Broadband access has transformed the economic potential of the internet but the ADSL technology that delivers broadband to homes over traditional copper telephone wires is reaching its limit of around 10 megabits per second. If we want speeds ten times faster we need to replace the copper with optical fibers.

Optical fibers carry signals with light rather than electricity. They have been used in telecommunications for many years, especially over ‘long-haul’ links such as transatlantic cables and other trunk routes. Professor Henri Benisty, of the Institute of Optics Graduate School near Paris, likens them to motorways, carrying a lot of traffic but with only a small number of entrances and exits.

A thin polymer bio-film that seals surgical wounds could make sutures a relic of medical history.

Measuring just 50 microns thick, the film is placed on a surgical wound and exposed to an infrared laser, which heats the film just enough to meld it and the tissue, thus perfectly sealing the wound.

Known as Surgilux, the device’s raw material is extracted from crab shells and has Food and Drug Administration approval in the US.

Every advance in memory storage devices presents a new marvel of just how much memory can be squeezed into very small spaces. Considering the potential of nanolasers being developed in Sakhrat Khizroev’s lab at the University of California, Riverside, things are about to get a lot smaller.

As reported in the latest issue of Technology Review, Khizroev is leading a team exploring lasers so tiny that they point to a future where a 10-terabit hard drive is only one-inch square.

A new study published in this week’s Christmas issue of the BMJ says that humor appears to develop from aggression caused by male hormones.

Does it mean men are funnier? Or that more aggressive people are funnier? It means men, especially aggressive men, think they are funnier, according to Professor Sam Shuster.

Planetary scientists have puzzled for years over an apparent contradiction on Mars. Abundant evidence points to an early warm, wet climate on the red planet, but there’s no sign of the widespread carbonate rocks, such as limestone, that should have formed in such a climate.

Now, a detailed analysis in the Dec. 21 issue of Science by MIT’s Maria T. Zuber and Itay Halevy and Daniel P. Schrag of Harvard University provides a possible answer to the mystery. In addition to being warmed by a greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as on Earth, the early Mars may have had the greenhouse gas sulfur dioxide in its atmosphere. That would have interfered with the formation of carbonates, explaining their absence today.

With powerful instruments scouring the heavens, astronomers have found more than 240 planets in the past two decades, none likely to support Earth-like life, but as astronomers become more adept at finding planets orbiting other stars it’s natural to wonder if anybody is looking back. A team of astronomers has speculated at just what those alien eyes might see using technologies similar to those available to Earth’s astronomers.

“They would only be able to see Earth as a single pixel, rather than resolving it to take a picture,” said Eric Ford, a UF assistant professor of astronomy and one of five authors of the paper.