenges. Phone accelerometers are far less accurate than seismometers, so the team pieced together data from the sheer ubiquity of Android devices and their default logging of motion data.

Transforming these pooled signals into meaningful warnings required them to account for differences between devices and regional variations in geology and building layouts.

Now operating in several countries — including Greece, Turkey, the United States, Japan and Indonesia — the AEA had issued 1,279 alerts as of March 2024.

User feedback reveals that 85% of people who experienced an earthquake received an alert, with 36% getting one before the shaking started, 28% during and 23% after.

Only three of the alerts were false, with two being triggered by thunderstorms and another by an unrelated mass notification event that vibrated a number of phones.

But issues remain, especially in estimating the magnitude of large quakes, such as those that hit Turkey in February 2023. These tremors were significantly underestimated by the AEA, which the researchers attributed to flaws in algorithms and collection methods that they have since updated.

Events like this raise questions about lifesaving software being owned and operated by a tech giant, but Google insists its technology will merely "help supplement official warning systems" instead of replacing them.

"AEA demonstrates that globally distributed smartphones can be used to detect earthquakes and issue warnings at scale with an effectiveness comparable to established national systems," the researchers wrote in the study. "Large earthquakes remain the most important and challenging for all EEW [earthquake early-warning] systems, and the global implementation of AEA supports efforts to improve detection with rapid, large-scale data collection and feedback to algorithms."

Researchers in Japan say they have set a new world record for the fastest internet speed, transmitting over 125,000 gigabytes of data per second over 1,120 miles (1,802 kilometers).

That's about 4 million times the average internet speed in the U.S. and would allow you to download the entire Internet Archive in less than four minutes, according to some rough estimates. This is also more than twice the previous world record of 50,250 GB/s, previously set by a different team of scientists in 2024.

To achieve this new speed — which has not been independently verified — the team developed a new form of optical fiber to send information at groundbreaking speeds over roughly the distance between New York and Florida.

Details about this achievement were presented April 3 at the 48th Optical Fiber Communication Conference in San Francisco, according to a statement from Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology.

1,120 miles of travel

The new type of optical fiber is equivalent to 19 standard optical fibers in its data transmission capacity. The new optical fiber is better suited to long-haul transmission than existing cables because the centers of all 19 fibers interact with light in the same way, so they encounter less light fluctuation, which results in less data loss.

The new cable squeezes 19 separate fibers into a diameter of five-thousandths of an inch (0.127 millimeters), which is the same thickness as most existing single-fiber cables already in use. This effort means the new cable can transmit more data using existing infrastructure.

Related: Internet history timeline: ARPANET to the World Wide Web

In March 2023, the same team reached similar transmission speeds but across less than a third of the distance covered in the new achievement. The biggest hurdles to increasing the range were further reducing data loss, which can happen over long distances, and figuring out how to amplify the data, according to the statement.

Solving these challenges led to increased signal strength, which allowed the data to travel a longer distance.

For this demonstration, the data ran through a transmission system 21 times, finally reaching a data receiver after traveling the equivalent of 1,120 miles.

This record shows technological progress toward developing long-distance, high-capacity, scalable optical communication systems, which could address the increasing global demand for data, the statement suggests.

Data traffic volume worldwide is expected to increase significantly in the near future, so new communications infrastructure may be necessary, the statement suggests. Next, the team hopes to explore practical applications in the telecommunications sphere.

Cybersecurity and data privacy are constantly in the news. Governments are passing new cybersecurity laws. Companies are investing in cybersecurity controls such as firewalls, encryption and awareness training at record levels.

And yet, people are losing ground on data privacy.

In 2024, the Identity Theft Resource Center reported that companies sent out 1.3 billion notifications to the victims of data breaches. That's more than triple the notices sent out the year before. It's clear that despite growing efforts, personal data breaches are not only continuing, but accelerating.

What can you do about this situation? Many people think of the cybersecurity issue as a technical problem. They're right: Technical controls are an important part of protecting personal information, but they are not enough.

As a professor of information technology, analytics and operations at the University of Notre Dame, I study ways to protect personal privacy.

Solid personal privacy protection is made up of three pillars: accessible technical controls, public awareness of the need for privacy, and public policies that prioritize personal privacy. Each plays a crucial role in protecting personal privacy. A weakness in any one puts the entire system at risk.

The first line of defense

Technology is the first line of defense, guarding access to computers that store data and encrypting information as it travels between computers to keep intruders from gaining access. But even the best security tools can fail when misused, misconfigured or ignored.

Two technical controls are especially important: encryption and multifactor authentication. These are the backbone of digital privacy — and they work best when widely adopted and properly implemented.

Encryption uses complex math to put sensitive data in an unreadable format that can only be unlocked with the right key. For example, your web browser uses HTTPS encryption to protect your information when you visit a secure webpage. This prevents anyone on your network — or any network between you and the website — from eavesdropping on your communications. Today, nearly all web traffic is encrypted in this way.

Related: Quantum computers will be a dream come true for hackers, risking everything from military secrets to bank information. Can we stop them?

But if we're so good at encrypting data on networks, why are we still suffering all of these data breaches? The reality is that encrypting data in transit is only part of the challenge.

Securing stored data

We also need to protect data wherever it's stored — on phones, laptops and the servers that make up cloud storage. Unfortunately, this is where security often falls short. Encrypting stored data, or data at rest, isn't as widespread as encrypting data that is moving from one place to another.

While modern smartphones typically encrypt files by default, the same can't be said for cloud storage or company databases. Only 10% of organizations report that at least 80% of the information they have stored in the cloud is encrypted, according to a 2024 industry survey. This leaves a huge amount of unencrypted personal information potentially exposed if attackers manage to break in. Without encryption, breaking into a database is like opening an unlocked filing cabinet — everything inside is accessible to the attacker.

Multifactor authentication is a security measure that requires you to provide more than one form of verification before accessing sensitive information. This type of authentication is more difficult to crack than a password alone because it requires a combination of different types of information. It often combines something you know, such as a password, with something you have, such as a smartphone app that can generate a verification code or with something that's part of what you are, like a fingerprint. Proper use of multifactor authentication reduces the risk of compromise by 99.22%.

While 83% of organizations require that their employees use multifactor authentication, according to another industry survey, this still leaves millions of accounts protected by nothing more than a password. As attackers grow more sophisticated and credential theft remains rampant, closing that 17% gap isn't just a best practice — it's a necessity.

Multifactor authentication is one of the simplest, most effective steps organizations can take to prevent data breaches, but it remains underused. Expanding its adoption could dramatically reduce the number of successful attacks each year.

Awareness gives people the knowledge they need

Even the best technology falls short when people make mistakes. Human error played a role in 68% of 2024 data breaches, according to a Verizon report. Organizations can mitigate this risk through employee training, data minimization — meaning collecting only the information necessary for a task, then deleting it when it's no longer needed — and strict access controls.

Policies, audits and incident response plans can help organizations prepare for a possible data breach so they can stem the damage, see who is responsible and learn from the experience. It's also important to guard against insider threats and physical intrusion using physical safeguards such as locking down server rooms.

Public policy holds organizations accountable

Legal protections help hold organizations accountable in keeping data protected and giving people control over their data. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation is one of the most comprehensive privacy laws in the world. It mandates strong data protection practices and gives people the right to access, correct and delete their personal data. And the General Data Protection Regulation has teeth: In 2023, Meta was fined €1.2 billion (US$1.4 billion) when Facebook was found in violation.

Despite years of discussion, the U.S. still has no comprehensive federal privacy law. Several proposals have been introduced in Congress, but none have made it across the finish line. In its place, a mix of state regulations and industry-specific rules — such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act for health data and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act for financial institutions — fill the gaps.

Some states have passed their own privacy laws, but this patchwork leaves Americans with uneven protections and creates compliance headaches for businesses operating across jurisdictions.

The tools, policies and knowledge to protect personal data exist — but people's and institutions' use of them still falls short. Stronger encryption, more widespread use of multifactor authentication, better training and clearer legal standards could prevent many breaches. It's clear that these tools work. What's needed now is the collective will — and a unified federal mandate — to put those protections in place.

This article is part of a series on data privacy that explores who collects your data, what and how they collect, who sells and buys your data, what they all do with it, and what you can do about it.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Scientists have developed a new type of laser amplifier that can transmit information 10 times faster than current technology.

Laser amplifiers boost the intensity of light beams. This particular amplifier achieves a tenfold increase in transmission speed by expanding the bandwidth, or wavelengths of light, at which the lasers can transmit information.

The amount of information we generate and transmit is growing every day. Due to the proliferation of streaming services, smart devices and generative AI, Nokia Bell Labs predicted in their Global Network Traffic Report that the amount of data traffic will double by 2030.

Current optical-based telecommunication systems transmit information by sending pulses of laser light through fiber-optic cables, which are thin strands of glass. The capacity — the amount of information that can be transmitted — is determined by the amplifier’s bandwidth (the wavelengths of light that it can amplify). As data traffic increases, bandwidth therefore becomes crucial.

Most lasers used for modern telecommunications, such as internet communications, require an amplifier. These work by a process called stimulated emission, which uses an incoming photon to stimulate the release of another photon with the same energy and direction.

Scientists have now designed a new type of laser technology that can transmit information using a technology called high-efficiency optical amplification. The researchers published their findings April 9 in the journal Nature.

"The amplifiers currently used in optical communication systems have a bandwidth of approximately 30 nanometers," lead author Peter Andrekson, a professor of photonics at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, said in a statement. "Our amplifier, however, boasts a bandwidth of 300 nanometers, enabling it to transmit ten times more data per second than those of existing systems."

The new amplifier is made of silicon nitride, a hardened ceramic material that is resistant to high temperatures. The amplifier uses spiral-shaped waveguides to efficiently direct the laser pulses to remove anomalies from the signal. The technology has also been miniaturized so that multiple amplifiers can fit onto a small chip.

Related: Next-gen quantum computers could be powered using chip with high-energy lasers made 10,000 times smaller

The researchers chose spiral waveguides over other waveguide types because they enable longer optical paths to be created within a small area. This enhances useful effects such as four-wave mixing, which occurs when two or more optical frequencies are combined together to amplify the output with minimal noise (external interference that can disrupt the quality of the signal).

Because the speed of light is constant, the laser light itself does not travel any faster than that from conventional lasers. However, the larger bandwidth enables the new amplifier to transmit 10 times more data than conventional lasers can.

The amplifier currently functions in a wavelength range of light 1,400 to 1,700 nanometers, which is within the short-wave infrared range. The next stage in the research will be to see how it operates over other wavelengths, such as those for visible light (400 to 700 nanometers) and a broader range of infrared light (2,000 to 4,000 nanometers).

The new amplifier has multiple potential applications, including medical imaging, holography, spectroscopy and microscopy, according to the statement. The miniaturization of the technology could also make lasers for light-based applications smaller and more affordable.

"Minor adjustments to the design would enable the amplification of visible and infrared light as well," Andrekson said. "This means the amplifier could be utilised in laser systems for medical diagnostics, analysis, and treatment. A large bandwidth allows for more precise analyses and imaging of tissues and organs, facilitating earlier detection of diseases."

SpaceX's Starlink satellite constellation is facing threats from Russia and China because it was tapped for military use in Ukraine following Russia's invasion of the nation in 2022, according to a new report evaluating the counterspace capabilities of a dozen countries over the past year.

The report, published on April 3 by the nonpartisan policy think tank Secure World Foundation (SWF), highlights how humanity's growing reliance on space — especially for national security — has led an increasing number of countries to develop their own counterspace capabilities. The 316-page document assesses the counterspace capabilities of 12 countries including the U.S., Russia, China, India, Australia as well as North Korea and South Korea, based on publicly available information spanning February 2024 through February of this year.

"We feel strongly that a more open and public debate on these issues is urgently needed," the report's foreword states. "Our global society and economy are increasingly dependent on space capabilities, and a future conflict in space could have massive, long-term negative repercussions that are felt here on Earth, as everyone on this planet is a user of space data in some form."

SpaceX's Starlink uses a massive network of satellites in low Earth orbit to provide high-speed broadband internet. Ukrainian residents began using Starlink in 2022 to maintain internet connectivity after Ukraine's own internet services were disrupted following Russia's invasion. The service also enabled secure communications for the Ukrainian military and government. Starting in May 2024, however, the Ukrainian military began experiencing outages in Starlink connections, with military officials attributing the disruptions to Russia "testing different mechanisms" for its electronic warfare systems seemingly employing new and more advanced technology.

The SWF report cites leaked U.S. military documents that suggest a Russian system called Tobol — that was originally designed to protect Russian satellites from jamming — was used to disrupt Starlink commercial satellite signals over Ukrainian territory. Those leaked documents "suggest that Russia has used at least three Tobol installations to try and disrupt Starlink commercial satellite signals over Eastern Ukraine," the report notes.

Russia appears to also be developing a newer, more sophisticated system called Kalinka, which is intended to detect and disrupt signals to and from Starlink satellites in order to interfere with Ukrainian drones and military communications, according to the SWF report. Andrei Bezrukov, the director of the Russian Center for Unmanned Systems and Technologies, which is developing the Kalinka system, told state media that the so-called "Starlink killer" could also detect communication terminals connected to Starshield, the military version of Starlink that's designed with enhanced security features.

Additional reports revealed that Russia had jammed GPS signals in four European countries: France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Luxembourg. There have also been reports that Russia interrupted children's TV channels in these countries to broadcast images of the war in Ukraine. The International Telecommunication Union's Radio Regulations Board has said the interference likely originated from stations in Moscow, Kaliningrad and Pavlovka.

"As of February 2025, the Starlink service appears to have been remarkably resistant to further cyber attacks," the report notes.

According to the SWF report, China is investing in similar capabilities for potential future armed conflicts with the U.S.

In July of last year, researchers from the People's Liberation Army Navy proposed laser-equipped submarines with retractable masts that could surface to target Starlink satellites or other space-based surveillance systems, although the researchers acknowledged that the submarines' limited detection capabilities would require external forces to provide satellite position guidance for accurate targeting.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Space Force is testing new satellite jammers called the Remote Modular Terminals, intended to operate remotely and provide counterspace electronic warfare capability, the report notes.

"Everyone is jamming," Victoria Samson, the director of Secure World's Washington office and one of the report's primary authors, told Breaking Defense earlier this week.

So far, only non-destructive counterspace capabilities are being actively used against satellites in current military operations, the report notes.

A new comb-like computer chip could be the key to equipping drones, smartphones and autonomous vehicles with military-grade positioning technology that was previously confined to space agencies and research labs.

Scientists have developed a "microcomb chip" — a 5 millimeter (0.2 inches) wide computer chip equipped with tiny teeth like those on a comb — that could make optical atomic clocks, the most precise timekeeping pieces on the planet, small and practical enough for real-world use.

This could mean GPS-equipped systems a thousand times more accurate than the best we have today, improving everything from smartphone and drone navigation to seismic monitoring and geological surveys, the researchers said in a statement. They published their findings Feb. 19 in the journal Nature Photonics.

Up and atom

"Today's atomic clocks enable GPS systems with a positional accuracy of a few meters [where 1 meter is 3.3 feet]. With an optical atomic clock, you may achieve a precision of just a few centimeters [where 1 centimeter is 0.4 inches]," study co-author Minghao Qi, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, said in the statement.

Related: How long is a second?

"This improves the autonomy of vehicles, and all electronic systems based on positioning. An optical atomic clock can also detect minimal changes in latitude on the Earth's surface and can be used for monitoring, for example, volcanic activity."

There are approximately 400 high-precision atomic clocks worldwide, which use the principles of quantum mechanics to keep time.

This typically involves using microwaves to stimulate atoms to shift between energy states. These shifts, called oscillations, happen naturally at an extremely high rate, acting like an ultra-precise ticking clock that keeps timekeeping accurate to within a billionth of a second.

That is why atomic clocks form the backbone of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) — which is used to set global time zones — and GPS (global positioning system) satellites, which rely on atomic timekeeping to provide positioning data to cars, smartphones and other devices.

Despite this incredible accuracy, traditional atomic clocks are far less accurate than optical atomic clocks. Where standard atomic clocks use microwave frequencies to excite atoms, optical atomic clocks use laser light, enabling them to measure atomic vibrations at a much finer scale — making them thousands of times more precise.

Until now, optical atomic clocks have been confined to extremely limited scientific and research environments, such as NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This is because they are extremely complex, putting them well out of reach of your standard Casio fan.

Tapping into the teeth of a comb

Microcomb chips could change this by bridging the gap between high-frequency optical signals (which optical atomic clocks use) and the radio frequencies used in the navigation and communication systems that modern electronics rely on.

"Like the teeth of a comb, a microcomb consists of a spectrum of evenly distributed light frequencies. Optical atomic clocks can be built by locking a microcomb tooth to a ultra-narrow-linewidth laser, which in turn locks to an atomic transition with extremely high frequency stability," the researchers explained in the statement.

They likened the new system to a set of gears, where a tiny, fast-spinning gear (the optical frequency) drives a larger, slower one (the radio frequency). Just as gears transfer motion while reducing speed, the microcomb acts as a converter that changes the ultra-fast oscillations of atoms into a stable time signal that electronics can process.

"Moreover, the minimal size of the microcomb makes it possible to shrink the atomic clock system significantly while maintaining its extraordinary precision," study co-author Victor Torres Company, professor of photonics at Chalmers, said in the statement. "We hope that future advances in materials and manufacturing techniques can further streamline the technology, bringing us closer to a world where ultra-precise timekeeping is a standard feature in our mobile phones and computers."

Google X has revealed the Taara chip, the latest development in its quest to harness the power of light for inexpensive, cable-free, high-speed internet.

This "fingernail-sized" chip uses software-controlled light emitters to steer data-encoded light beams between two points. In tests, researchers successfully transmitted data at 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) over 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) outdoors using two Taara chips.

"We believe this is the first time silicon photonics chips have transmitted such high-capacity data outdoors at this distance," Mahesh Krishnaswamy, the general manager of Taara, said in a statement.

The researchers at X, which is Google's research and development arm, hope Taara can deliver fiber-like internet speeds to regions that are difficult to access with traditional fiber-optic cables. These traditional cables are typically buried deep underground, making them impractical for remote areas or challenging terrains, such as mountains and forests. This, however, isn't a problem for Taara.

Related: Scientists achieve record-breaking 402 Tbps data transmission speeds — 1.6 million times faster than home broadband

Similarly, because the light frequencies Taara uses don't overlap with radio frequency bands like 5G, Taara doesn't have to contend with other signals taking up bandwidth.

He added that the goal was to make high-speed connectivity cheaper and easier to deploy by reducing the size and cost of the infrastructure, specifically by creating a mesh network of multiple Taara devices connected together.

These devices could then exchange data directly, providing high-speed, easily-scalable coverage wherever Taara nodes exist.

"Using chips deployed in a global mesh network, we see opportunities to bring high-speed internet to underserved regions, rethink the way data centers are built and operated, enable faster, create safer communication for autonomous vehicles, and so much more."

Data beamed at light speed

Fiber-optic cables contain tiny plastic or glass strands that transmit data as pulses of light. These are extremely effective at carrying high-speed data over long distances — far more so than older, copper-based cables, which carry data as slower electrical signals that are more prone to interference.

Taara also sends data as optical signals; however, it avoids the need for underground cables and networks that require physical maintenance. This means it can be installed "in hours instead of the days, months, or even years it can take to lay fiber," Krishnaswamy said.

The Taara chip is actually a newer, smaller version of an existing Google X invention called Taara Lightbridge, which is about the size of a traffic light.

Lightbridge featured a physical housing and mechanisms consisting of "mirrors, sensors, precision optics, and smart software" to align light beams to where they need to be. When two beams lock onto each other, they create a secure link capable of transmitting data up to speeds of 20 Gbps up to distances of 12.4 miles (20 km).

Krishnaswamy said the Taara chip will be available in 2026 in X's next product — which the company has not disclosed. In the meantime, Google's research arm has invited researchers and tinkerers to get in touch to explore potential applications.

Scientists are developing artificial intelligence (AI) models that could help next-generation wireless networks such as 6G deliver faster and more reliable connections.

In a study that featured in December 2024’s edition of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, researchers detailed an AI system which reduces the amount of information that needs to be sent between a device and a wireless base station — such as a cell tower — by focusing on key information such as angles, delays and signal strength.

By optimizing signal data in wireless networks that use high-frequency millimeter-wave (mmWave bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, the researchers found that connectivity errors were significantly reduced, and the AI system improved data reliability and connectivity in diverse environments, such as in urban areas with moving traffic and pedestrians.

"To address the rapidly growing data demand in next-generation wireless networks, it is essential to leverage the abundant frequency resource in the mmWave bands," said the lead author of the study, Byungju Lee, a professor in the telecommunications department at Incheon National University, South Korea.

Related: Future wearable devices could draw power through your body using background 6G cellphone signals

"Our method ensures precise beamforming, which allows signals to connect seamlessly with devices, even when users are in motion," said Lee.

Smarter ways to shape waves

The current challenge for networks that use high-frequency radio spectrum like mmWaves is that they rely on a large group of antennas working together through massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). The process needs precise information — referred to as "channel state information” (CSI) — to deliver connectivity between base stations and mobile devices with compatible antennas.

This situation is further complicated by changes to a network's environment, such as antennas moving with people and traffic, or obstructions in the line of sight between devices and cell towers. This leads to “channel aging” – a mismatch between the predicted channel state and its actual state, which results in degraded performance such as reduced data throughput and signal quality.

To try and overcome such challenges, the study’s authors used a new kind of AI model known as a transformer. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be used to help predict and optimize wireless network traffic, by recognizing signal patterns and classification.

But the researchers took a different approach: by using a transformer model instead of a CNN in their network analysis method, both short- and long-term patterns in signal changes could be tracked. As a result, the AI system, dubbed "transformer-assisted parametric CSI feedback", could make real-time adjustments in the wireless network to improve the connection quality between a base station and a user, even if the latter was moving quickly.

The improvement is explained by the difference between CNNs and transformers. Both are neural network models that analyze visual patterns such as images — in this case, patterns on the electromagnetic spectrum — but CNNs tend to be trained on smaller datasets and focus on "local" features, whereas transformer models use larger datasets and have a self-attention mechanism that enables them to determine the importance of different input elements and their relationships at a global and local level.

In simple terms, a transformer model will learn about an image as a whole, while a CNN has a bias toward features like edges and textures. Transformers see the bigger picture, so to speak.

However, transformer models are more computationally demanding than CNNs. But if they can deliver robust next-generation wireless networks, they could be the key to high-speed wireless communication in the near future.

Your body could become a battery for wearable devices, thanks to a breakthrough in harvesting waste energy from 6G wireless communication.

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that waste radio frequency (RF) energy given off by visible light communication (VLC), if used to deliver 6G, can be harvested with small, inexpensive copper coils and transmitted to power other devices via the human body. 6G is a future wireless communication technology that is currently in development and is set to be deployed before the end of the decade.

As outlined in a 2022 research paper, the crux of this mechanism lies with VLC — which transmits data through extremely fast flashes of visible light from sources such as LEDs. VLC is one method through which 6G signals might hypothetically be transmitted in the future. But LEDs also emit side-channel RF signals, as a form of leaked energy. The researchers found that this could be harvested by a coiled copper wire, whose energy recycling efficiency is boosted when touching human skin.

Related: Scientists could make blazing-fast 6G using curving light rays

According to the study, skin contact boosted efficiency by up to 10 times compared to using the coil on its own. The human body also proved to be better at amplifying the coil’s ability to collect leaked radio energy than wood, plastic, cardboard or steel.

Body batteries

From this, the researchers created "Bracelet+" — a simple copper wire coil that could be worn as a bracket on the upper forearm. The design can also be adapted to be worn as a necklace, anklet, belt or ring, although the scientists found the bracelet occupied a happy medium between power harvesting and wearability.

"The design is cheap — less than fifty cents," said the authors of the study in a statement. “But Bracelet+ can reach up to micro-watts, enough to support many sensors such as on-body health monitoring sensors that require little power to work owing to their low sampling frequency and long sleep-mode duration."

With this in mind, such technology could solve the issue of limited battery life on wearable devices. Even highly rated smartwatches, like the Apple Watch, tend to need charging on a near-daily basis, which can mitigate how useful they are unless charging is part of one’s daily routine. And now that smart rings are growing in popularity, there are even more devices that require regular power top-ups.

The energy harvesting technology that the Bracelet+ facilitates could, therefore, become a form of in-situ charger for next-generation wearable devices, providing of course that such devices come with a way of taking power from the bracelet.

Of course, this relies on 6G networks that use VLC, which are currently far away from deployment, let alone widespread adoption and integration into consumer or industrial devices.

But this could be the advent of turning the human body into a form of battery to power technology, only in a more harmonious fashion than the future envisioned by "The Matrix."

"Ultimately," said lead author of the study Jie Xiong, professor of information and computer sciences at UMass Amherst, in a statement, "we want to be able to harvest waste energy from all sorts of sources in order to power future technology."

Scientists are testing an alternative to the global position system (GPS) that uses phone signals to act as an emergency backup for pilots in case their standard in-flight equipment is jammed or malfunctions.

The 31 operating GPS satellites orbit Earth twice daily, emitting precise signals that receivers on the ground can pick up and analyze to determine how far away they are from the satellites. GPS devices use data from three satellites to precisely triangulate the user's precise location.

Although GPS is highly reliable (the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) certifies it as accurate to within seven meters 95% of the time) it isn’t immune from issues. GPS connections cannot be counted on in and around regions of conflict and can be jammed by malicious parties. Hackers can also "spoof" GPS signals to present pilots with misleading information about their location or direction of travel. Beyond this, GPS systems can malfunction or stop working altogether. If a commercial airliner lost its GPS signal, it could put everyone on board at risk.

Beyond this, GPS systems can malfunction or stop working altogether. If a commercial airliner were to lose its GPS signal, it could put everyone on board at risk.

Related: X-ray vision chip gives phones 'Superman' power to view objects through walls

"The impacts of losing GPS could be felt throughout society,” said lead author of the study Jennifer Sanderson, an electrical engineer at Sandia National Laboratories and an expert in navigation algorithms, in a statement.

The project, carried out by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and Ohio State University, aims to create a robust safety net for airborne navigation systems that uses a floating receiver to detect radio waves from communications satellites and cell towers in relation to a plane. It then uses this information to provide pilots with navigation data.

Signals that can be used for navigation, even if that's not their intended use, are known by scientists in the field as "signals of opportunity." They may rely on processes such as the Doppler effect, in which waves become crushed or stretched depending on whether they're moving closer to or farther away from a defined point, to determine position and velocity.

In this case, researchers strapped antenna payloads to weather balloons and sent them into the stratosphere — the layer of Earth's atmosphere between about 4 and 31 miles (6 to 50 kilometers) above the planet's surface — to sit between the satellites and towers and aim to detect their individual signals. These payloads could theoretically act as emergency beacons if a pilot were to lose their GPS signals.

At present, the researchers have to manually determine which satellites sent which signals based on available reference data. Going forward, the team will work on using algorithms to allow for payloads to automatically identify satellites and how this relates to a user’s position and velocity in real time.

"While we are still processing the flight data, we believe our preliminary findings indicate that we detected cell tower signal beacons at our peak altitude of about 82,000 feet [25,000 m]," Sanderson said. "If these signals are clean enough for navigation, it will significantly change what we thought was possible for alternative navigation."

Previous tests of the technology took place between 5,000 and 7,000 feet (1,500 to 2,100 m), whereas this new project has sent payloads as high as 80,000 feet (24,300 m). If the payload can reliably return navigational data from this altitude, it could have real-world benefits for air travel.

Although the payloads float at high altitudes to better receive signals from both communications satellites and cellphone towers on the ground far below, it's not a foolproof method. Satellites focus their radio waves down to Earth for an optimal signal on the ground, so picking strong signals up at weather balloon height isn't guaranteed.

Researchers will have to gradually improve detection capabilities and speed to account for this potential for error down the line.

Scientists have sent data through the air at speeds of up to 938 gigabits per second (Gbps) — setting a new record for wireless transmission speeds.

The new record, closing in on 1 terabit per second (Tbps), is the equivalent of downloading a 30 gigabyte (GB) 4K Ultra HD movie in 0.26 seconds. In comparison, using the download would take approximately 17 to 29 minutes using average 5G connections in the U.S, which range from 140 to 230 megabits per second (Mbps). In the U.K, where the researchers are based, average 5G speeds are roughly 100 Mbps, meaning the data transmission speeds achieved are roughly 9,380 times faster.

The scientists achieved this by combining radio and optical technologies for the first time, which enabled them to tap into radio frequency (RF) wavelengths of up to 150 gigahertz (GHz). They outlined their methods in a new study published Oct. 15 in The Journal of Lightwave Technology.

Most 5G connections transmit data in "narrow" frequencies below 6 GHz. But these transmission bands are highly congested, meaning speeds tend to be much lower than the theoretical maximum speed for 5G, which is 20 Gbps.

But future 6G transmission speeds are likely to occupy higher frequencies than the narrow 5G bands, which will let communications networks tap into much higher speeds. These bands include the "upper mid-band" frequencies from 7 to 24 GHz, alongside "sub-terahertz bands" from roughly 90 to 300 GHz, according to the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA).

“Current wireless communication systems are struggling to keep up with the increasing demand for high-speed data access, with capacity in the last few metres between the user and the fibre optic network holding us back," senior study author Zhixin Liu, a professor of electrical engineering at the U.K-based University College London (UCL), said in a statement.

"Our solution is to use more of the available frequencies to increase bandwidth, while maintaining high signal quality and providing flexibility in accessing different frequency resources. This results in super-fast and reliable wireless networks, overcoming the speed bottleneck between user terminals and the Internet."

Related: Scientists could make blazing-fast 6G using curving light rays

The new approach combines two existing wireless technologies for the first time — high-speed electronics and millimeter wave photonics, Liu added. The latter technology uses photonics, or light, to generate millimeter-wave radiofrequency signals. This hybrid system enables large amounts of data to be transmitted wirelessly over bands that could be used in future systems like 6G.

The scientists combined electronic digital-to-analog signal generators, which operate in the 5 to 75 GHz range, with light-based radio signal generators, which let data be transmitted across frequencies between 75 and 150 GHz. The total bandwidth of 145 GHz was five times more than the system used to achieve the previous wireless transmission world record, the scientists said.

This hybrid technology could be used to propagate wireless signals from masts in crowded places so that people can tap into these 5G (and eventually 6G) speeds from their smartphones. It would enable more people to use wireless networks in densely populated areas, such as at large concerts, without experiencing network traffic or sluggish speeds.

The scientists have only tested their system in a lab but plan to produce a prototype that can be used in a commercial setting. If successful, they hope to incorporate their technology into commercial equipment within the next five years.

Scientists have successfully transmitted quantum data and conventional data through a single optical fiber for the first time.

The research demonstrates that quantum data in the form of entangled photons and conventional internet data sent as laser pulses can coexist in the same fiber-optic cable.

Most research into building a quantum internet has focused on the need for separate infrastructure or dedicated channels for quantum data to avoid interference from "classical" data. But this new "hybrid" network could pave the way for more efficient implementation of quantum communications by enabling quantum and conventional data to share the same infrastructure. The researchers revealed their findings in a study published July 26 in the journal Science Advances.

Fiber-optic cables are composed of thin strands of glass or plastic fibers that carry data as infrared light pulses. These fibers transmit data through different color channels, with each corresponding to a specific wavelength of light.

Related: Fiber-optic data transfer speeds hit a rapid 301 Tbps — 1.2 million times faster than your home broadband connection

Researchers have previously shown that quantum data can be transmitted through a standard fiber-optic cable, but this new experiment marks the first time that both quantum and conventional data have been transmitted together in the same color channel.

Creating hybrid networks is challenging because quantum data is often transmitted through fiber-optic cables using entangled photons.

Entanglement occurs when two qubits — the most basic units of quantum information — are linked in such a way that information is shared between them regardless of their relationship over time or space. But entanglement is an extremely delicate state that can be easily disrupted by environmental disturbances like noise or interference from other signals. This includes any data sharing the same wavelength on a fiber-optic channel. This is known as "decoherence," and breaking this connection causes the qubits to lose their quantum state, resulting in data loss.

​​"To make the quantum internet a reality, we need to transmit entangled photons via fibre optic networks," study co-author Michael Kues, head of the Institute of Photonics at Leibniz University Hannover, said in a statement. "We also want to continue using optical fibres for conventional data transmission."

To get around these challenges, the scientists used a technique called electro-optic phase modulation to precisely adjust the frequency of the laser pulses so that they matched the color of the entangled photons. This enabled both types of data to be transmitted in the same color channel without disrupting the quantum information held by the entangled photons.

The ability to transmit quantum and conventional data in the same channel frees up other color channels in the fiber-optic cable for more data, the scientists said. This will be key to making the many applications of quantum computing, such as ultra-secure communications and quantum cryptography, more practical and scalable.

"Our research is an important step to combine the conventional internet with the quantum internet," said Kues. "Our experiment shows how the practical implementation of hybrid networks can succeed."

Network slowdowns could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a superfast new algorithm.

The breakthrough offers a dramatically faster solution to a problem that has been plaguing computer scientists since the 1950s: maximum flow, or how to achieve the fastest flow of information through a system with limited capacity.

Previous maximum flow algorithms made steady and incremental advances, but they still took longer to find the optimal flow than to process the network data. But the new research, presented on June 11 at the Proceedings of the 56th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, details an algorithm that can solve the problem roughly as quickly as it takes to write the details of the network down.

The maximum flow problem is a cornerstone of algorithmic science and has inspired many of the most significant advances in the field. The first attempt to solve it came in 1956, when the mathematicians Delbert Fulkerson and Lester Ford proposed what they called a "greedy solution" to the question.

Greedy algorithms work by making the most immediately advantageous choices at each point along the decision tree, picking the best path in front of it regardless of the routes this may block in the future.

Related: New quantum computer smashes 'quantum supremacy' record by a factor of 100 — and it consumes 30,000 times less power

Picture the problem of optimizing traffic moving from A to B along multiple possible paths, one route being made up of a first segment that is a six-lane highway and the final a three-lane road. To solve this, the greedy algorithm will launch as much traffic as possible (three lanes of cars) along the route, adjusting its capacity and repeating the same steps for other routes until every possible path is at full capacity.

Fulkerson and Ford's algorithm proved effective enough, but it often didn't produce the best possible flow: If other routes were cut off and suboptimal jams emerged, so be it. The subsequent 70 years of contributions to the problem attempted to refine this aspect of the solution, smoothing out unnecessary slow-downs by building better decision-making into the algorithm.

These tweaks shifted the runtime of the algorithm from a multiple m^2 (where m is the number of nodes in the network) to a multiple of m^1.33 in 2004, but then progress stalled.

To arrive at their breakthrough, the study researchers combined two prior approaches: the original solution that treated networks as traffic; and a later one that instead viewed them as an electrical grid. Unlike cars or trains, the flow of electrons can be partially diverted to join the current along another route, enabling computer scientists to map out the best flow across the entire network before the segment-by-segment traffic approach is applied.

Combining these two approaches resulted in a hybrid algorithm that was "absurdly fast," Daniel A. Spielman, a professor of applied mathematics and computer science at Yale University who supervised the doctoral program of one of the researchers, said in a statement. Spielman compared the new solution to previous ones as being like "a Porsche overtaking horse-drawn carriages."

Once refined, the new algorithm could potentially be applied to a number of applications, including internet data, airline scheduling and improving the efficiencies of markets, the researchers said.

Researchers have achieved record-breaking fiber-optic data transfer speeds of 402 terabits per second (Tbps) — roughly 1.6 million times faster than typical home broadband speeds.

The scientists at Aston University in the U.K. achieved these new speeds by tapping into all the wavelength bands used in commercially available fiber-optic cables. Only one or two bands are used in most fiber-optic broadband connections. They outlined their methods in a technical report published by Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).

The new record is 25% faster than the previous one set by the same team of scientists in March. In previous experiments, they achieved speeds of 301 Tbps by using four of the six wavelength bands in fiber-optic cables.

"This finding could help increase capacity on a single fiber so the world would have a higher performing system," Ian Phillips, a teaching fellow in electronics and computer engineering at Aston University, said in a statement. "The newly developed technology is expected to make a significant contribution to expand the communication capacity of the optical communication infrastructure as future data services rapidly increase demand."

To achieve the new record, the research team built the world's first optical transmission system that spanned all six wavelength bands used in fiber-optic communications, including O, E, S, C, L and U. These refer to different wavelength portions of infrared in the electromagnetic spectrum, falling between 1,260 and 1,675 nanometers (nm). Visible light, for reference, falls between 400 nm and 700 nm on the spectrum.

Related: Fiber-optic data transfer speeds hit a rapid 301 Tbps — 1.2 million times faster than your home broadband connection

Most current commercial fiber-optic connections transmit data using the C-band and L-band portions, which range between 1,530 nm and 1,625 nm, because they are the most stable segments — meaning the least amount of data is lost through transmission. But increased network congestion means these bands will one day be saturated — meaning new bands will need to be used, the researchers noted in the report.

In the past, the S-band, adjacent to the C-band and occupying the 1,460 nm to 1,530 nm segment, has also been used in combination with the others in a "wavelength division multiplexing" (WDM) system to reach much higher speeds.

In the previous study, the scientists stabilized connections that used the E-band portion. Normally, data lost when transmitting in this region shoots up to extremely high levels — five times the data loss versus the C-band and L-band regions. This is because fiber-optic cables are susceptible to exposure to hydroxyl (OH) molecules in the ground that can enter the tubes and disrupt connections.

The new study went one step further and built new equipment that could also harness the O-band and U-band wavelengths. Specifically, the scientists built devices to amplify signals in the U-band portions. They also used off-the-shelf amplifiers to amplify O-band signals.

What’s more, they achieved these speeds on standard commercially available fiber-optic cables — meaning there would be no need to install specialized cables to tap into these speeds.

The next evolution of the internet could involve digitally transmitting the sense of touch, which may transform remote surgery and usher in a whole new era of online gaming.

Researchers have developed a "Haptic Codecs for the Tactile Internet" (HCTI) standard that allows haptic information to be sent both ways across a network via data packets that are neither excessive in size nor require large amounts of bandwidth. They outlined the details in a paper published June 14 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standards Association.

Currently, transmitting tactile feedback over a remote connection — for instance, when operating a robot arm onsite — requires data packets to be sent both ways 4,000 times per second. While this allows for feedback to be realistic and ensures robust data transmission, it places very high demands on the network that transports the data packets, said lead author of the paper Eckehard Steinbach, professor of media technology at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), in a statement.

To overcome this, the HCTI standard uses compression and reduces this clock rate to 100 times per second, which Steinbach said is "close to the human perception threshold."

Related: This bizarre vortex doesn't just look cool — it can be a key cog in making scalable high-speed 6G networks a reality

The HCTI standard optimizes the control loop between the sender and receiver, alongside compressing information in a similar way as is used to send audio or image files across the internet — but in a two-way format.

"The new codec is something like JPEG or MPEG, only for haptics," said Steinback, adding: "In the case of JPEG, MP3 and MPEG, many applications emerged after the standards were made public. I expect the same from our new haptic codecs."

Touch transmission

Codecs compress information sent across the internet by cutting out data beyond human perception. In JPEG and MP3 files, that means removing visual and audio elements that humans aren't likely to notice. This results in the loss of high fidelity, say in colors or high-frequency sounds, but makes for a much smaller easily transferred data packet.

But that process is normally a one-way transmission. Given haptic feedback requires two-way communication and high fidelity to be effective remotely, it requires high-bandwidth and low-latency connections. When operating robots on-site this isn’t a huge problem, but operating them remotely poses challenges.

While information is sent through fiber optic networks at the speed of light, it still travels at a maximum of 300 kilometers in one millisecond (ms). In terms of pure transmission time, that means a haptics data packet would take 30 ms to travel from Germany to Japan — not counting any delays in transmission caused by the receiving device. This isn't fast enough for effective remote tactile feedback, the scientists said in the statement.

But compressing the data packet size, yet still transferring enough information for haptics to be effective, allows for tactile feedback to be transmitted without a delay that’s noticeable to humans. The only downside, the researchers added, is that the forces exerted by a robot are slightly dampened when fed back to a controller — meaning hard surfaces can feel softer, for example.

The HCTI standard could have a variety of future applications, particularly in medicine, the scientists said. Most notably, it could be used in telesurgery, where an in-theater robot could be controlled remotely by an expert surgeon in another continent. A doctor could also perform a remote ultrasound of a patient in an ambulance, thereby speeding the process of delivering aid.

Haptic feedback could also improve gaming and entertainment experiences, with more realistic feedback when gaming online or in so-called "4D cinemas." It could, for example, convey the physical feeling of a handshake between two players. This could also be applied to the best virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets to deliver better immersion.

The future of super-fast 6G communications could lie in the use of flexible plates with eye-catching spirals of carbon nanotubes tuned to broadcast terahertz (THz) signals. 

In a new study published April 30 in the journal Advanced Optical Materials, researchers explained how layers of spiral zone plates can act as optical components to manage a THz beam. This is electromagnetic radiation in the 1 trillion hertz spectrum that sits between the microwave and infrared frequency bands for use in 6G communications, microscopy and medicine. 

The varifocal Fresnel zone plates – devices with transparent and opaque concentric rings used to focus light and other waveforms – were constructed of a thin film of carbon nanotubes arranged in a spiral pattern that can twist the waveform of a THz beam passing through it. The new component can be seen here.

By combining two plates and rotating them relative to each other, the researchers changed the distribution of the intensity of the THz beam and split it into several areas of different radiation intensities. This could be used to create several channels for high-speed information transfer. 

Related: Scientists could make blazing-fast 6G using curving light rays

Maria Burdanova, a senior researcher at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology’s Laboratory of Nanooptics and Plasmonics, explained in a statement that the paper outlines a way to overcome the challenges of making instruments that can tap into the THz spectrum band — which will be essential for high-speed 6G in the future. 

"One of the key features highlighting the prospects of carbon nanotubes is the possibility to create multifunctional devices with properties that can be fine-tuned by different effects through responses at the atomic, supramolecular, and micron levels," Burdanova said in the statement. "For the first time, our joint team has succeeded in introducing an additional effect: interaction of different nanotube patterns. This paves the way for future devices." 

By creating plates with spiral patterns formed from thin carbon nanotubes on a flexible and stretchable substrate, the plates can then be stretched and orientated – tuning them for the specific manipulation of THz signals.  

Tubular signals 

6G is mostly in the early research stages at the moment, despite a predicted rollout slated for 2023 by trade body GSMA. Until now, manipulating signals in the THz spectrum has been difficult to accomplish at range and scale.

As such, there’s a need to create components that can modulate and generate terahertz vortex beams that carry data — or beams that can be used as a form of X-ray in medicine. That’s why developing a varifocal Fresnel zone plate, based on focusing THz radiation via nanotubes, is significant. 

Because the plates can be layered, stretched and rotated, they may pave the way for THz control components that can be tuned for different applications rather than needing different parts for communications and medical applications.

Furthermore, using nanotubes means engineers can create components that are compact and lightweight as well as tunable, which will be essential if 6G networks are to be developed at scale. With the constant demand for more data at faster speeds for both business and pleasure, 6G must be sufficiently scalable to usher in the next generation of high-speed communication. 

The future of cellular data transfer could lie in "curving" light beams midair to deliver 6G wireless networks with blazing-fast speeds — bypassing the need for line of sight between transmitter and receivers. 

In a new study published March 30 in the journal Nature's Communications Engineering, researchers explained how they developed a transmitter that can dynamically adjust the waves needed to support future 6G signals. 

The most advanced cellular communications standard is 5G. Expected to be thousands of times faster, 6G will begin rolling out in 2030, according to the trade body GSMA. Unlike 5G, which mostly operates in bands under 6 gigahertz (GHz) in the electromagnetic spectrum, 6G is expected to operate in sub-terahertz (THz) between 100 GHz and 300 GHz, and THz bands — just below infrared. The closer this radiation is to visible light, the more prone the signals are to be blocked by physical objects. A major challenge with high-frequency 5G and future 6G is that signals need a direct line of sight between a transmitter and receiver. 

But in the experiments, the scientists showed that you can effectively "curve" high-frequency signals around obstacles such as buildings.

"This is the world's first curved data link, a critical milestone in realizing the 6G vision of high data rate and high reliability," said Edward Knightly, co-author of the study and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, in a statement.

Related: Scientists create light-based semiconductor chip that will pave the way for 6G

The photons, or light particles, that make up the THz radiation in this region of the electromagnetic spectrum generally travel in straight lines unless space and time are warped by massive gravitational forces — the kind that black holes exert. But the researchers found that self-accelerating beams of light — first demonstrated in research from 2007 — form special configurations of electromagnetic waves that can bend or curve to one side as they move through space. 

By designing transmitters with patterns that manipulate the strength, intensity and timing of the data-carrying signals, the researchers made waves that worked together to create a signal that remained intact even if its route to a receiver was partially blocked. They found that a light beam can be formed that adjusts to any objects in its way by shuffling data to an unblocked pattern. So while the photons still travel in a straight line, the THz signal effectively bends around an object.

Bending toward a 6G future

While bending light without the power of a black hole isn't new research, what's significant about this study is it could make 6G networks a practical reality. 

5G millimeter wave (mmWave) currently offers the fastest network bandwidth by occupying the higher 5G radio frequencies between 24GHz and 100GHz of the electromagnetic spectrum to deliver theoretical maximum download speeds of 10 to 50 gigabits (billions of bits) per second. THz rays sit above mmWave in a frequency between 100 GHz and 10,000 GHz (10 THz), which is needed to deliver data transfer speeds of one terabit per second — nearly 5,000 times faster than average U.S. 5G speeds. 

"We want more data per second," Daniel Mittleman, a professor at Brown's School of Engineering, said in a statement. "If you want to do that, you need more bandwidth, and that bandwidth simply doesn't exist using conventional frequency bands."

But due to the high frequencies they operate in, both 5G mmWave and future 6G signals need a direct line of sight between a transmitter and receiver. But by practically delivering a signal over a curved trajectory, future 6G networks wouldn't need buildings to be covered in receivers and transmitters.

However, a receiver needs to be within the near-field range of the transmitter for signal bending to work. When using high-frequency THz rays, this means some 33 feet (10 meters) apart, which is no good for city-wide 6G but could be practical for next-generation Wi-Fi networks.

"One of the key questions that everybody asks us is how much can you curve and how far away," Mittleman said. "We've done rough estimations of these things, but we haven't really quantified it yet, so we hope to map it out."

While curving THz signals holds a lot of promise for future 6G networks, the use of THz spectrum is still in its infancy. With this study, the scientists said we have gotten a step closer to realizing cellular wireless networks with unparalleled speeds.

A new programmable antenna could pave the way for a new generation of 6G devices, smart city-type applications and 3D holograms, scientists claim.

Researchers have created a dynamic metasurface antenna (DMA) that could be controlled by a digitally coded miniature processor that is technically, a high-speed field programmable gate array (FPGA) — a type of reconfigurable circuit integrated onto a chip. 

This prototype, which is about the size of a matchbox, is the world’s first to work with a 6G signal in the 60 GHz millimeter-wave (mmWave) band — reserved for industrial, scientific and medical applications. The findings are detailed in a new study accepted for publication in the near future in the journal IEEE Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation.

The most advanced mobile communications standard today is 5G. This network was first established in 2018 before becoming widespread in 2019. Today, almost every new smartphone can connect to 5G networks in the U.S. and globally. 

6G — which could be a thousand times faster than 5G — is next in line, with the technical specifications still being decided, alongside the infrastructure and components needed to make this network a reality. The final specifications for 6G are expected in 2028, with commercial rollout likely to follow in the early 2030s, according to the trade body GSMA. 

Related: Breakthrough photonic chip could power 6G devices

“Our high-frequency intelligent and highly adaptive antenna design could be one of the technological foundation stones of the next generation of mmWave reconfigurable antennas,” said lead author of the research, Masood Ur Rehman, senior lecturer in autonomous systems and connectivity at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland, in a statement.

One of the prototype antenna’s key features is beamforming. This focuses the direction of the 6G signal precisely to the target device, which increases reliability and speed while reducing power demands. This process happens in nanoseconds. Here, the researchers used "metamaterial" elements designed to resonate at around 60.5 GHz that can be fine-tuned without the need for complex circuitry. 

"The programmable beam control and beam-shaping of the DMA could help in fine-grained mmWave holographic imaging as well as next-generation near-field communication, beam focusing, and wireless power transfer," said Ur Rehman.

In the study, the researchers said this device could have a major impact in communication, sensing and imaging.

One of the main challenges for 6G is that it is difficult to obtain a signal inside a building. This new antenna could support large-scale 60GHz indoor Internet of Things (IoT) networks that encompass high transmission rates and massive data throughput” the scientists said in their report. In tests, the prototype reduced energy consumption by 88% and data collisions by 24%, compared to omnidirectional antennas.

Sensing via 6G also raises interesting possibilities. This uses the properties of radio waves to detect objects in real-time, with potential applications including tracking patients in a hospital or determining the path of an autonomous car. Using this captured data might also lead to the creation of 3D holographic models showing the movement of people and objects in the local area, the scientists said.

Ur-Rehman said his team is just at the start of the journey, and plans to improve the design so that the antenna offers greater flexibility and more versatile performance. Eventually, Ur Rehman sees it as a key component in 6G-enabled IoT and smart city environments.

A consortium of companies in Japan has built the world's first high-speed 6G wireless device, capable of transmitting data at blistering speeds of 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) at more than 300 feet (90 meters) — up to 20 times faster than 5G. 

These data transfer speeds are equivalent to transferring five HD movies wirelessly per second, and, according to Statista, up to 500 times faster than average 5G T-Mobile speeds in the U.S. 

The results of the new tests, announced April 11 in a joint statement, show that the consortium’s wireless device transmitted data at 100 Gbps indoors over the 100 gigahertz (GHz) band and outdoors in the 300 GHz band — which sits below infrared in the electromagnetic spectrum. The tests were conducted over 328 feet (100 meters), consortium representatives said in the statement.

Rolled out in 2019, 5G is the current state-of-the-art wireless communication standard and is used by almost all new smartphones, for example. Average T-Mobile speeds in the U.S. are approximately 204.9 megabits per second (Mbps), while the theoretical maximum 5G speed is at least 10 Gbps. 

Related: Scientists create light-based semiconductor chip that will pave the way for 6G

But scientists are already working on building the sixth generation of this standard, 6G, with the infrastructure in the works ahead of rollout by the early 2030s, according to the GSM Association (GSMA) — where GSM stands for Global System for Mobile.

The main differences between 5G and 6G lie in the frequency bands of the electromagnetic spectrum in which they operate. Operating in higher bands generally means much higher speeds. 

5G signals are commonly transmitted in bands under 6 GHz and extended into bands of around 40 GHz — known as the "millimeter-wave bands," according to 6GWorld. 

6G, on the other hand, is expected to use higher-frequency bands, known as "sub-THz" bands, which are between 100 GHz and 300 GHz, according to Nokia. Transmitting in this region taps into the advantage of faster speeds but has the disadvantage of greater interference with the environment, with signals more likely to become blocked — particularly indoors.

Where the jump from 4G to 5G paved the way for much greater volumes of media consumption, the jump from 5G to 6G could lead to new technologies like holographic communication and smoother virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality experiences.

Because 6G relies on much higher frequency bands, however, we would need completely new infrastructure to transmit and amplify signals, while smartphones or VR devices would require 6G antennae.

In previous tests, scientists have achieved faster 6G speeds — but over much shorter distances. A different team of scientists in Japan, for example, demonstrated world-record 6G speeds of up to 240 Gbps but only at 66 feet (20 m), publishing their findings Feb. 10 in the journal IEICE Electronics Express. 

If you want the latest discoveries, groundbreaking research and fascinating breakthroughs, then Live Science has you covered.

From the majesty of space to Earth's amazing animals, ancient cultures to modern medicine — whatever it is that piques your interest, sign up for the Live Science newsletter to get the most up-to-date advances from the realm of science delivered to your inbox every day.

We also answer some of the most mind-bending questions in Life's Little Mysteries, go deep with our Science Spotlight features and offer recommendations for products that we know our science-loving readers will enjoy.

Sign up below and begin your daily journey of discovery.

Scientists have achieved fiber-optic data transfer speeds 1.2 million times faster than the average fixed broadband line by tapping into a previously unstable transmission band for the first time.

The researchers hit a rate of 301 terabits per second (Tbps) — equivalent to transferring 1,800 4K movies over the internet in one second. The median fixed broadband speed in the U.S. in comparison, is 242.38 megabits per second (Mbps), according to Speed Test.

They achieved this breakneck speed by sending infrared light through tubular strands of glass — which is how fiber-optic broadband works generally. But they tapped into a spectral band that has never been used in commercial systems, called "E-band," using new, custom-built devices.

The results of the test — which were conducted using the kind of fiber cables already laid in the ground — were published in March by the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET), the scientists said in a statement. The team also presented the research at the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) in Glasgow in October 2023 — but the paper has not been made public.

A new frontier for fiber-optic connections

All commercial fiber-optic connections beam data through cables in the C-band and L-band portions of infrared in the electromagnetic spectrum — with the particular infrared region used for internet connections occupying a range of 1,260 to 1,675 nanometers (nm). For reference, visible light occupies wavelengths between approximately 400 nm and 700 nm on the spectrum.

C-band and L-band — which range between 1,530 nm and 1,625 nm — are commonly utilized in commercial connections because they're the most stable, meaning the least amount of data is lost during transmission. But the scientists speculated that one day the sheer volume of traffic will result in these two bands being congested — meaning additional transmission bands will be needed to increase capacity.

Related: Project Kuiper: Amazon's answer to Starlink passes 'crucial' test

S-band, which is adjacent to the C-band and occupies the range 1,460 nm to 1,530 nm, has been commercially used in combination with the other two in a system known as "wavelength division multiplexing" (WDM), in which all three bands are used to reach much higher speeds.

Scientists have never been able to emulate E-band connections before, however, because the data loss in this region shoots up to extremely high levels — roughly five times the rate of loss of transmission in the C-band and L-band regions.

Specifically, fiber-optic cables are susceptible to exposure to hydroxyl (OH) molecules that can enter the tubes and disrupt connections, either through manufacturing or naturally in the environment. E-band is called the "water peak" band because extremely high transmission loss is caused by the absorption of OH molecules by infrared light in this region.

Stabilizing connections at the "water peak" band

In the new research, scientists built a system that made stable E-band transmission possible. They demonstrated successful and stable data transfer at high speeds using both the E-band and the adjacent S-band.

To maintain a stable connection in this region of the electromagnetic spectrum, the researchers created two new devices called "optical amplifiers" and "optical gain equalizers." The former helps to amplify the signal over distances while the latter monitors each wavelength channel and adjusts the amplitude where needed. They deployed them in the fiber-optic cables to ensure the infrared light transmitted data without the instability and loss that normally plagues connections in these bands.

"Over the last few years Aston University has been developing optical amplifiers that operate in the E-band, which sits adjacent to the C-band in the electromagnetic spectrum but is about three times wider," said Ian Phillips, professor of electronics and computer engineering at Aston University in the U.K. and one of the scientists working on the project. "Before the development of our device, no one had been able to properly emulate the E-band channels in a controlled way."

Although 301 Tbps is extremely fast, other scientists have tapped into fiber-optic connections to demonstrate even faster speeds in recent years. A team at NICT, for example, hit the world record of 22.9 petabits per second in November 2023 — 75 times faster than the speed Aston University team achieved. They used WDM technology but did not access E-band wavelengths. They demonstrated this high-speed connection over a distance of 8 miles (13 kilometers).

When computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee sent a memo detailing his idea of a "distributed hypertext system" on March 12, 1989, it was largely ignored by his colleagues at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. This is not surprising: CERN is a place where scientists build huge colliders, not a think tank for computer geeks. Why should they care about one man's curious idea to create an interlinked web of information?

The answer was that he was trying to make their lives easier. Several thousand scientists worked at CERN at the time, but information about their projects sat in silos. Linking them together through one extended network of computers seems obvious now, but it took 18 months before Berners-Lee was granted permission to dedicate time to his idea. 

He published the first web page for CERN users in December 1991 and freely distributed his software the following year. Exponential growth soon followed. By 1994, with over 10,000 web servers online, Berners-Lee saw the need for standards. He moved from CERN to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to ensure that the web's royalty-free, open nature was baked into its principles. 

Related: Internet history timeline: ARPANET to the World Wide Web

He also started talking about "the semantic web." This concept is built upon metadata and relationships — think of it as a machine-readable version of the internet that adds both context and structure. 

Using this, "you can ask things like, 'let me listen to music which has been written by people who were born in towns in Minnesota with less than 200,000 inhabitants,'" Berners-Lee said in an InfiniteMIT video in 2010. In short, because information has been linked together — and is openly accessible — it can be used in original, unpredictable ways. Such a concept can't work if the data is siloed or controlled by corporations. 

Pushing for a more open web

Berners-Lee helped to set up the World Wide Web Foundation in 2009, which aims to"[fight] for a world where everyone has affordable, meaningful access to a web that improves their lives and where their rights are protected.".

For the past decade, he has also pushed for the third evolution of the web, which he dubs "Web 3.0." This often gets confused with Web3, but they are very different: Web3 is based entirely around the use of blockchain to build a decentralized internet, with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin used to trade. Web 3.0, by contrast, stays true to the founding principles of being open and royalty-free. It also builds on the two key ideas of the semantic web and giving people control over their data. 

In 2016, Berners-Lee created the Solid protocol, a "single sign-on across the web," he told CNBC's Beyond The Valley podcast in February 2023. "And then you give everybody [their] own personal cloud storage, call it a Solid pod, they have complete control over that." 

Rather than hundreds of companies controlling the data you have provided to them, as is the status quo, any app creator can access your data, or a portion of it, by tapping into your pod, with your permission. Berners-Lee used the example of sharing data with a vacation-planning app at the Global Freight Summit in November 2023. "So I'm going to show you all the data in my pod about all of the other family vacations that we've had before, just for the purposes of helping me find the next one. Then it will all vanish, [the app] won't have access anymore."

For Solid to work, Berners-Lee realized he needed to talk to governments and enterprises. That's why he set up Inrupt with co-founder John Bruce. The idea behind the company, Bruce told the Beyond The Valley podcast, was to "galvanize the efforts" around the Solid protocol and build "an enterprise-grade version of it all."  The venture aims to make Solid safe and scalable so it can be used by governments and massive organizations who want to use data in a more ethical and consensual way.

Can the internet's creator make Web 3.0 a mainstream idea? 

In the five-and-a-half years since its foundation, Inrupt has scored some successes. It worked with the Flemish government to create a "data utility company" called Athumi, giving consumers and businesses within Flanders their own pods in which they can store their personal data. This system enables users to control and share data, for example to share career data with prospective employers and smartwatch data with doctors.

In 2022, the BBC also partnered with Inrupt to launch a six-month trial called "BBC Together + Data Pod" to give viewers control over their data when taking part in a watch party on its streaming service, iPlayer. 

Max Leonard, principal technologist at Inrupt, told VideoWeek that "there was only a small number of people who were really bothered by [the data side of it], but they went into quite a lot of detail." He added: "But most people just wanted to get on and use the thing."

Inrupt's website also notes "customers" such as the U.K. and Swedish governments, British bank Natwest and the British National Health Service (NHS). There are also three American organizations including the insurance company Allstate, Brooklyn-based climate tech company BlocPower and the Bezos Earth Fund.

So far, then, Inrupt has not had an explosive impact. But Berners-Lee cites people's growing awareness of their personal data as a key driver of change. "People will realize that basically anything which works and doesn't give them data in their pocket is kind of robbing them of the power," he told the Beyond The Valley podcast. "There won't be suddenly a day when everything switches across, but just incrementally and inexorably, everything will be moving into this new, much more powerful world."

Voyager 1, one of NASA's longest-lived space missions, is suffering a communication malfunction, and the mission team is growing concerned that the far-flung spacecraft may not recover. Engineers are currently working to fix a computer error that is preventing the craft from transmitting data back to Earth, but software limitations and distance are making it difficult.

Since Nov. 14 of last year, the interstellar Voyager 1 probe has been unable to send back data collected by its scientific instruments, NASA officials said in a statement. The probe appears to be receiving and executing commands just fine, according to its California-based support team, and is continuing to hurtle through interstellar space more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth — far beyond the edge of the solar system. However, without access to the glitching systems, it's hard for the engineers to fully assess the craft's status.

"It would be the biggest miracle if we get it back," Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd said in an interview with Ars Technica.

Since Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977, it has been traveling away from the sun at roughly 10.5 miles per second (17 kilometers per second). Voyager 1 officially crossed into interstellar space in 2012, becoming the first spacecraft to do so. Today, it is the farthest human-made object from Earth.

Related: Space photo of the week: Bruce McCandless II floats untethered as the 1st 'human satellite' in history

Ordinarily, the probe transmits data back to Earth using its flight data system, one of three onboard computers. But an apparent glitch in one of its subsystems, the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), means that instead of the usual binary code, it has been sending back strings of repeated zeros for months.

Unfortunately, fixing the malfunction has proved complicated because of the spacecraft's age and distance from Earth. After sending a command, the ground team has to wait 45 hours for the craft to respond, according to NASA. And because the probe was designed and built in the 1970s, much of its onboard technology is no longer state-of-the-art and the schematics aren't digitized.

"The people that built the spacecraft are not alive anymore," Dodd said. "We do have a reasonably good set of documentation, but a lot of it is in paper, so you do this archaeology dig to get documents."

If NASA is unable to reestablish contact with Voyager 1, the agency will still have at least one probe in interstellar space. Its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, crossed that barrier in 2018 and, for the most part, has maintained contact with Earth ever since. (NASA researchers accidentally cut contact with the probe for several weeks in summer 2023.) NASA's New Horizons probe is expected to fully exit the solar system sometime in the 2040s.

But for now, the Voyager team is committed to getting the TMU back online. "We certainly haven't given up," Dodd said.

A new algorithm could significantly speed up web browsing by making caching more effective.

The open-source program, called "SIEVE," introduces a new way to handle web caching — the process of storing and retrieving objects from a computer's long-term storage as you encounter them while surfing the internet.

These objects — tiny files stored on your hard drive — include images, logos or entire copies of webpages. When you encounter these elements for the first time, you retrieve them from the server, but they are stored on your hard drive for reuse. The second time you encounter these objects, your browser can retrieve them from your computer's memory rather than from the server, which saves time and consumes less energy. 

But because local storage is limited, cache-eviction algorithms work to decide how long to store objects for, and when to replace older ones less frequently accessed by a user, with newer or more popular ones. 

Although many such algorithms exist, SIEVE is a much simpler and effective option that can dramatically speed up web browsing if implemented across the internet, the scientists said in their preprint paper, published Dec. 17, 2023. They plan to present the paper at the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in April.

Related: How could this new type of room-temperature qubit usher in the next phase of quantum computing?

"A main reason why computers and the internet are fast at all is the cache. We feel software caches are this ubiquitous and yet underappreciated pillar that enable the modern web to function, and so working on them can have outsized impact," co-first author of the paper Yazhuo Zhang, a doctoral student at Emory University in Atlanta, told Live Science. 

Testing a new approach to web caching

First-in, first-out (FIFO) algorithms work by adding new objects in sequence to a "conveyor belt" to oblivion. When objects reach the end of the line, they're removed. Less recently used (LRU) is another method in which objects move along the conveyor belt as in FIFO, but if an object is requested again, it jumps back to the front. More sophisticated variations exist, but the more complex they are, the more bugs they have, Zhang said. SIEVE, by contrast, was implemented with fewer than 20 lines of code.

SIEVE uses the same conveyor belt mechanism, but objects are labeled "zero" to begin with. When an object is requested again, its status changes to "one" and it joins the front of the line. Objects are evicted as normal when they reach the end. This is known as "lazy promotion." Meanwhile, a "moving hand" that scans the length of the belt and loops back to the beginning, is programmed to remove any object labeled "zero." This sieve-like function is called "quick demotion." The scientists said SIEVE is the simplest algorithm that achieves both lazy promotion and quick demotion.   

They conducted 1,500 separate tests against nine state-of-the-art algorithms using real caching histories based on tracked web-cache traces from Meta, Wikimedia, X and four other sources. One trace, for example, consisted of 2.8 billion web requests made to access media on Wikipedia in 2019. Together, the 1,500 traces comprised 247 billion requests to nearly 15 billion objects. 

They were looking for a low "miss ratio," or the fraction of objects fetched from the web versus storage, where a "miss" is considered fetching an object from the web — the lower, the better. No single algorithm is expected to have the lowest miss ratio in every test, but SIEVE was the best-performing in 45% of the tests, Zhang told Live Science. The next best algorithm, by contrast, was the top performer in just 15%.

SIEVE has already been implemented on more than 10 popular libraries that fuel modern apps and websites. Many sites may soon upgrade to SIEVE "without much effort," Zhang said. She added that Meta is about to evaluate SIEVE in production, while Google has also expressed interest in adopting SIEVE alongside other web companies. 

"This is remarkable and unusual traction," Zhang said. No cache algorithm in the past 20 years has seen broad uptake across multiple production systems." 

Scientists have developed a new type of visible light communication (VLC) technology that can transmit data using conventional lighting fixtures used in homes and offices. The technology could one day usurp Wi-Fi as the go-to tool for wireless communication.

Unlike wireless-fidelity (Wi-Fi) technology, which uses electromagnetic radio waves to transmit data, light-fidelity (Li-Fi) uses sources of light and can theoretically reach speeds over 100 times faster. While Li-Fi is a fully networked system and can incorporate infrared or ultraviolet light, VLC is unidirectional and only taps into the visible light spectrum. Some scientists also say Li-Fi is the incorporation of Wi-Fi and VLC, according to the Institute of Physics.

VLC is not widely used because the light source would have to be on all the time, it requires a direct line of sight with a receiver and it cannot be used outdoors. Deploying a VLC system using generic white light also reduces stability and accuracy in the transmission of data due to the interference. 

But now, researchers have mimicked white light by creating a tri-color VLC system — using red, blue and green light — emitted from an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) array, and have reduced interference in the process. They also set up an organic photodiode (OPD) array as a receiver. They described their work in a study published Oct. 19 2023 in the journal Advanced Materials.

Related: Wireless tech could replace Bluetooth at short distances and boost battery life 5-fold

"Our light source, which blends three wavelengths, circumvents interference thereby enhancing stability and accuracy in data transmission," Dae Sung Chung, professor of chemical engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, said in a statement. "We foresee this technology as a potentially beneficial tool for diverse industries, serving as a next-generation wireless communication solution that utilizes conventional lighting systems."

OLEDs use an organic layer to generate light and are commonly used in the display screens of many modern TVs, smartphones and laptops. Compared with LEDs, OLEDs are better for the environment, are more cost-effective and have a more lightweight design. OLEDs are also more suited to being fitted into receivers because they provide greater sensitivity at specific wavelengths.

OPDs operate inversely to OLEDs, utilizing the organic semiconductor element to absorb light and convert it to electric current -– similar to photovoltaic cells in solar panels.

In the new study, the researchers configured OPDs to use a Fabry-Pérot interferometer, which consists of two curved mirrors facing one another. When aligned in such a way, the OPDs detected specific wavelengths of light transmitted from the OLED array.

By sending data from the transmitter to the receiver, the researchers demonstrated that even indoor lighting fixtures could be fitted with the light source to transfer data in a Li-Fi system. Their composite light source also had a lower bit error rate compared with conventional lighting, as it suppressed interference.

The scientists tested this technology in specific laboratory conditions designed to minimize interference and ensure the accuracy of data. But they're aiming to test it in real-world conditions to better understand how the system works in practice. Here, there will be interference from the local environment such as other sources of light and dust, the researchers noted in the paper. They also want to test whether the Li-Fi system works with a moving receiver, rather than a stationary one.

In the future, a near-infrared (NIR) channel could also further reduce interference issues, which would allow VLC transmitters to extend their operational range. They also want to test whether they can resolve physical barriers, like walls in a house, by using power-line communications.

Amazon's upcoming satellite broadband network, dubbed "Project Kuiper," just passed a key test test that paves the way for a 2024 launch. 

Similar to SpaceX's Starlink, Project Kuiper is Amazon's plan to provide high-speed internet by launching and connecting 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). The firm launched two prototype satellites in October and began testing the systems required for the network to operate. One key test was validating the optical inter-satellite link (OISL) technology, which uses infrared lasers to send data between the spacecraft. 

Now, Amazon says the prototypes have passed this important hurdle. In testing, the two prototype satellites maintained a stable connection speed of 100 gigabits per second. 

OISL has long been used to maintain connections between satellites further away from Earth. But earlier generations could only link two satellites together. Beyond verifying the two satellites could maintain a high-speed link, additional data suggested Amazon's version of OISL should be able to connect its entire constellation of 3,000-plus satellites together to create a mesh network. 

Related: SpaceX launch of Starship a 'success', despite explosion minutes after takeoff

Currently, Earthbound optical fiber cables power high-speed internet services by using light to transmit data over great distances. Project Kuiper, however, transmits light in space, which travels 30% faster than light racing through cables on Earth, according to Amazon. With OISL, Project Kuiper will be able to move data throughout the network, meaning it can receive data from anywhere on Earth and route it efficiently based on factors such as network traffic. 

It has always been tricky to maintain OISL links between satellites in LEO because they require an extremely narrow beam to be maintained over distances of up to 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers) and between satellites moving at speeds up to 15,000 mph (25,000 km/h). But the company claimed its optics and control system have overcome these challenges.

Amazon aims to deploy enough satellites to begin customer pilots by mid-2024. Amazon plans for Project Kuiper to offer speeds of up to 400 megabits per second for most consumers when fully deployed in 2029. That's approximately twice the average U.S. broadband speed, according to Speedtest. Some organizations may also be able to tap into speeds of up to 1,000 megabits per second, according to the company. Whether the network will actually reach such speeds when the system is fully operational in a real-world — and off-world — environment remains to be seen.

A first-of-its-kind chip architecture that uses both electronic- and light-based components could pave the way for 6G technology.

The research, published Nov. 20 in Nature Communications, offers a blueprint for communications chips needed for advanced radar, satellite systems, advanced wireless networks (Wi-Fi), and even future generations of 6G and 7G mobile technology.

By integrating light-based, or photonic components, into a conventional electronic-based circuit board, researchers dramatically increased radio frequency (RF) bandwidth, while demonstrating improved signal accuracy at high frequencies.

They built a working prototype of the networking semiconductor chip, measuring 0.2 by 0.2 inches (5 by 5 millimeters), by sourcing a silicon wafer and attaching the electronic and photonics components — in the form of "chiplets" — like Lego bricks.

Related: How radar works: The technology made famous by war

Crucially, they also improved how the chips filtered information.

Wireless transceivers send out data, and microwave filters built into conventional chips block out signals in the wrong frequency range. Microwave photonic filters perform the same function for light-based signals. But it's been extremely challenging to combine photonic and electronic components, and effective microwave photonic filters, on one chip. 

But by fine-tuning precisely into specific frequencies at higher bands, which tend to be crowded, more information can flow through the chip more accurately, according to the study. This is important for future wireless technologies which will come to rely on higher frequencies. These have shorter wavelengths, and can therefore carry more energy, which equates with a higher bandwidth for data.

“Microwave photonic filters play a crucial role in modern communication and radar applications, offering the flexibility to precisely filter different frequencies, reducing electromagnetic interference and enhancing signal quality," said research team leader Ben Eggleton, pro-vice-chancellor (research) at the University of Sydney.

Devices that tap into 5G networks, like smartphones, transmit and receive data at varying radiofrequency ranges — ranging from low band (under one gigahertz) to high band (24 to 53 GHz) in the U.S, Verizon said. 

Higher frequencies allow for faster speeds due to the greater energy capacity of the shorter wavelengths, but there's a higher chance of interference and obstruction. This is because shorter wavelengths struggle to pierce through larger surfaces and objects, also reducing signal range.

Meanwhile, 5G data speeds average 138 megabits per second in the U.S., according to OpenSignal, and carriers run the networks on bands ranging from 2 to 4 GHz. 6G, which is expected to become mainstream by the 2030s will operate on a higher frequency — starting from 7 to 15 GHz, according to the Global Systems for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA).  

The highest 6G bands, for industrial applications, however, will need to be above 100 Ghz and possibly even reach 1,000 GHz, according to the University of Liverpool, and speeds could reach a theoretical maximum of 1,000 gigabits per second,

This means there's a need to build communications chips with a significantly higher RF bandwidth, and the advanced filtering to eliminate the interference at these higher frequencies. This is where advancements in chip architecture come in — with photonics playing a key role in the networking semiconductor chips that will be used to power 6G devices.

Scientists have created a new wireless technology that could one day rival the reigning wireless communication technology, Bluetooth. The new technology requires so little power it could make devices last five times longer on a single charge.

Currently, the main wireless technologies — including Wi-Fi, 5G and Bluetooth — embedded in devices such as smartphones and wearables, as well as smart home devices, rely on classical radio configurations. These transmit data through electromagnetic waves generated by electromagnetic field modulation.

But the alternative technology instead relies on electric field modulation. Signal-transmitting devices swap out power amplifiers used in conventional wireless technologies for voltage amplifiers which generate a short-range electric field.

These voltage amplifiers also generate a weak electromagnetic field, but the receivers — untuned electrodes rather than tuned antennae — are configured to only pick up on data that travels via the electric field. (Conventional radio systems create electric fields alongside electromagnetic fields, but they decay very quickly and aren't used to transmit information.)

Power is consumed on the receiving device only when there's a charge or discharge on the receiving electrode — a process known as capacitive coupling — and not by the continuous transfer of energy through air as in classical radio configurations. As a result, the new tech, dubbed "Electric Potential Sensing Communication" (EPSComm), consumes a fraction of the power that Bluetooth uses.

"This new technology means that wearable and mobile devices will be able to operate longer on a battery charge. More fundamentally it will be possible to use smaller batteries and miniaturize devices even further, thanks to the energy savings brought about by this new communication technology. This opens up new possibilities for tiny wearable devices, such as earables (smart earbuds), smart rings, or even electronics integrated into garments," Daniel Roggen, a professor of wearable technologies at the University of Sussex, told Live Science in an email.

Related: Bluetooth: Who invented it and how does it work?

In experiments, Roggen's team found that optimized EPSComm consumed 10 times less power than Bluetooth, he said, which likely translates to device batteries lasting between four and five times longer between charges.

EPSComm achieved a data throughput of up to 600 kilobits per second, which Roggen said is fast enough for audio, video and virtual reality (VR) applications. While Bluetooth often has higher data transmission rates now, the first generation of Bluetooth transmitted at only 125 kbps.

The electrical signals from EPSComm travel much shorter distances than Bluetooth, which is the trade-off, but that also means a reduced chance of eavesdropping or signal interference.

Rather than completely replacing Bluetooth, however, the new tech may complement the wireless standard in future devices, Roggen said.

Somebody, for example, could connect their headphones to their smartphone using EPSComm, but if they walk away, the system would dynamically switch to a Bluetooth connection, which has a much longer range.

The team built several prototype EPSComm devices, but the transmitters and receivers were approximately 1.2 by 1.2 inches (3 by 3 centimeters). That's too large to fit into today's smartphones or wearable devices, such as running headphones.

Having established a working prototype, the researchers are looking for industrial partnerships to reduce the size of the components so they will fit into small personal devices.

Scientists have harnessed the byproducts of cosmic rays to create the world's first "GPS" system that works underground — and it could be used to monitor volcanoes and aid in future search-and-rescue missions.

The new positioning system, named the muometric wireless navigation system (MuWNS), scans for ghostly and ultrafast subatomic particles called muons to triangulate the position of a receiver buried deep beneath the ground. 

What's more, the researchers say the tech can be miniaturized to fit inside devices such as smartphones. They published their findings June 15 in the journal iScience. 

Related: Cosmic rays reveal 'hidden' 30-foot-long corridor in Egypt's Great Pyramid

"Indoor navigation systems can serve many practical purposes, including for human transportation navigation guidance systems, pinpointing the location of a missing person for emergency rescue and automated robot operation in factories as well as navigation through mines and underground facilities," first-author Hiroyuki Tanaka, a professor of geophysics at the University of Tokyo told Live Science. "However, GPS is unavailable in these environments. GPS signals are weak and easily blocked by a small obstacle."

When cosmic rays — high-energy particles produced by the sun, stellar explosions called supernovas and mysterious sources outside our Milky Way galaxy — smash into Earth's upper atmosphere, they break into showers of particles that eventually decay into muons. Similar to electrons in their structure but 207 times as heavy, roughly a million muons zip harmlessly through our bodies at near light speed every night. 

Unlike GPS, which is weaker at higher altitudes and gets scrambled underground, only some muons are stopped by solid objects — which absorb more of them the more solid they are. This has enabled scientists to harness the constant cosmic downpour to map the interiors of otherwise inaccessible places, such as pyramids, volcanoes and the fiery hearts of nuclear reactors. 

A previous version of MuWNS, called the muometric positioning system (muPS), was created by the researchers to detect seafloor changes caused by tectonic or volcanic activity. Much like GPS triangulates with satellites in the sky, muPS consisted of four surface-level reference stations through which muons would pass before arriving at a receiver station on the ocean floor. 

To take into account the travel time of the muons between the reference stations and the receiver, the researchers connected the five detectors with wires so they could communicate the time difference between them.

To move away from cumbersome wires, the researchers came up with a new solution for the time lag using high-precision quartz clocks, synchronizing the reference stations to the receiver with GPS before it was taken underground. 

"The receiver detector and the reference detectors are connected to GPS first to synchronize," Tanaka said. "These detectors are eventually separated from GPS for navigation. Each detector is equipped with a precise local clock — in this case, an oven controlled crystal oscillator — which doesn't drift so widely within a short [period of time]. Therefore, these are practically synchronized for a while."

Then, to test their system's ability to triangulate, the researchers placed four reference detectors on the sixth floor of a building and gave a receiver detector to an individual in the building's basement. By scanning for the cosmic rays picked up by the detectors and the receiver, the researchers reconstructed the route the basement navigator had walked.

With the new technology successfully demonstrated, the next steps will be to streamline it so that it can be incorporated into smartphones.

"The receiver's detector size will be a chip scale," Tanaka said. "We don't need precise time synchronization either; hence the atomic clock is not needed anymore. Therefore, it is definitely possible to fit [in] smartphones."

In internet history, credit for the initial concept that developed into the World Wide Web is typically given to Leonard Kleinrock. In 1961, he wrote about ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet, in a paper entitled "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets." 

According to the journal Management and Business Review (MBR), Kleinrock, along with other innovators such as J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO), provided the backbone for the ubiquitous stream of emails, media, Facebook postings and tweets that are now shared online every day.

The precursor to the internet was jumpstarted in the early days of the history of computers , in 1969 with the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), according to the journal American Scientist. ARPA-funded researchers developed many of the protocols used for internet communication today. This timeline offers a brief history of the internet’s evolution:

Internet timeline: 1960s

1965: Two computers at MIT Lincoln Lab communicate with one another using packet-switching technology.

1968: Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN) unveils the final version of the Interface Message Processor (IMP) specifications. BBN wins ARPANET contract.

1969: On Oct. 29, UCLA’s Network Measurement Center, Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of California-Santa Barbara and University of Utah install nodes. The first message is "LO," which was an attempt by student Charles Kline to "LOGIN" to the SRI computer from the university. However, the message was unable to be completed because the SRI system crashed.

1970–1980

1972: BBN’s Ray Tomlinson introduces network email. The Internet Working Group (INWG) forms to address need for establishing standard protocols.

1973: Global networking becomes a reality as the University College of London (England) and Royal Radar Establishment (Norway) connect to ARPANET. The term internet is born.

1974: The first Internet Service Provider (ISP) is born with the introduction of a commercial version of ARPANET, known as Telenet.

1974: Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn (the duo said by many to be the Fathers of the Internet) publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," which details the design of TCP.

1976: Queen Elizabeth II hits the “send button” on her first email.

1979: USENET forms to host news and discussion groups.

1980–1990

1981: The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided a grant to establish the Computer Science Network (CSNET) to provide networking services to university computer scientists.

1982: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, emerge as the protocol for ARPANET. This results in the fledgling definition of the internet as connected TCP/IP internets. TCP/IP remains the standard protocol for the internet.

1983: The Domain Name System (DNS) establishes the familiar .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int system for naming websites. This is easier to remember than the previous designation for websites, such as 123.456.789.10.

1984: William Gibson, author of "Neuromancer," is the first to use the term "cyberspace."

1985: Symbolics.com, the website for Symbolics Computer Corp. in Massachusetts, becomes the first registered domain.

1986: The National Science Foundation’s NSFNET goes online to connected supercomputer centers at 56,000 bits per second — the speed of a typical dial-up computer modem. Over time the network speeds up and regional research and education networks, supported in part by NSF, are connected to the NSFNET backbone — effectively expanding the Internet throughout the United States. The NSFNET was essentially a network of networks that connected academic users along with the ARPANET.

1987: The number of hosts on the internet exceeds 20,000. Cisco ships its first router.

1989: World.std.com becomes the first commercial provider of dial-up access to the internet.

1990–2000

1990: Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, develops HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This technology continues to have a large impact on how we navigate and view the internet today.

1991: CERN introduces the World Wide Web to the public.

1992: The first audio and video are distributed over the internet. The phrase "surfing the internet" is popularized.

1993: The number of websites reaches 600 and the White House and United Nations go online. Marc Andreesen develops the Mosaic Web browser at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. The number of computers connected to NSFNET grows from 2,000 in 1985 to more than 2 million in 1993. The National Science Foundation leads an effort to outline a new internet architecture that would support the burgeoning commercial use of the network.

1994: Netscape Communications is born. Microsoft creates a Web browser for Windows 95.

1994: Yahoo! is created by Jerry Yang and David Filo, two electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University. The site was originally called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." The company was later incorporated in March 1995.

1995: Compuserve, America Online and Prodigy begin to provide internet access. Amazon.com, Craigslist and eBay go live. The original NSFNET backbone is decommissioned as the internet’s transformation to a commercial enterprise is largely completed.

1995: The first online dating site, Match.com, launches.

1996: The browser war, primarily between the two major players Microsoft and Netscape, heats up. CNET buys tv.com for $15,000.

1996: A 3D animation dubbed "The Dancing Baby" becomes one of the first viral videos.

1997: Netflix is founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph as a company that sends users DVDs by mail.

1997: PC makers can remove or hide Microsoft’s internet software on new versions of Windows 95, thanks to a settlement with the Justice Department. Netscape announces that its browser will be free.

1998: The Google search engine is born, changing the way users engage with the internet.

1998: The Internet Protocol version 6 introduced, to allow for future growth of Internet Addresses. The current most widely used protocol is version 4. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses allowing for 4.3 billion unique addresses; IPv6, with 128-bit addresses, will allow 3.4 x 1038 unique addresses, or 340 trillion trillion trillion.

1999: AOL buys Netscape. Peer-to-peer file sharing becomes a reality as Napster arrives on the Internet, much to the displeasure of the music industry.

2000–2010

2000: The dot-com bubble bursts. Websites such as Yahoo! and eBay are hit by a large-scale denial of service attack, highlighting the vulnerability of the Internet. AOL merges with Time Warner

2001: A federal judge shuts down Napster, ruling that it must find a way to stop users from sharing copyrighted material before it can go back online.

2003: The SQL Slammer worm spread worldwide in just 10 minutes. Myspace, Skype and the Safari Web browser debut.

2003: The blog publishing platform WordPress is launched.

2004: Facebook goes online and the era of social networking begins. Mozilla unveils the Mozilla Firefox browser.

2005: YouTube.com launches. The social news site Reddit is also founded. 

2006: AOL changes its business model, offering most services for free and relying on advertising to generate revenue. The Internet Governance Forum meets for the first time.

2006: Twitter launches. The company's founder, Jack Dorsey, sends out the very first tweet: "just setting up my twttr."

2009: The internet marks its 40th anniversary.

2010–2020

2010: Facebook reaches 400 million active users.

2010: The social media sites Pinterest and Instagram are launched.

2011: Twitter and Facebook play a large role in the Middle East revolts.

2012: President Barack Obama's administration announces its opposition to major parts of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, which would have enacted broad new rules requiring internet service providers to police copyrighted content. The successful push to stop the bill, involving technology companies such as Google and nonprofit organizations including Wikipedia and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is considered a victory for sites such as YouTube that depend on user-generated content, as well as "fair use" on the internet.

2013: Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, reveals that the NSA had in place a monitoring program capable of tapping the communications of thousands of people, including U.S. citizens.

2013: Fifty-one percent of U.S. adults report that they bank online, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.

2015: Instagram, the photo-sharing site, reaches 400 million users, outpacing Twitter, which would go on to reach 316 million users by the middle of the same year.

2016: Google unveils Google Assistant, a voice-activated personal assistant program, marking the entry of the internet giant into the "smart" computerized assistant marketplace. Google joins Amazon's Alexa, Siri from Apple, and Cortana from Microsoft.

2018: There is a significant rise in internet-enabled devices. An increase in the Internet of Things (IoT) sees around seven billion devices by the end of the year.  

2019: Fifth–generation (5G) networks are launched, enabling speedier internet connection on some wireless devices. 

2020–2022

2021: By January 2021, there are 4.66 billion people connected to the internet. This is more than half of the global population. 

2022: Low–Earth orbit satellite internet is closer to reality. By early January 2022, SpaceX launches more than 1,900 Starlink satellites overall. The constellation is now providing broadband service in select areas around the world. 

Additional resources

To find out more about the SpaceX satellite internet project, you can watch this video about the mission. Additionally, to read an interview with Leonard Kleinrock, visit the Communications of the ACM website.

Bibliography

• "Leonard Kleinrock Internet Pioneer". Management and Business Review (2022). 
• "The Science of Computing: The ARPANET after Twenty Years". American Scientist (1989). 
• "A brief history of the internet". Association for Computing Machinery (AGM) (2009). 
• "Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification". S. Deering, R. Hinden (1998). 
• "Distributed denial of service attacks". IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (2000). 
• "Statistics and Social Network of YouTube Videos". 2008 16th Interntional Workshop on Quality of Service (2008). 
• "Social Media and Crisis Communication".  (Routledge, 2017). 

Internet Protocol (IP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) are the languages computers use to communicate with one another, and they out the rules of the internet.

TCP/IP makes the internet work a bit like a postal system. There is an address book that contains the identity of every device on the network, and a set of standard envelopes for packaging up data. The envelopes must carry the address of the sender, the address of the recipient, and details about the information packed inside.

The IP explains how the address system works, while TCP explains how to package and send the data.

All computers get an IP address when they connect to the internet, according to PC magazine, and they’re all unique. You can find out yours by typing "what’s my IP" into Google. You’ll notice that it’s not very human-friendly. It either contains four numbers between 0 and 255, separated by full stops, or eight four-digit sequences separated by colons. 

You might also notice that your IP address doesn’t stay the same. At home, you get your IP address from your internet service provider but, when you’re out and about, it might come from the wi-fi you've connected to in a coffee shop, or from your company network, according to Business Insider. 

How TCP/IP works

To load a website, your machine needs to know the IP address of the web server that contains the data. This is also a long string of letters and numbers, and it might change unexpectedly too.

Luckily, there’s a second address system that helps you to guide your computer to the right place. Known as the Domain Name System, or DNS for short, it gives servers human-friendly names called domains, according to Cloudflare. Your web browser can look them up to find out which IP address to use.

Your computer can then make a connection to the server using a three-way handshake, according to the CISSP Study Guide. First, it sends a message to the server asking if it is ready to talk. It does this by sending an empty envelope with the word "synchronize?" written on the front. 

If the server is ready, it writes "acknowledge" on a new envelope and sends it back. Finally, your computer completes the connection by sending a third envelope that also says "acknowledge".

Now, you’re ready to start exchanging data. 

To do this, the server chops the content of the website into small pieces and wraps each one in its own envelope. On the outside, it writes its own IP address, your IP address, and a sequence number, according to Cloudflare. That number tells your computer how to put the pieces back together.

When your computer receives one of the envelopes, it checks it and sends a message back saying: "acknowledge". This means, "I have received the data, and everything looks fine." 

If the server doesn’t get an acknowledgement back after a set amount of time has passed, it assumes the envelope got lost or damaged, and it sends it again, according to IR Technologies. 

Once all the data is safely on your computer, the only thing left to do is close the connection. This involves another three-way handshake. One computer sends an envelope that says: "finish". The other sends back: "acknowledge". The first one replies with: "acknowledge", and the connection closes.

Additional resources

For more information about how the internet functions, check out the many resources at the Internet Society and "Introduction to Networking: How the Internet Works" by DR. Charles R Severance. 

Bibliography

• Eric Conrad, et al, "CISSP Study Guide (Second Edition)", Syngress, 2012. 
• IR Media, "What Is Network Packet Loss?", accessed April 2022. 
• Cloudflare, "What is DNS? | How DNS works", accessed April 2022. 
• Cloudflare, "What is TCP/IP?", accessed April 2022. 
• Dave Johnson, "How to change your IP address to troubleshoot your internet connection or protect your privacy" Business Insider, May 2021. 

Latency is the technical word that describes how long it takes data to get from one place to another. You can measure it with a ping. Your computer sends a small packet of data to a server, the server sends it back again, and you time how long it takes. 

Latency varies depending on three things: how fast data can physically travel through the network, which route it takes, and whether it has to queue, according to the computer hardware manufacturer Apposite Technologies.

Measuring latency

Measured in milliseconds, latency is often expressed in terms of its "round trip time" (RTT), according to Frontier.  RTT is the time taken for a data packet to get from one network destination to another. An alternative and less common phrase used to express latency is "time to first byte" (abbreviated to TTFB). TTFB refers to the time passed between the first part of a data packet leaving a point in the network and reaching its destination. 

Related: Quantum computing: Definition, facts & uses

Speed through the network is a significant problem for satellite internet. Most communication satellites are in geostationary orbit, 22,300 miles (35,900 km) above the Earth, according to Space.com. To get from your computer to a server and back again, data has to make that long trip four times. 

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced a concept called Starlink in January 2015, explaining that the company intended to launch only about 4,000 broadband satellites into low-Earth orbit to provide low–cost internet. For perspective, there are only about 2,000 operational satellites in orbit today, and humanity has launched only around 9,000 craft into space in all of history.

In relation to latency, Starlink is aiming to greatly reduce the RTT of data packets, cutting latency right down. This should make high-speed activities, like streaming and gaming, possible almost anywhere in the world.

Reducing data speeds

The idea of a network of geographically distant computers was originally proposed in the 1960s by MIT computer researcher JCR Licklider, in his theoretical piece on real–time interactive computing, Man–Computer Symbiosis. 

According to Scientific American, the earliest form, ARPANET, was limited to just a few nodes in the U.S., but the development of packet switching and TCP/IP protocols (internet communication languages) in the 1970s unlocked the network's potential for expansion around the world.

Related: Firewall: Definition, technology and facts

Email was being used by the 1980s, but it wasn't until Tim Berners–Lee introduced the World Wide Web in the early 1990s that the internet began to spread beyond research and government institutions. Since then, improvements in data transmission speeds have allowed individuals and organizations to store and access ever-increasing amounts of data and send big files at faster speeds from anywhere.

Currently, fast internet access is only available in places with fiber optic cables, with fiber optic internet being 20 times faster than cable internet, according to software and computer manufacturer HP. In remote locations, communications satellites provide links to the internet, but the connections are notoriously slow.  

Testing latency

Anybody can carry out a ping test on their computer to test latency. All computers that are connected to a network will have a latency testing tool built in. Web infrastructure company Cloudfare also run this test on their website. This can be used to carry out a quick data speed check, without needing to install extra software. 

The process involves sending a default of 32 bytes of data to a set destination and measuring the time taken for data to be returned to the computer, according to web hosting company Ionos. The time is shown in milliseconds. 

The RTT is calculated for each test carried out and the user is provided with a summary of the results. As well as data speed, any lost data packets will be reported in this summary. At the end of the test, an average time taken between the data being sent and received again is calculated. 

Additional resources

You can find out how to improve latency for activities such as gaming by reading this article from computer software company, Norton. Alternatively, to learn about how 5G impacts latency, listen to this video from telecommunications company AT&T. 

Bibliography

• "What is Latency in Networking?". Apposite Technologies.
• "What is network latency and how do I fix latency issues?". Frontier. 
• "Man-Computer Symbiosis". IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics (1960).
•  "Early sketch of ARPANET's first four nodes". Scientific American (2009).
•  "Top 10 Advantages of Fiber Optic Internet Connections". HP (2020). 
• "How to use the ping command in Windows". Ionos Digital Guide (2020). 

The internet is a vast network that connects computers across the world via more than 750,000 miles (1,200,000 kilometres) of cable running under land and sea, according to the University of Colorado Boulder. 

It is the world's fastest method of communication, making it possible to send data from London, U.K. to Sydney, Australia in just 250 milliseconds, for example. Constructing and maintaining the internet has been a monumental feat of ingenuity.

What is the internet?

The internet is a giant computer network, linking billions of machines together by underground and underwater fibre-optic cables.These cables run connect continents and islands, everywhere except Antarctica

Each cable contains strands of glass that transmit data as pulses of light, according to the journal Science. Those strands are wrapped in layers of insulation and buried beneath the sea floor by ships carrying specialist ploughs. This helps to protect them from everything from corrosion to shark bites.

When you use it, your computer or device sends messages via these cables asking to access data stored on other machines. When accessing the internet, most people will be using the world wide web. 

When was the internet invented?

It was originally created by the U.S. government during the Cold War. In 1958, President Eisenhower founded the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to give a boost to the country’s military technology, according to the Journal of Cyber Policy. Scientists and engineers developed a network of linked computers called ARPANET. 

ARPANET's original aim was to link two computers in different places, enabling them to share data. That dream became a reality in 1969, according to Historian Jeremy Norman. In the years that followed, the team linked dozens of computers together and, by the end of the 1980s, the network contained more than 30,000 machines, according to the U.K.'s Science and Media Museum.

How the onternet works

Most computers connect to the internet without the use of wires, using  Wi-Fi, via a physical modem. It connects via a wire to a socket in the wall, which links to a box outside. That box connects via still more wires to a network of cables under the ground. Together, they convert radio waves to electrical signals to fibre optic pulses, and back again. 

At every connection point in the underground network, there are junction boxes called routers. Their job is to work out the best way to pass data from your computer to the computer with which you’re trying to connect. According to the IEEE International Conference on Communications, they use your IP addresses to work out where the data should go. Latency is the technical word that describes how long it takes data to get from one place to another, according to Frontier. 

Each router is only connected to its local network. If a message arrives for a computer that the router doesn’t recognizse, it passes it on to a router higher up in the local network. They each maintain an address book called a routing table. According to the Internet Protocol Journal, it shows the paths through the network to all the local IP addresses. 

The internet sends data around the world, across land and sea, as displayed on the Submarine Cable Map. The data passes between networks until it reaches the one closest to its destination. Then, it passes through local routers until it arrives at the computer with the matching IP address.

The internet relies upon the two connecting computers  speaking the same digital language. To achieve this, there is a set of rules called the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), according to the web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare. 

TCP/IP makes the internet work a bit like a postal system. There is an address book that contains the identity of every device on the network, and a set of standard envelopes for packaging up data. The envelopes must carry the address of the sender, the address of the recipient, and details about the information packed inside. The IP, explains how the address system works, whileTCP, how to package and send the data.

How do websites work?

Click the numbers on the following interactive image to find out what happens when you type www.livescience.com into your browser:

Internet speed and bandwidth

When it comes to internet speed how much data you can download in one second: bandwidth. According to Tom’s Guide, to surf the web, check your email, and update your social media, 25 megabits per second is enough. But, if you want to watch 4K movies, live stream video, or play online multiplayer games, you might need speeds of up to 100-200 megabits per second.

Your download speed depends on one main factor: the quality of the underground cables that link you to the rest of the world. Fibre optic cables send data much faster than their copper counterparts, according to the cable testing company BASEC, and your home internet is limited by the infrastructure available in your area.

Jersey has the highest average bandwidth in the world, according to Cable.co.uk. The little British island off the coast of France boasts average download speeds of over 274 megabits per second. Turkmenistan has the lowest, with download speeds barely reaching 0.5 megabits per second.

Additional resources

You can read more about the history of the internet at the Internet Society website. To discover how the Internet has changed our daily lives, read this article by Computing Australia.

Bibliography

• "Getting to the bottom of the internet’s carbon footprint". University of Colorado Boulder, College of Media, Communication and Information (2021).
• "The evolution of the Internet: from military experiment to General Purpose Technology". Journal of Cyber Policy (2016). 
• "The Internet: Past, Present, and Future". Educational Technology (1997). 
• "Three-Way Handshake". CISSP Study Guide (Second Edition) (2012).
• "Content Routers: Fetching Data on Network Path". IEEE International Conference on Communications (2011).
• "Analyzing the Internet's BGP Routing Table". The Internet Protocol Journal (2001). 
• "The Internet of Tomorrow". Science (1999).

The Internet is one of the greatest inventions in human history, revolutionizing communication and changing the world forever. This vast network connects computers across the world via more than 750,000 miles of cables running under land and sea. It’s our fastest method of communication, making it possible to send a message from London, UK, to Sydney, Australia, in just 250 milliseconds. 

Constructing and maintaining this global link has been a monumental feat of ingenuity. Maybe you were born this side of the new millennium, or maybe you’re old enough to remember a time when you had to go to the library to get more information on a subject, step outside your house to go shopping or phone a friend to stay in touch. In any case, today the Internet is a staple for most of us, every bit as essential a utility to modern living and working as electricity. 

We take for granted the fact that we can pick up our phones or use a PC to access a cornucopia of data and services, but most of us don’t understand how it all works. In the latest issue of How It Works magazine, you will discover how miles of cables, millions of computers and sophisticated software programs and protocols come together to connect you to an online world.

Related: Read a free issue of How It Works here

Also this issue, discover why ostriches are unable to fly, how diamonds are mined, cut, polished and even made, see inside a bionic eye and discover how this technology is becoming a viable cure for some forms of blindness. You can make your own thunderstorm in a tank in our practical How To..., see how modern car central locking works, what the Romans taught us (hint: a lot) and, could we build Star Trek's USS Enterprise?

Read on to find out more about issue 161's biggest features.

How to make a diamond

A diamond is essentially just carbon, one of the most common elements. But we usually find carbon compounded with other elements, and when pure carbon does occur on the Earth’s surface it takes the form of graphite. Making diamond requires much higher temperatures and pressures — those found inside the Earth’s mantle at depths of a hundred miles or more. There may be lots of diamonds there, perhaps as much as a quadrillion tonnes, but they’re totally inaccessible to us.

But there’s nothing mystical or supernatural about diamonds: they’re simply the form that carbon takes under certain conditions of temperature and pressure. Natural diamonds were formed where these conditions exist inside the Earth, but it’s also possible to create the necessary conditions artificially. 

This has been done on a commercial scale to make synthetic diamonds since the 1950s. One approach — called the high-pressure, high-temperature (HPHT) technique — attempts to mimic the natural process as closely as possible. An alternative, called chemical vapour deposition (CVD), requires less extreme temperatures and pressures. At first synthetic diamonds were poor in quality and only suitable for industrial purposes, but today they can be made attractive enough to use in jewellery. See how diamonds are made, mined, cut and polished, in How It Works 161. 

Could we build the USS Enterprise?

The USS Enterprise is the iconic flagship from Star Trek and an impressive work of science fiction. But that's all it is, right, it's just sci-fi? 

At the moment it is, but engineers and scientists still have 233 years to achieve Roddenberry’s vision for space exploration, and several scientific breakthroughs suggest that we might be heading towards a spaceship that’s reminiscent of the Enterprise. 

As a Constitution-class Starfleet Federation starship, the main role of the Enterprise is to venture on intergalactic exploration and diplomatic missions. To assist the crew on their journeys of discovery, the ship is equipped with an array of advanced scanners and sensors: just flip a few switches and a planet can be scanned for signs of life — and scientists are one step closer to making this technology a reality. 

One of the most iconic abilities of the USS Enterprise is its ability to zip from one end of the galaxy to the other in mere moments using its fictitious warp drive. Human technology is currently nowhere near advanced enough to replicate the Enterprise’s warp drive. However, the theory behind building one has been around since the early 1990s. To achieve speeds faster than the speed of light, physics’ natural speed limit, theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed that we must bend the fabric of space-time.

In How It Works 161, we explore the many rudimentary technologies we have today that could lead to a spacefaring future that isn't light years away from Roddenberry’s vision.

The fifth generation of cellular technology, 5G, is the next leap in speed for wireless devices. This speed includes both the rate mobile users can download data to their devices and the latency, or lag, they experience between sending and receiving information.

5G aims to deliver data rates that are 10 to 100 times faster than current 4G networks. Users should expect to see download speeds on the order of gigabits per second (Gb/s), rather than the tens of megabits per second (Mb/s) speeds of 4G.

"That's significant because it will enable new applications that are just not possible today," said Harish Krishnaswamy, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University in New York. "Just for an example, at gigabits per second data rates, you could potentially download a movie to your phone or tablet in a matter of seconds. Those type of data rates could enable virtual reality applications or autonomous driving cars."

Apart from requiring high data rates, emerging technologies that interact with the user's environment like augmented reality or self-driving cars will also require extremely low latency. For that reason, the goal of 5G is to achieve latencies below the 1-millisecond mark. Mobile devices will be able to send and receive information in less than one-thousandth of a second, appearing instantaneous to the user. To accomplish these speeds, the rollout of 5G requires new technology and infrastructure.

The new network

Since the earliest generation of mobile phones, wireless networks have operated on the same radio-frequency bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. But as more users crowd the network and demand more data than ever before, these radio-wave highways become increasingly congested with cellular traffic. To compensate, cellular providers want to expand into the higher frequencies of millimeter waves.

Millimeter waves use frequencies from 30 to 300 gigahertz, which are 10 to 100 times higher than the radio waves used today for 4G and WiFi networks. They're called millimeter because their wavelengths vary between 1 and 10 millimeters, where as radio waves are on the order of centimeters.

The higher frequency of millimeter waves may create new lanes on the communication highway, but there's one problem: Millimeter waves are easily absorbed by foliage and buildings and will require many closely spaced base stations, called small cells. Fortunately, these stations are much smaller and require less power than traditional cell towers. They can be placed atop buildings and light poles.

The miniaturization of base stations also enables another technological breakthrough for 5G: Massive MIMO. MIMO stands for multiple-input multiple-output, and refers to a configuration that takes advantage of the smaller antennas needed for millimeter waves by dramatically increasing the number of antenna ports in each base station.

"With a massive amount of antennas — tens to hundreds of antennas at each base station — you can serve many different users at the same, increasing the data rate," Krishnaswamy said. At the Columbia high-Speed and Millimeter-wave IC (COSMIC) lab, Krishnaswamy and his team designed chips that enable both millimeter wave and  MIMO technologies. "Millimeter-wave and massive MIMO are the two biggest technologies 5G will use to deliver the higher data rates and lower latency we expect to see."

Is 5G dangerous?

Although 5G may improve our day to day lives, some consumers have voiced concern about potential health hazards. Many of these concerns are over 5G's use of the higher energy millimeter-wave radiation, which experts say is no cause for worry.

"There's often confusion between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation because the term radiation is used for both," said Kenneth Foster, a professor of bioengineering at Pennsylvania State University. "All light is radiation because it is simply energy moving through space. It's ionizing radiation that is dangerous because it can break chemical bonds."

Ionizing radiation is the reason we wear sunscreen outside because short-wavelength ultraviolet light from the sky has enough energy to knock electrons from their atoms, damaging skin cells and DNA. Millimeter waves, on the other hand, are non-ionizing because they have longer wavelengths and not enough energy to damage cells directly.

"The only established hazard of non-ionizing radiation is too much heating," Foster said, who has studied the health effects of radio waves for nearly 50 years. "At high exposure levels, radio frequency (RF) energy can indeed be hazardous, producing burns or other thermal damage, but these exposures are typically incurred only in occupational settings near high-powered radio frequency transmitters, or sometimes in medical procedures gone awry."

Many of the public's outcries over the adoption of 5G echo concerns over previous generations of cellular technology. Skeptics believe exposure to non-ionizing radiation may still be responsible for a range of illnesses, from brain tumors to chronic headaches. Over the years, there have been thousands of studies investigating these concerns.

In 2018, the National Toxicology Program released a decade-long study that found some evidence of an increase in brain and adrenal gland tumors in male rats exposed to the RF radiation emitted by 2G and 3G cellphones, but not in mice or female rats. The animals were exposed to levels of radiation four times higher than the maximum level permitted for human exposure.

According to Foster, many opponents to the use of RF waves cherry-pick studies that support their argument, and often ignore the quality of the experimental methods or inconsistency of the results. Although he disagrees with many of the conclusions skeptics have about previous generations of cellular networks, Foster agrees that we need more studies on the potential health effects of 5G networks.

"Everyone I know, including me, is recommending more research on 5G because there's not a lot of toxicology studies with this technology," Foster said.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowed the rollout of 5G wireless networks in 2019 without changing any prior federal safety limits for RF exposure. That agency, following guidance from the World Health Organization and the US Food and Drug Administration, saw nothing unique in 5G technology that could necessitate additional caution on top of existing guidelines that the FCC says already incorporate a significant safety margin.

For the proponents of 5G, many believe the benefits 5G can provide to society far outweigh the unknowns.

"I think 5G will have a transformational impact on our lives and enable fundamentally new things," Krishnaswamy said. "What those types of applications will be and what that impact is, we can't say for sure right now. It could be something that takes us by surprise and really changes something for society. If history has taught us anything, then 5G will be another example of what wireless can do for us."

Additional resources:

• Learn more about previous generations of cellphones and why 5G is the next step.
• What do other health experts have to say about cellphone usage?
• Find out if 5G is available in your area.

This article was updated on Feb. 1, 2021 by LiveScience Reference Editor Vicky Stein.

We've all seen those corny, binge-watchable spy action series where, upon uncovering a plot, the agent must alert the White House post haste to thwart an imminent attack on the nation. Cue to the horse voice of TV drama "24"'s star Kiefer Sutherland: "Get me a secure line to the president." 

But what exactly does that mean? 

"I get a lot of these movie-style questions and I'll say they're often not accurate portrayals," said Ben Caudill, founder and CEO of Rhino Security Labs, a security advisory firm based in Seattle. "But basically, secure phones are meant to protect the caller against being phone tapped."

Related: How do fax machines work?

This is achieved through encryption technology working in tandem at both ends of a call. Before the dial-er's phone sends its signals down the line, encryption jumbles them to render them utterly incomprehensible should somebody physically tap the wires of a landline phone or remotely capture a cell phone’s radio waves.

"Even if I managed to get hold of the signals or if I physically tapped your home phone cable, I wouldn't be able to hear the conversation if it's encrypted, and neither would a phone provider or a government intelligence agency," Caudill told Live Science. 

But crucially, the legitimate recipient's phone already has the key needed to unlock all that scrambled nonsense and reassemble it into comprehensible sound packages or text messages. All of this happens automatically and seamlessly, so the call isn't interrupted or jittery. There are two ways to achieve this end-to-end encryption — through software or through hardware. 

As a software, this enigma-esque technology is actually pretty commonplace these days. The Facebook-owned application WhatsApp uses it and so do many other smartphone messaging apps like Signal. So, does this mean your iPhone is actually a secure phone? Well, that's probably pushing things, Caudill said. Religiously using secure apps to send and receive calls and texts might not be as secure as you think. 

"If you have malware on your phone, for example, then the hackers may well be able to listen in to your calls," Caudill said. "So there's a question of how rigorously secure encryption through smartphone software can be, but it's definitely better than just using regular cell signals to make calls." 

That's why the kind of calls made by the likes of "24"'s Jack Bauer to the president are far more likely to use hardware encryption technology, reasoned Caudill. "The president has a physical phone that's not an off-the-shelf kind of device. It has decryption stuff built right into the hardware rather than software, and it can talk to other similarly-built phones." 

So there you have it, Hollywood’s presidential phrase, “Get me a secure line,” really is a thing. 

Originally published on Live Science.

The advent of mass working from home has made many people more aware of the security risks of sending sensitive information via the internet. The best we can do at the moment is make it difficult to intercept and hack your messages — but we can't make it impossible.

What we need is a new type of internet: the quantum internet. In this version of the global network, data is secure, connections are private and your worries about information being intercepted are a thing of the past.

My colleagues and I have just made a breakthrough, published in Science Advances, that will make such a quantum internet possible by scaling up the concepts behind it using existing telecommunications infrastructure.

Our current way of protecting online data is to encrypt it using mathematical problems that are easy to solve if you have a digital "key" to unlock the encryption but hard to solve without it. However, hard does not mean impossible and, with enough time and computer power, today's methods of encryption can be broken.

Quantum communication, on the other hand, creates keys using individual particles of light (photons) , which — according to the principles of quantum physics — are impossible to make an exact copy of. Any attempt to copy these keys will unavoidably cause errors that can be detected. This means a hacker, no matter how clever or powerful they are or what kind of supercomputer they possess, cannot replicate a quantum key or read the message it encrypts.

This concept has already been demonstrated in satellites and over fiber-optic cables, and used to send secure messages between different countries. So why are we not already using it in everyday life? The problem is that it requires expensive, specialized technology that means it's not currently scalable.

Previous quantum communication techniques were like pairs of children's walkie talkies. You need one pair of handsets for every pair of users that want to securely communicate. So if three children want to talk to each other they will need three pairs of handsets (or six walkie talkies) and each child must have two of them. If eight children want to talk to each other they would need 56 walkie talkies.

Obviously it's not practical for someone to have a separate device for every person or website they want to communicate with over the internet. So we figured out a way to securely connect every user with just one device each, more similar to phones than walkie talkies.

Each walkie talkie handset acts as both a transmitter and a receiver in order to share the quantum keys that make communication secure. In our model, users only need a receiver because they get the photons to generate their keys from a central transmitter.

This is possible because of another principle of quantum physics called "entanglement". A photon can't be exactly copied but it can be entangled with another photon so that they both behave in the same way when measured, no matter how far apart they are — what Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance".

Full network

When two users want to communicate, our transmitter sends them an entangled pair of photons — one particle for each user. The users' devices then perform a series of measurements on these photons to create a shared secret quantum key. They can then encrypt their messages with this key and transfer them securely.

By using multiplexing, a common telecommunications technique of combining or splitting signals, we can effectively send these entangled photon pairs to multiple combinations of people at once.

We can also send many signals to each user in a way that they can all be simultaneously decoded. In this way we've effectively replaced pairs of walkie talkies with a system more similar to a video call with multiple participants, in which you can communicate with each user privately and independently as well as all at once.

We've so far tested this concept by connecting eight users across a single city. We are now working to improve the speed of our network and interconnect several such networks. Collaborators have already started using our quantum network as a test bed for several exciting applications beyond just quantum communication.

We also hope to develop even better quantum networks based on this technology with commercial partners in the next few years. With innovations like this, I hope to witness the beginning of the quantum internet in the next ten years.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Hey, science fans! If you're a science geek like me and the writers here, you may have signed up for notifications from your favorite science news websites — hopefully, Live Science. (If so, we thank you.)

While it may be helpful to receive news and updates, at some point, you may no longer wish to receive these notifications. Or perhaps you subscribed by mistake and want to get rid of them.

Here's a handy guide for how to disable notifications in Google Chrome and Safari.

How to quickly turn off web notifications in Google Chrome

1. Open Chrome.
2. Navigate to the website you want to stop receiving notifications from.
3. Click the toggle bar icon to the left of the URL.
4. Turn notifications off.

How to access all of your notifications settings in Google Chrome

If you want more details about which sites you allow notifications for and their specific settings, you can navigate to your notifications settings. If you're using Chrome, it's probably linked to your phone or other personal devices with the app, and you may be getting notifications from a website across those platforms. These screenshots are from my laptop, so yours may look slightly different — but the process should be the same. Follow these steps:

1. Open Google Chrome on whatever device you're receiving notifications from.

2. Click the three vertical dots in the top-right corner to open the main menu in Chrome. Click "Settings" to begin the process.

3. Click the "Privacy and security" section, where you'll find a subsection called "Site Settings." Click it.

4. Scroll down to select "Notifications." In this section, you can see a full list of your notifications permissions and turn them on or off. You can choose to block all websites from showing notifications or select "Sites can ask to send notifications." That way, when a website asks permission, you'll receive a pop-up that asks to allow or block notifications.

On the Notifications page, you can also select individual websites to allow or block notifications. Here's how to do it:

1. Scroll to the bottom, under the "Allow" section. Click the three vertical dots to the right side of a specific website. You will see choices to block, edit or remove.

2. Select "Block" if you want to block the website from sending you notifications, as well as from asking again. "Edit" will allow you to change the website's name in your notifications, which we don't recommend. "Remove" will stop notifications for now, but you may be asked again whether you want to subscribe. This is a good choice if you're not sure if you want to stop notifications forever.

Because Chrome is connected to your Google account, if you make this change on one device, it should apply to all Chrome apps on your other devices.

What if you want to turn notifications back on?

If you've blocked notifications from a site and you want to reenable them, it's pretty simple. Here's how to do it:

1. Head back to the website. You'll likely be asked if you want to subscribe to notifications.
2. Select "Allow" to resume them.

Alternatively, follow these steps:

1. When you're on a website you want to receive notifications from, select the toggle bar icon to the left of the URL.
2. To turn notifications on, click the "Notifications" toggle.

How to turn off notifications in Safari on Mac

If you're using Safari on a Mac, adjusting your notifications is a bit different. Here's how to do it:

1. While you're in the Safari browser, navigate to the Safari menu at the top of the screen.
2. Select "Settings."
3. Click "Websites" at the top of the screen.
4. On the list on the left, select "Notifications." Any sites you have subscribed to will be shown here.
5. In the drop-down menu on the right, select "Allow" or "Deny" to change the notifications settings for each of those sites. Select "Deny" to stop notifications on your Safari device.

I hope this helps — a huge thanks to my colleague James Peckham at our sister site Tech Radar for help with this guide.

Editor's note: This article was originally published on Jan. 8, 2020, and was updated on Oct. 30, 2024.

The dead could outnumber the living on Facebook by 2070, and the social media site could be a virtual crypt by the end of the century.

Depending on the rate of the site's growth, the number of dead Facebook users could range from 1.4 billion to 4.9 billion by 2100, according to new research. Many of these zombie profiles will come from India, due to the country's large population, and the United States, because of its prevalence of Facebook use.

"These statistics give rise to new and difficult questions around who has the right to all this data, how should it be managed in the best interests of the families and friends of the deceased and its use by future historians to understand the past," study leader Carl Öhman, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, said in a statement. [After Death: 8 Burial Alternatives That Are Going Mainstream]

Estimating the dead

Facebook is the largest social media network in the world. As of March 2019, the company claimed 2.38 billion users who had logged in at least once in the past month (1.56 billion had logged in daily). Öhman and his co-author David Watson, also of the Oxford Internet Institute, used Facebook data from the end of 2018, which put the number of monthly active users at 1.43 billion. This data included nationality and self-reported user ages.

The researchers then extrapolated the death rate of those users, based on United Nations mortality data. They found more than 500 million will be dead by 2060, and 1 billion will be gone by 2079. By 2100, 98 percent of today's monthly active users will be dead. [What Are Your Odds of Dying from These 'Killers'?]

Those numbers assume no new user growth after 2018, which is unrealistic; the company already claims that more have signed on. To pinpoint the other extreme, the researchers assumed a scenario in which Facebook grows by 13 percent each year until everyone in the world is on the site. More living users mean, eventually, more dead users. Under those assumptions, Facebook is littered with the virtual gravestones of 4.9 billion people by 2100. In that scenario, the dead won't outnumber the living until the early part of the 22nd century, however.

History in the making

Both scenarios are implausible, the researchers noted in their report on the data, published April 27 in the journal Big Data & Society. The real number of dead users will likely fall between those two extremes. (The numbers also don't take into account the number of users who have already died.)

In the scenario in which Facebook extends into every corner of the globe, however, the largest proportion of dead profiles (16%) will come from India, a side effect of that country's large population. Nigeria follows with 6%, then Indonesia and Pakistan with 4% and 3.6%, respectively. The United States is the only Western nation in the top 10, coming in at no. 7 with 2.3% of total zombie profiles.

"The management of our digital remains will eventually affect everyone who uses social media, since all of us will one day pass away and leave our data behind," Öhman said. "But the totality of the deceased user profiles also amounts to something larger than the sum of its parts. It is, or will at least become, part of our global digital heritage."

Other social media sites will face the same conundrums, the researchers noted. The profiles will represent a source of historical information unprecedented in human history, Watson said in the statement.

"Facebook should invite historians, archivists, archaeologists and ethicists to participate in the process of curating the vast volume of accumulated data that we leave behind as we pass away," Watson said. "This is not just about finding solutions that will be sustainable for the next couple of years, but possibly for many decades ahead."

• Top 10 Leading Causes of Death
• 25 Weird Things Humans Do Every Day, and Why
• The 7 Biggest Mysteries of the Human Body

Originally published on Live Science.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk just said on Twitter that he wants to start a new media outlet. What's behind his posts? Is it just another Musk prank, or is he actually serious about the idea?

"The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them," Musk posted Wednesday (May 23) along with a link to a news story discussing negative media coverage of his electric car company, Tesla.

Musk then wrote a series of tweets lamenting the state of journalism and vowing to do something about it.

"Problem is," he said, "journos are under constant pressure to get max clicks & earn advertising dollars or get fired. Tricky situation, as Tesla doesn't advertise, but fossil fuel companies & gas/diesel car companies are among world's biggest advertisers."

Musk said he plans to start up a new website for the public to rate "the core truth of any article" that would also track credibility scores for journalists, editors and publications. He said he may call it "Pravda," which was the name of the former Soviet Union Communist Party newspaper. "Pravda" means "truth" in Russian.

"Even if some of the public doesn't care about the credibility score, the journalists, editors & publications will. It is how they define themselves," Musk said. He then created a Twitter poll asking readers if they would be in support of that or not. By the time the poll closed today (May 24), it had received more than 680,000 votes, with 88 percent of voters saying they would support Musk's proposal.

Musk urged the media to promote the poll if "they didn't want Pravda to exist," then tweeted again, saying he may call the site "You're Right" instead. Musk does own the domain youreright.com, he added, but all it does now is point to Facebook News.

"For some reason, this is the best I've felt in a while. Hope you're feeling good too," Musk added.

But as The Wall Street Journal pointed out, Musk is famous for making proclamations that may not necessarily be serious. For example, in recent posts, he claimed that Tesla was going bankrupt (that was posted on April Fools' Day); that he was going to start a candy company; and that he was going to start a new company to drill tunnels to avoid traffic. (That last one may not have been a joke; Musk eventually started a new tunneling organization called The Boring Co., whose goal is to build an underground Hyperloop transportation system.)

Musk's comments, naturally, attracted attention on Twitter from everybody from journalists to Donald Trump Jr., the son of U.S. President Donald Trump. 

"One journalist retweeted Mr. Musk's comments with a link to a California filing for a business incorporated last October called Pravda Corp.," The Wall Street Journal added, "involving a person connected with other Musk ventures. 'Er, he's not kidding,' wrote journalist Mark Harris. Mr. Musk replied with a "hugging face" emoji.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

A few weeks ago, I pulled my iPhone out of my purse only to discover a spiderweb of cracks emanating from the earpiece area of the screen. I couldn't remember dropping the phone or hitting my purse against anything, but I must have jostled something just wrong. Considering that last year a guy dropped his phone 1,000 feet (305 meters) out of an actual airplane with no ill effects, my cracked screen feels a little unfair.   

But Live Science's sister site Tom's Guide, which reviews tech gadgets, recently did some testing that reveals that phone breakage isn't just about the length of the fall. Tom's Guide testers found that a phone dropped from 100 feet (30 m) might survive the fall, while the same kind of phone might shatter from a 6-foot (1.8 m) drop.  

Why? The surface involved in the impact matters, of course, but so does the angle of the fall. And that, says glass expert Peter Houk, is all due to the unique atomic structure of glass.

Strengthening glass

The testing at Tom's Guide lacked the kind of tech you'd need to really test the integrity of smartphone glass, like high-speed cameras and hundreds of spare phones to test. But the Tom's Guide testers found that dropping phones onto plywood, even from a drone flying 100 feet up, didn't necessarily cause the devices to shatter. The drop destroyed some phones, like the Apple iPhone X and the LG V30. Others, like the Samsung Galaxy S9, had no damage whatsoever. (Concrete, unsurprisingly, was far rougher on phones than plywood was, totally killing 10 percent of them when they were dropped from 6 feet onto their edges and 5 percent of them when they were dropped from 6 feet onto their faces.)

[See how smartphones fared in Tom's Guide drop-testing.]

It's not surprising that there would be variations in breakage, Houk said, given the importance of the angle of contact with the ground.

Here's why: Glass stands up well to compressional forces, or forces that squeeze, said Houk, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Glass Lab. That's why a phone dropped flat on its face often survives. But "glass doesn't like tension," Houk said. Bend a piece of glass, or apply a small, pinpoint force to one of its edges, and you're likely to end up with a shower of shards.

Smartphone glass and glass used in car windows, shower doors and other places where you don't want a million razor-sharp shards is tempered, but the two types of glass are tempered in very different ways. Window glass is heat-tempered, Houk told Live Science. In thermal tempering, manufacturers heat the glass to 1,148 degrees Fahrenheit (620 degrees Celsius) and then rapidly cool it. The outside and inside of the glass cool at slightly different rates, Houk said, which compresses the surface of the material while putting the interior layer in tension.

For the purposes of strength, this is great — it's very difficult to break the glass by hitting it on its face, because the additional compression further strengthens the glass against forces that compact it. When it does break, the high compressive force gets released all at once, causing the glass to break into tiny, pebble-like pieces rather than large, knifelike shards.

In their screens, smartphone manufacturers tend to favor Gorilla glass, a chemically tempered glass made by the company Corning. This glass makes up iPhones, and Samsung, LG and other phone manufacturers also use it. Gorilla glass is bathed in potassium salts, Houk said, which allows potassium ions (charged molecules of potassium) to squeeze in between the silica atoms in the glass's molecular structure. This is another way of creating a strong, compressive layer.

"It makes it superstrong against blows to the face, and they can make this glass very scratch-resistant," Houk said.

Glass that bends

It's extremely difficult to manufacture glass that doesn't have tiny defects, though, Houk said, which is one vulnerability for even Gorilla Glass. Corning has more recently developed another glass, called Willow Glass, by fusing two thin sheets of molten glass together in midair; when that method is used, the glass doesn't have any contact points with surfaces during the cooling process. (Contact points can introduce invisible flaws in the molecular structure of glass.) Willow Glass can be made less than a millimeter thin and is remarkably flexible. [10 Cool Technologies You Can Thank the iPhone For]

"That is as close as we've gotten at this point to producing flaw-free glass," Houk said.

Still, glass is fundamentally an amorphous solid, meaning it lacks the organized lattice pattern (and resulting strength) of crystalline solids like diamonds. That atomic structure means glass is fundamentally prone to cracking, especially when pressed by a point source of force.

Drop your phone on its face on a concrete sidewalk, and you might be fine. If the device lands on its edge, though, it's likely "game over."

The good news for my cracked phone screen, Houk said, is that by breaking it, I've relieved the tension it was under from the tempering process. That means it may be in a stress-free state and won't crack anymore on its own. The bad news, of course, is that it's no longer strong. Eventually, those little spiderwebs of glass may shed shards — and I'll no longer be able to put off the repair bill.  

Original article on Live Science.

Washington, D.C., may be home to spies and criminals using spying devices to intercept people's cellphone calls and text messages.

In a March 26 letter, the U.S Department of Homeland Security publicly acknowledged, for the first time, that these devices, known as cell-site simulators, were being used anonymously in the country's capital, the Associated Press reported. The devices, often known as Stingray devices, should be marketed and sold only to law enforcement agencies, but the new letter acknowledges that others are using the devices and that they pose a "real and growing risk."

But what exactly are cell-site simulators, and is there anything people can do to protect themselves against snooping?

"They are essentially a fake cell tower that tricks phones into connecting to it and can then obtain the phone's location and track the phone's location," said Cooper Quintin, a senior technologist and security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital-rights group based in San Francisco. [Mind-Controlled Cats?! 6 Incredible Spy Technologies That Are Real]

How they work

In older, 2G networks (an earlier version of the cellular network), cellphones were required to verify themselves, or prove that the person using the cellphone had a valid service plan. But towers did not have to verify themselves. So, any device that sent out similar signals to the cellphone tower could "impersonate" that specific tower, Quintin said.

Though more-advanced cellphone networks, such as 3G and 4G, have patched that security bug, the makers of these spying devices still tout their ability to track people's phones, which means there are still security bugs in the cellular network being exploited, Quintin said. [10 Wild Tales of Famous Spies]

"They also claim they can intercept conversations [and] intercept text messages, and [they] sometimes even say they can plant malware in peoples' cellphones," Cooper told Live Science. "None of their claims have been proven."

The devices work by forcing phones to drop down to a lower, less secure 2G network, according to the AP.

Despite imitating cellphone towers, the devices can be small and incredibly inconspicuous, Quintin said. Some are set up in the backs of trucks that have a few antennas on them, but some are the size of a cellphone or are embedded in a vest.

Quintin built one that was the size of a small loaf of bread. (He placed it in a Faraday cage, so it could not connect to or disrupt other cellphone users.)

Little protection

Cell-site simulators don't just violate people's privacy; they can also be dangerous, Quintin said.

"From what we can tell, cell-site simulators disrupt cell service for everyone in the area, potentially even disrupting access to 911 for people in the area," he said.

People who want to protect their communications can use end-to-end encryption with apps like Signal or WhatsApp, but people can do little to protect themselves against the location tracking of cell-tower simulators, Quintin said.

While law enforcement agencies are the primary lawful users of these devices, embassies in Washington, D.C., which are on "sovereign soil," can also lawfully install a spying device.

Every embassy "worth their salt" has a cell-tower simulator installed, Aaron Turner, president of the mobile security consultancy IntegriCell, told the AP. The Russians have simulators that can track people from a mile (1.6 kilometers) away, Turner told the AP.

Originally published on Live Science.

That's a hard-learned lesson for a man who visited a Chinese electronic store shopping for a replacement battery and decided to apply his own technologically unsound method for verifying the batteries authenticity. He placed the battery into his mouth and bit down. The result? Pop goes the battery.

MORE: Smartphones with the Longest Battery Life

The footage, captured by the store's closed circuit TV, has been uploaded to Chinese video sharing site miaopai.com, as usually happens when there's footage of someone risking life and limb.

The Taiwan News reports that no one was injured in the resulting blast, though we suspect the intrepid shopper has lost his taste for batteries. According to the Taiwan News report, the man was shopping for a replacement battery for his iPhone.

iPhone users have been in the market for replacement batteries after Apple confirmed that it had been slowing down performance of older phones to preserve the battery life of those devices. Amid public grumbling about that revelation, Apple announced that anyone with an iPhone 6 or later would be able to get a replacement battery installed for $29 before the end of 2018.

The discounted battery replacement program has iPhone users flocking to Apple Stores for their new battery — so much so that some customers are reporting delays until the spring. If you're facing a delay, you can take matters into your own hands by turning to a third-party replacement service. Just don't be like your fellow iPhone owner in China and take matters into your own mouth.

Originally published on Tom's Guide.

With the help of an actor and some high-tech motion-capture techniques, computer scientists can now take a still photo of a person's face and animate it. The photos can be animated to express emotions such as happiness, anger or surprise. They can even include details such as teeth when the person in the photo had shown none.

The new photo-manipulation technique is the result of a collaboration between computer scientists at Facebook and Tel Aviv University. The research, published in the journal Associate for Computing Machinery on Nov. 20, provides what the scientists claim is the most realistic manipulations of a portrait or selfie to date. [Optical Illusions: A Gallery of Visual Tricks]

"The most difficult part is to make it look real, or natural looking," said lead author Hadar Averbuch-Elor, a doctoral candidate at Tel Aviv University. "People are extremely sensitive to the most subtle variations in face animation and it's challenging not to fall into the 'uncanny valley,'" she said.

The team starts out by mapping the facial features of someone looking at the camera in a photo. Then, they did the same facial-feature mapping to an actor expressing an emotion in a video, either shot in the lab or taken from a database. The facial movements from the video were then applied to the original photo, animating it into expressing an emotion, according to the research.

Once the researchers got the original photo moving, they fine-tuned the resulting video by smoothing out wrinkles and, if necessary, adding in the actor's teeth and tongue.

What they were left with was a short video of a person making an expression. Even if the person in the photo had never made that face in their entire life, the resulting product made it look as if they had.

To see if the videos were convincing, the researchers showed them to 30 people. They found that 58 percent of the participants thought that a video of someone smiling was real the first time they saw it, and 37 percent thought the same of a video of someone making a surprised expression. Overall, an average of 46 percent of the people said they thought the manipulated videos were real, compared with an average 87 percent of the people who thought the unedited videos were real, according to the paper. Thirteen percent thought that the real videos were fakes.

The animated faces aren't perfect, however. Many of the problems come from either the photo or the actor in the video looking off to the side, because it creates a bizarre contortion in which a part of the face pivots but the rest of the photo continues to look forward, the researchers said. Also, a photo of someone smiling with exposed teeth adds difficulty — if the actor creates an open-mouthed expression, the photo's teeth will stretch out instead of separating.

"Combining this tech with 3D would solve pose issues," Averbuch-Elor told Live Science, though projecting the photo into 3D might lower the image quality. "It would also be cool to combine it with VR to create an interactive avatar from just a single image," she said.

The team said that this technology could be used to animate profile photos on Facebook; clicking the "like" button could someday make your photo smile at the liker, or something to that effect.

It's possible that the technology could one day be used to manipulate photos into a deliberately misleading videos; however, that wasn't a current question for the researchers. But with technologies like this and others, including AI-generated photorealistic landscapes, it could be easier than ever to fake photos.

"When we were creating the technology, the goal was to push the boundaries of what's possible starting from just a single image," Averbuch-Elor said. "We didn't have production plans in mind and still don't — we wanted to create state-of-the-art research."

As face-manipulating technology becomes even more advanced, the line between real and fake could blur and become harder to find.

"We didn't really think about it while we were creating this technology," says Averbuch-Elor, "but like with many other examples, technology can be misused, and it's a scary thing."

Original article on Live Science .