Team sets New Speed Record for Industry Standard Optical Fiber

The world's fastest industry standard optical fibre
Table of fibers. Credit: Macquarie University

An optical fiber about the thickness of a human hair can now carry the equivalent of more than 10 million fast home internet connections running at full capacity.

A team of Japanese, Australian, Dutch, and Italian researchers has set a new speed record for an industry standard optical fiber, achieving 1.7 Petabits over a 67km length of fiber. The fiber, which contains 19 cores that can each carry a signal, meets the global standards for fiber size, ensuring that it can be adopted without massive infrastructure change. And it uses less digital processing, greatly reducing the power required per bit transmitted.

Macquarie University researchers supported the invention by developing a 3D laser-printed glass chip that allows low loss acce...

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Experimental ‘Decoy’ Protects Against SARS-CoV-2 Infection

An experimental “decoy” has provided long-term protection from infection by the pandemic virus in mice, a new study finds. Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the work is based on how the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, uses its spike protein to attach to a protein on the surface of the cells that line human lungs. Once attached to this cell surface protein, called angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the virus spike pulls the cell close, enabling the virus to enter the cell and hijack its machinery to make viral copies.

Earlier in the pandemic, pharmaceutical companies designed monoclonal antibodies to glom onto the spike and neutralize the virus. Treatment of patients soon after infection was successful in preventing hospitalization and death...

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‘You can 3D print one material through another, as if it were invisible’: New 3D printing technique

'You can 3D print one material through another, as if it were invisible': new 3D printing technique ready to advance man
Dr Jose Marques-Hueso from the Institute of Sensors, Signals & Systems at Heriot-Watt University. Credit: Heriot-Watt University

Scientists have developed an advanced technique for 3D printing that is set to revolutionize the manufacturing industry.

The group, led by Dr. Jose Marques-Hueso from the Institute of Sensors, Signals & Systems at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, has created a new method of 3D printing that uses near-infrared (NIR) light to create complex structures containing multiple materials and colors.

They achieved this by modifying a well-established 3D printing process known as stereolithography to push the boundaries of multi-material integration...

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Webb Telescope finds Towering Plume of Water escaping from one of Saturn’s Moons

Courtesy of NASA/ESA/CSA/Alyssa Pagan (STScI)/Geronimo Villanueva (NASA-GSFC) SwRI contributed to new Cycle 1 JWST findings that show the plume of water escaping from Saturn’s moon Enceladus extends 6,000 miles or more than 40 times the moon’s size. In light of this discovery, SwRI’s Dr. Christopher Glein was awarded a NASA JWST Cycle 2 allocation to study the plume as well as the icy surface of Enceladus, to better understand the potential habitability of this ocean world.

Two Southwest Research Institute scientists were part of a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team that observed a towering plume of water vapor more than 6,000 miles long—roughly the distance from the U.S. to Japan—spewing from the surface of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus...

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