Nikolay Zheludev's voice in the U.K. traverses the Atlantic Ocean on wires, fiber-optic cables and microwaves and reaches me in New York City. The delay and noise make a conversation difficult. Speaking from the University of Southampton, he is describing man-made structures called metamaterials and how they will make almost any conceivable device or application faster, cheaper and more efficient. Our transoceanic conversation is a case in point, he notes: over a metamaterial-augmented all-optical network, the static, the awkward pauses and the cross-talk at the ends of our sentences would be eliminated. “We are no longer limited by what nature gives us or what we can cook with chemistry,” Zheludev says. “We can do better.”
Image Courtesy of phanlop88 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
To read the original article: Smart Phones as Thin as Credit Cards: Scientific American
