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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."
Once again, nature outdoes our best attempts at copying it.
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Cool, fiber optics up to 7 inches long! That'll be effective! I can finally connect my computer to... uhh... to my uhh... what the hell, 7 inches! WTF!
Hrmm... what lives in a pineapple under the sea... sponge bob fiber light... wait no.. er... DOH!
Are we still allowed to copy nature? I thought reverse engineering was made illegal under the DMCA.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
yet another specie we can drive to extinction in the name of technology.
But seriously, won't this sponge smell funny especially when trunking it in dark and dry spaces like under floorings?
Just a thought.
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Now, this is the sort of thing that makes you wonder why we spend so little effort studying our oceans. While I am all for space exploration and research, we should also spend considerably more effort to understand what is in our oceans, how they work and what effects we are having on them.
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EE 1: We need a better fiberoptic cable.
EE 2: Let's look at organisms deep in the ocean!
EE 1: That's just crazy enough to work!
Long ago, Ma Bell pressurized the long distance cabling with air to keep the conductors dry. What would they have to do with these, pressurize them with seawater?
The paper in Nature about on this research says the sponge fibers are more fracture resistant than commercial fibers because of a layer of organic ligands at the fiber's exterior. Now if we can just genetically engineer them to grow a few hundered miles in length...
Does anyone know where I can pick up some Athlon seeds?
But do they glow in the dark in slowly changing multi-colored patterns. That's the important thing.
... if scientists could reproduce what the sponges are doing synthetically in a lab. This way we could have our new form of fiber optic without killing tons of sponges.
Nature does things for a reason...I wonder why this creature uses fibre optic to anchor itself to the ocean floor. I doubt it is using the fibre optic to communicate...Perhaps it is using it because it happens to also be very flexible and strong at the same time, the fact that it could also be used for transporting light is a co-incidence.
Who makes fiberglass cables under the sea?
SPONGEBOB GLASSPANTS!
Flexible, clear, with sodium has he.
SPONGEBOB GLASSPANTS!
If flexible fibers be something you wish,
Dive under the ocean and look for some fish!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Wrong... the speed of light changes depending on the medium it is moving through. Light travels faster through air than through glass... does that mean c>c? No.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This is why we shouldn't just cream the biosphere- who knows how many absolutely cool techs lurk under the rocks.
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...now Verizon customer service is gonna be all, "Sorry, sir, it will take a week for us to replace the sponge."
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
apparently you're no physicist yourself.
the speed of light in a medium does not equal the the speed of light in a vacuum. here is a handy chart for you.
Of course you wouldn't harvest them for their 2 to 7 inch long bits of fibre optic.
You try and replicate the process the sponges use. It at least shows it is possible to make the stuff at cold temperatures, which as the article states (which you obviously didn't bother comprehending, and probably reading) makes doping the glass easier.
SCO recently copyrighted Walrus DNA, and both creatures use the pattented Symmetric Multi-Cell technology.
Anyone using a sea sponge better pay up and admit their blatent violation of others' IP.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Have you thought that if we can figure a way to grow these ourselves, quickly and cheaply, that this would be what brings fiber to your doorstep? It's not cheap to make a spool of fiber cable right now, but what if we can just flip a few genetic switches in some sponges in a lab and have them start growing these things by the miles? Or even better, we learn how they make the glass, and duplicate it industrially. I can only see good things comin from this (well, maybe not for the sponge with a 3 mile long glass strand growing out of its ass, but it's a sponge, I doubt anyone at PETA will come calling on it's behalf).
Space for rent, inquire within
"Sponges grow in the ocean. That kills me. Make's me wonder how much deeper it'd be if that didn't happen."
My Niece has been trying for months to get me to sit down and watch SpongeBob SquarePants.
She says Spongies RULE....
Maybe she's been onto something all along...
do() || do_not();
Frank Herbert wrote about the exact same thing in his book "The Ascension Factor." Only there it was sentient kelp. The coolest part was how the kelp could create ultra realistic holograms. Wouldn't that be an interesting twist on display technology?
Thank god aliens haven't discovered that humans grow the best spligduglizacks.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Today we have this thing called biotechnology. We only need a few of them (the sponges) to isolate the gene(s) of interest and use something more plentiful (bacteria/yeast/chinese hamster ovaries) to manufacture it.
If you're wondering Chinese Hamster Ovaries are pretty much the standard in the manufacture of human proteins. I grow them in Bioreactors (fancy jars) everyday.
I hope this isn't in any way related to sponge bob :-)
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Considering that these sponges aren't exactly easy to find (like orb spiders), the research should take much longer. But my oh my, imagine the applications: fiber that is as durable as ethernet. Wow.
Great. 25 years from now, some company from Utah will be demanding I purchase a license to wash my dishes.
Actually, the reason you don't have fiber up to your doorstep has more to do with the high cost of digging up your street in order to get it there. This isn't really feasible except maybe in new neighborhoods. Fiber's actually pretty cheap these days, especially compared to other equipment costs like switches and ADMs.
The other problem right now is the high cost of components such as tunable lasers. Even if every home had fiber, it'd cost a lot more to equip your computer with an optical network card. The average Joe Public won't get enough use out of the extra bandwidth (yet) to justify the cost of buying the hardware. This would be true regardless of whether your fiber was made out of sand or sponges.
Although, if someday networks did come to be made out of organic sponges, it'd be funny to see people be forced to remember to water their internet connections or be disconnected :)
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
what made them try?
"Hey Bob, we got another load of crap from the bottom on that trawl. want me to throw it overboard?"
"Nah, let's try hooking part of it up to our router and see what happens!"
Those clever scientists never cease to amaze me.
What's the index of refraction, as compared to glass fibre? This is one of the factors that limits flexability, and is really quite important.
-twb
This is one reason why we should be keeping more of the research money on terra firma. As far as helping humankind, the oceans have much more to offer than Mars or a passing meteor or a distant galaxy (at least at this point). I'm not saying that stuff isn't academically enriching, but it doesn't (directly) solve our earth-bound problems.
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
I work in a research group that did some stuff in this field a couple of years ago. I didn't work directly on the sponge spicules and I'm not at the lab so some of this info is only as accurate as my memory.
Pretty much all sponges contain small glass needles called spicules which primarily act as a deterrent to being eaten. Some species of Antarctic sponges evolved spicules to the point of using them as light collectors. The species we were working with (can't recall the scientific name right now) lives about 100m below the ocean surface where there is virtually no light. Despite this, the sponge is dependent upon a symbiotic relationship with algae living inside of it.
Unlike normal sponges that have spiclues 90% light gathering efficiency over something like a 200 degree angle. The light is then concentrated and piped down that long body of the spicule where it shines onto the algae so they can photosynthesize.
What makes these fibers quite unique is their durability and construction technique. As mentioned, you can tie a loose overhand knot into these fibers and they not only fail to break but retain high light transfer efficiencies. This is due to a layered glass/protein structure that provides a slip plane for flexing and also works to prevent catastrophic crack propagation. This sort of layering is fairly common in hard biological tissues. (eg: mother of pearl)
The synthesis is fairly striking as it occurs in water at approximately 0 degrees C. Normal glass fiber pulling is at something like 2500 C in a completely water-free environment. (water has strong absorbance peaks in the IR wavelengths used in telecommunications) How the shape of the fibers is created is still a bit of a mystery but the biochemical process is fairly well understood. For those who are interested, look up work from the Dan Morse group. They isolated the enzymes responsible for the silica polymerization a few years ago and created a recombinant analog. Also look at work by the Morley Stone group more recently for some additional work done in this area.
Actual sponges would never be harvested for these applications, it would just be too impractical to get enough raw material and to splice those pieces together. However, it is conceivable that a biochemical process could be implememted to make the same sort of layered fiber. The advantages would be a fiber that is highly crack and bend resistant and that would require vastly lower amounts of energy to produce. The downside is that the silica is full of water and is useless for telecom frequencies. However, I see a potential market for in-house cables - Cat5 replacement if you will. The data rates in-house are much lower so visible wavelengths could be used with standard LED/photodiodes. Also, with in-house applications, the low-cost and high strength would be highly advantageous.
What does a sponge need with such superior optical fibres ? Could they in fact use it for other purposes inside their bodies, such as optical communication ? ... now that would be amazing!
Bitter and proud of it.
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
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