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."

For all our technology

Once again, nature outdoes our best attempts at copying it.

But SCO owns it!

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.

7 inches long!

The sponge grows in deep water in the tropics. It is about a foot and a half tall with an intricate silica mesh skeleton that also serves as a home for shrimp. The glass fibers form a crown at its base that appear to help anchor the sponge to the ocean floor. The fibers are about 2 to 7 inches long and each is about the thickness of a human hair.

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!

Re:7 inches long!

Um, I know this was meant as joke, but the point is that the sponge makes the fibers at low temperatures, doped with sodium, and if materials engineers could figure out how, they could precisely control the physical and optical properties of manmade fibers.

We need a new acronym for "Read the WHOLE freakin' article." RTWFA, man, RTWFA

Re:7 inches long!

Worthless as an industrial product, yes. Worthless as a teaching example, that we can use our considerable tool making prowess to expand on? Not by a long shot.

Re:7 inches long!

I did FTFA article...

FTFA?

Hmm...

RFTA = Read The Fucking Article...
FTFA = Fuck The Fucking Article?

LOL i know it was just a typo, but it's still funny, especially with a subject of "7 inches long!" ;)

Re:7 inches long!

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!

I got an email today addressing this issue. Naturally increae size [fayichina.com]

Ahh yes.. this brings back child hood memories.

Hrmm... what lives in a pineapple under the sea... sponge bob fiber light... wait no.. er... DOH!

Copying nature?

Are we still allowed to copy nature? I thought reverse engineering was made illegal under the DMCA.

Re:Copying nature?

Nature was benevolent enough to put her stuff in the public domain.

God, however, is another story.

Re:Copying nature?

This just in!

In a recent press release, SCO has claimed that Linux, Windows, and, yes, even Nature herself are violating its IP. "Our pattern recognition experts, after verifying our Linux ownership, found that Windows is basically Linux sans fork(2), so we clearly own it too," says Darl McBride, SCO's CEO and intellectual property rights advocate. "But the real breakthrough was when we found crabs were finding shells with algorithms that we own."

"It turns out that when crabs outgrow their shell, they look in ('iterate through,' in programmer's lingo) a pile ('array') of shells, and when they find one that fits, they move in," explains Yahkee group analyst and industry visionary Laura DiDio. "Although Nature's algorithm is implemented as a neural net, it has been copied line by line from SCO's malloc code. It's time people realized that while a free, massively parallel, evolving population looks good on paper, it needs to face the reality, which is that SCO will enforce it's rights."

Open source advocates point out that crabs had perfected their algorithm long before SCO existed, but McBride says he owns the rights, because of an ammendment letter God sent him that nobody can find. He also says that although Caldera released the crab algorithm under the old BSD license, crabs do not include the copyright notice, and besides, SCO has "absolutely no idea what it's doing."

Film at 11.

Great...

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.

Space or oceans?

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.

Re:Space or oceans?

to understand what is in our oceans, how they work and what effects we are having on them.

The oceans certainly contain many great mysteries. However, the effect we're having on it is pretty clear: destroy and degrade it with pollution. Algae blooms, dying coral, overfishing. We are slowly killing/pillaging the oceans, which doesn't seem to bother anyone enough to stop doing it. (Though occasionally we decide to do it less.) Hey, we don't live there anymore, not our problem!

Re:Space or oceans?

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....... :-[

How Did They Figure This Out...

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!

Great, now Verizon...

...now Verizon customer service is gonna be all, "Sorry, sir, it will take a week for us to replace the sponge."

More fracture resistant than commercial fibers

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...

Re:Yeah but

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).

So...

Does anyone know where I can pick up some Athlon seeds?

I wonder....

... 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.

Re:I wonder....

and if they could reproduce what spiders do, we'd have a skyhook and lightweight bulletproof jackets. and the brookly bridge suspension cables would be as thick as a pencil

and if they could reproduce what bees' do, a flying machine that weighs half a gram and sees what's going on.

and if they could synthesize what chickens do, you could eat things out of my ass

just that we know it exists, doesn't mean it can be synthesized (ot should be)

Why

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.

Spongebob Glasspants?

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!

Re:Spongebob Glasspants?

classic episode...!!

Donovan: Atlanta was a city, landlocked, Hundreds of miles from the area we now call the atlantic ocean.

Yet so desperate the city's desire for tourism That they moved offshore, becoming an island and an even bigger delta hub, Until the city overdeveloped and it started to sink.

Knowing their fate, the quality people ran away: Ted Turner, Hank Aaron, Jeff Foxworthy, the guy who invented Coca Cola, the magician And the other so-called gods of our legends, though gods they were, And also Jane Fonda was there. The others chose to remain behind on their porches with their rifles And one day evolving to mermaids and sing and dance and ring in the new.

Everyone: Hail Atlanta!

Looting nature

This is why we shouldn't just cream the biosphere- who knows how many absolutely cool techs lurk under the rocks.

I think Steven Wright said it best:

"Sponges grow in the ocean. That kills me. Make's me wonder how much deeper it'd be if that didn't happen."

That must suck

Thank god aliens haven't discovered that humans grow the best spligduglizacks.

LS

We probably have a while to go

After discovering that spider silk was pound for pound much stronger then any man made synthetic, elastic material, scientists took over a decade to emulate it (and even then not quite as good).

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.

Bell labs?

Great. 25 years from now, some company from Utah will be demanding I purchase a license to wash my dishes.

what I really want to know is...

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.

Index of Refraction?

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.

Where Japan SHOULD direct funding...

And Japan wants to spend how many gazillions [slashdot.org] on space exploration?

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.

Bending Fibre Optics

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 .....

Re:Hint for Bell Labs researchers.

But do they glow in the dark in slowly changing multi-colored patterns. That's the important thing.

Re:Journalist != physicist

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.

Re:Journalist != physicist

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. [what-is-th...-light.com]

Re:Over fishing Risk?

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.