Ocean Sponge May Be Best for Fiber Optics

TheViffer writes "ABC News is reporting that scientists say they've identified an ocean sponge, living in the darkness of the deep sea, that grows thin glass fibers capable of transmitting light better than industrial fiber optic cables used for telecommunication. 'You can actually tie a knot in these natural biological fibers and they will not break - it's really quite amazing,' said Joanna Aizenberg, who led the research at Bell Laboratories."

Comments

Re:Space or oceans?

[BWJones]

Bottom line, idiot, is that humankind has absolutely no effect on the ocean compared to what the earth itself and the sun dish out.

Oh, boy.....here we go.

Imagine the sun flared. Just a little one. What could happen to the earth?

The sun flares all the time. Our atmosphere and the ozone layer protect us.

Why, the entire atmosphere could be blown away, and the oceans could dry up. The deserts would turn to glass. All from a small solar flare.

*Sigh.......* No. This is not correct. See above comment for clarification.

What about a volcano? How many megatons of carbon dioxide and other noxious chemicals does that dump into the atmosphere, not to mention the pollution in the oceans?

CO2 release into the oceans is common and the CO2 flux is truly massive. However, what we need to worry about are some of the non-naturally occurring chemicals such as estrogens and chemicals found in fertilizers and run off from mining such as cyanides. We also have to worry about what is happening from all of the nuclear reactors that the former Soviet union has dumped into the sea among other things.

The algae blooms are there because the sun put them there. We had nothing to do with it.

Wrong. Human intervention most likely primarily from excess nitrogens are at the root of many of these. Other causes are world wide shipping, which carries algae to new homes in water contained in ballast tanks, global warming, and pollution draining into the oceans from coastal development and farmland, which provides again nitrogenous compounds essential for algae metabolism.

You are an idiot. spouting out half-truths and whining about it.

There is no call for that sort of treatment. Lighten up, eh?

Go crack a real science book, not the pseudo-crap they are passing off in high school today.

Your credentials are what?

Go take a look at how much water there is in the ocean, and try and figure out how much pollution we could actually dump in there if we really tried. You'll see that we would have barely any effect at all.

Many, many studies are being performed on just this and the results are sobering.

And how do you pillage the ocean? The natural resources in the ocean are going to die anyway. Rather than allowing the fish to float to the bottom of the ocean and rot and pollute the ocean, we are harvesting the excess every year so that we can feed a starving world. How is that pillaging?

With a comment like this, I am not even sure where to start. Is this a troll? You can't be serious....... :-[

Bending Fibre Optics

[ajs318]

The thing about bending fibre optics that nobody ever points out, is that if you bend even an infinitely-elastic fibre optic through too tight a curve, then you will get light leakage.

Fibre optics work on the principle of total internal reflection. The angle at which the light strikes the interface between glass and air is too shallow for it to get refracted out into the air, so instead it bounces off. As far as a beam of light is concerned, a length of fibre optic is just like a tube whose inside walls have a perfect mirror finish.

If you put a tight enough bend into the fibre, then the light will no longer be striking at an unrefractable angle, and therefore will escape. {You can try this with cheap 1mm. acrylic fibre if you remove the outer jacket and warm it in a pan of boiling water}.

Now, glass fibres exhibit very nice thermoplastic behaviour, and can actually be bent without breaking to tighter radii than acrylic. Unfortunately, they begin leaking light long before they break .....