Lasers scan future possibilities

Lasers have already had a profound impact on our daily lives but the potential of the technology has only just been tapped, scientists believe.

Sunday marks the 50th anniversary of the first demonstration of a ruby laser at the Hughes Research Labs in the US.

The light beams have since found myriad uses, from scanning shop prices to trying to sense the ripples in space-time made by colliding black holes.

Researchers say the coming decades will see even more remarkable progress.

"The laser gave a capability over previous light sources that was just so immense that you simply can't digest and exhaust all that in the matter of a few decades," said David Hanna, emeritus professor at the Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton, UK.

People have to use their imagination about what amazing and crazy things can be done with all that capability," he told BBC News.

There is debate over which key technological step made the laser possible, but Theodore Maiman's success in stimulating a ruby rod to produce an intense narrow beam of light by shining a flash lamp on it was an undoubted landmark.

There had been a race to demonstrate "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation" (Laser), and Maiman beat everyone to it on 16 May, 1960.

At the time, the technology was said to be the classic "solution looking for a problem", but its ability to direct a powerful stream of energy from one location to another soon opened up a world of possibilities.

Anyone who scans a tin of beans at the checkout is using a laser. Anyone who listens to music on a CD is using a laser to read data stored on a disc. Anyone who sends an e-mail is reliant on the lasers that drive the world's fibre optic communications networks. Anyone who gets into a car is sitting in a box that owes its construction to lasers.

"There is a phenomenal amount of laser processing on a car; you wouldn't believe how much - laser cutting, marking, measurement, drilling, hardening, laser brazing, laser deposition, and laser welding," explained Tim Holt, the chief executive of the Institute of Photonics, University of Strathclyde.

"Modern cars today would not be possible without lasers."

THEODORE MAIMAN'S LASER (1) A powerful lamp is wrapped around a ruby rod, depositing energy in the form of undirected light of many colours, or wavelengths (2) Atoms in the rod absorb and store energy from the light (3) Reflecting mirrors then allow a small amount of light to bounce back and forth in the rod, collecting some of the atoms' stored energy on each pass (4) Some of the light escapes through one of the mirrors; it is a directed, intense beam of synchronised light waves of a specific colour

The worldwide market in lasers is worth some $5-7bn annually. Most of that value is in lasers sold to manufacturing outlets for use in material processing, but the two other key markets are lasers for use in communications systems and in data storage.

But as much as lasers have infiltrated our everyday world, there is still much more they could do, scientists believe.

There is hope lasers could provide us with a near-limitless supply of clean power.

Laser cutters deliver a lot of energy to a very specific spot

In the US, the National Ignition Facility will soon train 192 giant laser beams on a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel in an attempt to fuse the element to make helium, and so release a colossal amount of energy - much like the Sun does at its core.

In Europe, researchers want to take this approach forward in a project known as HiPER that would be the prototype power station of the future.

"It's possible to use lasers to crush and heat material to temperatures that are 10 times hotter than at the centre of the Sun," says Dr Kate Lancaster from the UK's Central Laser Facility in Didcot.

"A standard laser pointer is about a milliwatt; we'll be approaching a petawatt - 10 million million times more powerful than a standard lightbulb.

"Fusion would be immensely efficient but it's extremely hard to do. Ever since Maiman demonstrated his laser, however, people have realised that this technique should be possible."

In astronomy, lasers are already used to sharpen the images of the world's very best telescopes. By projecting a "reference star" on the sky, scientists can work out how to correct their observations for the distortions introduced by atmospheric turbulence.

Fibre lasers allow far more data to be transferred much faster

But lasers are also pioneering a completely new form of astronomy, one that attempts to probe the Universe without the need to detect light. These laser interferometers would measure the disturbances in the very fabric of space-time generated every time massive stars imploded.

Such gravitational waves are extremely weak, however, and only lasers have the precision to measure their passing. If the technique works, it should be possible to see remnant gravitational radiation from the very moment of creation itself.

And in medicine, too, the possibilities seem boundless. Lasers can be used to manipulate atoms and molecules, "to unfold proteins and tickle DNA", says Dr Lancaster.

"Lasers can accelerate particles to high energy and we can use that to treat cancer," she adds.

"At the moment, with the way we treat cancer with radiation, photons travel into the body and they deposit energy in healthy tissue as well as at the cancer site.

"Whereas when protons and ions travel into the body, they will deposit most of their energy only at the very end of their range. So we can use lasers to tune protons to deposit their energy just within the tumour site."

The world's biggest telescopes use lasers to sharpen their images

As lasers have got ever more powerful, their pulse rate has also pushed new boundaries.

We already have lasers that trace time at the femtosecond level - a thousandth of a millionth of a millionth of a second. Researchers now are also working on attosecond lasers, which count time in divisions of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second.

Working at these scales, it is possible to see how matter works, to record for example the moment chemical reactions occur.

"On the femtosecond timescale, the atoms in a molecule will vibrate. So that is the relevant timescale for taking a detailed look at what is going on - as it happens - in a molecule," Professor Hanna told BBC News.

Divide that tiny time by 10 - a reduction of an "order of magnitude", as it is known - three times over, and science can now speak of what happens in attoseconds. This, Professor Hanna explained, is the timescale of processes inside the very atoms that make up molecules.

"Every time we pick up an extra order of magnitude - and there are many more to be got - we need to go back to the drawing board and think 'what on Earth do we do with that?'."

The rise of the web's digital elites

Ahead of a major series on the BBC about the impact of the web, presenter, social scientist and journalist Aleks Krotoski asks whether the web has already missed its greatest chance.

The web is an extraordinary innovation, with the greatest potential to usher in social change since the invention of the printing press or the steam engine.

Built upon a technology that is apolitical, unregulated and decentralised, it empowers everyone - men, women, children - to be creators of information, rather than passive consumers.

It is also an enormous library of global consciousness, a digital collection of human knowledge from the past and the present and presented in an easy-to-access format.

As a result, we now have the unprecedented power to create our own truth, and share it with everyone in the world. It has ushered in an equality of access that we have never seen before.

But has its potential as a great leveller for the whole world already passed?

'Utopian society'

Twenty years ago, the web was colonised by a group of early adopters who believed that the ideal society was equal - every person had a right to get involved, there should be no hierarchy, and rules would be mutually determined for the common good.

People like American writer Stewart Brand, critic Howard Rheingold, and the Grateful Dead's John Perry Barlow believed the sanctity of the individual was superior to that of the nation state, and that contact with people from across the globe would be enough to solve the world's ills.

Howard Rheingold was an early adopter of the web

These people, many of whom we tracked down for the series in the idealistic haven of San Francisco, had spent more than a decade playing around with alternative, non-physical communities in cyberspace on the proto-internet.

The early communities they established, like the online forum the Well had parallels with other Free Towns in the "real" world, many of which had suffered when the reality of poorly-defined regulations degenerated into exploitation and lawlessness.

But the idealistic web pioneers maintained that the new digital frontier would provide a fertile, intellectual ground on which to create a freer, utopian society.

But as we found as we were speaking to many of these pioneers, history has had a different plan for the web.

The pioneers' loose approach to social behaviour online has clashed with the essential features of our nature - our desire to take control, to own and to profit.

Implicit inequalities emerged early, but once the Web became a space for commercial gain in the mid-1990s and its population exploded, being at the top of the pile - translated as holding the first position in Google's search results - became the benchmark for offline financial returns.

The exponential increase in content on the web during the late 1990s and throughout the last decade has meant that reliable, trustworthy and credible information is increasingly difficult to pin down.

Net hope

At an individual level, we rely on friends and family for what to trust and what to believe, but we also look to experts and other people with high social status to point us in the right direction.

Tim Berners-Lee on the road in Ghana

Jimmy Wales, founder of the online-user generated encyclopaedia Wikipedia, admits that despite being the current poster child of information levelling, Wikipedia has explicit hierarchies that determine whose knowledge is more worthy than others'.

It seems that, for all its talk as a great leveller, the web is as unequal as we are.

Indeed, what we social scientists are discovering when we observe the web as a platform of social interaction is that, despite the medium, human beings seek hierarchies to help us make sense of our world.

It turns out that this is as relevant online as offline. After all, we can only bring to this digital tabula rasa what we already know and what we have gained from our existing experiences.

Despite this, people like former US Vice-President Al Gore is an online optimist.

When we spoke with him, he insisted that the global nature of the world wide web has the potential to change this, as different societies bring their different perspectives to bear on the web community.

Human medium

Indeed, when I joined the inventor of the web - Tim Berner's Lee - in Ghana as he was travelling to remote villages to try to understand what could happen when the African continent, parts of which have only recently been physically connected to the rest of the web with high-speed broadband access, makes its contribution to the international dialogue.

The author believes the web is a reflection of humanity

However, what I realised on this trip is that the imprint that most people in the African states will develop in their first experiences of the web will be based on what non-Africans have created.

Our two decades of shaping this maturing technology his has led us to a tool that has been crafted in our image.

When the Virtual Revolution team went to Abiriw, a rural village in the mountains outside Ghana's capital Accra, I was struck by how the kids in the local community centre used the web - they saw the world of information through the window of Google.

The search engine works on a principle of the "madness" or "wisdom" of crowds, basing its results on which websites receive the most links to their pages.

The majority of the crowd to date has been non-Africans, and so the window that these kids are using for information is non-African. What kind of dogma does that transmit?

And how does this reinforce the inequalities that exist between the developed and the developing world?

Ultimately, the web is a reflection of humanity, not a humanity-changer. We bring to it all of our other human foibles, warts and all.

Kodak sues Apple and RIM over iPhone and Blackberry

Camera maker Kodak has said it will sue Apple and Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of the iPhone and Blackberry, over technology used in their handsets.

Kodak has filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission (ITC).

It alleges the iPhone and Blackberry use technology for previewing pictures that infringe Kodak patents.

It has also filed two separate suits against Apple that claim infringements of patents relating to digital cameras and certain computer processes.

Kodak has asked the ITC to bar both firms from shipping the phones and has asked for undisclosed monetary damages.

RIM and Apple declined to comment.

Legal scrutiny

"We've had discussions for years with both companies in an attempt to resolve this issue amicably, and we have not been able to reach a satisfactory agreement," said Laura Quatela, chief intellectual property officer at Kodak.

"In light of that, we are taking this action to ensure that we protect the interests of our shareholders and the existing licensees of our technology."

The patent for Kodak's picture previewing technology has already been the subject of one dispute.

On 17 December 2009, an ITC judge ruled that camera-enabled phones made by Samsung infringed upon the Kodak patent.

The separate filing against Apple has also been scrutinised in court in a case against Sun Microsystems.

In that case, a federal jury determined that Sun's Java programming technology had infringed Kodak's patents. Sun later agreed to pay Kodak in return for a license for the patents at issue.

Apple is currently in the middle of a legal dispute with phone giant Nokia.

In October, Nokia alleged that the iPhone infringed 10 of its "fundamental" patents relating to wireless technologies.

Apple countered with its own lawsuit in December, accusing Nokia of copying its technology.

Since then Nokia has complained to the ITC and launched a further legal action that alleges "virtually all" of Apple's products infringe on its patents.

Schools must embrace mobile technology

The need for schools to prepare for 21st century learning was top of the agenda at this year's BETT conference.

They must embrace mobile technologies, games, podcasts and social networking, according to leading educationalist Professor Stephen Heppell.

Schools should also break away from traditional classroom and curriculum models, he argued.

The gap between those schools embracing technology and those not is getting bigger, he said.

Prof Heppell was speaking to delegates at BETT, the world's biggest educational technology show.

Technology revolution

Meanwhile the UK's minister for Schools and Families Vernon Coaker reiterated the government's commitment to putting technology at the heart of the school curriculum.

"Teachers need access to innovative services. We must prepare pupils for the future workplace," said Mr Coaker.

"Cutting edge technology is the cornerstone of our reforms," he added.

The UK's Building Schools for the Future programme will see every state secondary school in England rebuilt or remodelled over the next 15 - 20 years.

But in that timeframe there could be a big divide between schools, thinks Professor Heppell.

"There is a gap between the schools that are doing pioneering stuff and those simply doing a shiny version of 19th century teaching," he said.

Cells and bells

Much of the debate in the conference centred around how technology can be seamlessly integrated into the curriculum.

For Professor Heppell, who advises governments around the world about technology policies, the answer is both radical and simple.

He thinks schools need to move away from what he terms "cells and bells".

"We have to get away from the 35 minute timetable blocks. We need to reconfigure schools for a week of immersion in numeracy and dress the school for a learning production," he said.

"We need much longer blocks of time and to allow children to be in charge of their learning," he added.

One of the ways to do this is to integrate the tools that children are using in their lives outside of the classroom.

Skyping infants

At Lampton Secondary School in Hounslow, play is a significant part of the school ethos and children were at the conference demonstrating how games consoles such as the Wii and GPS devices can be integrated into the classroom.

Meanwhile at Cleveland Junior School in Redbridge, Year 6 pupils have been busy designing their own computer games.

"We made a storyline and introduced characters and designed the backgrounds,"explained 11-year-old Rezwana.

"More schools should use the software because you can put your own personal thoughts into the game," added classmate Pawan, also aged 11.

The games the children made were sent to a nearby infant school where Year 2 pupils played them and suggested improvements via Skype.

But not all schools are so keen to embrace technology. Many still ban the use of mobile phones and social networking sites such as Facebook.

"Turned off devices equals turned off children. Sensible schools use mobile technology to their advantage, putting up a telephone number about an issue such as bullying and getting pupils to text their views," said Prof Heppell.

Teachers may be more willing to embrace technology but the resources are not there to back them up, a survey from Intel has found.

Intel, which has ploughed £1bn into educational programmes around the world over the last decade, asked 2,700 teachers from 15 countries about technology in their schools.

While 98% felt that technology was critical in preparing pupils for the workforce, three quarters also thought governments were not doing enough.

70% of teachers thought children should be provided with a personal laptop but only 3% had such access.

Home access

"The worst thing you can do is give a child a computer without access to the internet," said Lila Ibrahim, general manager of Intel's emerging markets platform group.

In the UK the government has just launched a new scheme dubbed Home Access to offer both internet connectivity and hardware to 270,000 families on low incomes by March of next year.

Eligible families need to apply for a grant and they will receive £500 to put towards kit and connectivity from a range of suppliers.

The fact that families are in charge of what kit they get should mean it is more successful than previous schemes, thinks Stephen Crowne, chief executive of Becta, a government agency that is co-ordinating the project.

Chris Green was one of the pilot familes who trialled the scheme in Suffolk.

She has seen big improvements in her son, Colin.

"He uses it for homework and I can access the school website. I wouldn't be without it," she said.

Colin is about to take his GCSEs and is thinking about further education, something he would not have contemplated a year ago.

But not everyone is convinced the Home Access scheme is the answer.

"Home access is necessary but not sufficient. You can't just parachute technology in," said Prof Heppell.

"We haven't done a great job helping mums with how to help their children read and we need to make sure that we help them with computers.

"Unless that happens it will be nice to get a laptop but it doesn't begin to solve the problem," he added.

Schools too need to adapt or they will find more pupils rejecting the current educational system, he warned.

"Put 'virtual schools' into Google and you get 387,000 references. Children in the future will have choices about where and how they learn and if schools aren't enticing, pupils won't come."

Technology we have loved in 2009

The last 12 months have offered a swathe of new technologies

and seen others cemented as firm favorites.

Here, the BBC News technology team members pick out their choice technology of 2009.

1. Jane Wakefield 3. Rory Cellan-Jones 5. Mark Ward

2. Zoe Kleinman 4. Jonathan Fildes 6. Maggie Shiels

JANE WAKEFIELD

My technology of the year goes to something I've had little chance to actually use much myself yet - the iPlayer on Wii.

On-demand TV is not new but increasingly it is finding its way away from the PC screen to its far more natural home on the box in the corner of the living room.

Programmes on the Wii are a hit with Jane's daughter

Games consoles will kick-start this and next year will see a glut of internet-ready TVs and even, towards the end of the year, the first set-top box developed by the BBC and other partners to bring on-demand content direct to the TV.

I live in an on-demand household and at the moment the thing "on demand" is Cbeebies show Gigglebiz - for the uninitiated Gigglebiz is a show best described as Little Britain for the under-fives.

I love technology to be simple and my six-year-old son has no problem finding the iPlayer channel on the Wii and finding exactly what he wants to watch.

But I think the moment I realised the real power of the technology was when I caught my little girl explaining to her friend that if she misses Gigglebiz she can always "catch up on the iPlayer".

When a technology has entered the vocabulary of a three-year-old it can truly be said to have arrived.

Its ever-availability hasn't been without problems though. Once upon a time there was a clear cut-off between children's TV and adult time when Cbeebies went off air at 7pm.

Alas, no more.

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ZOE KLEINMAN

It's still got a long way to go but I have been really impressed with improvements in web search.

A good friend of mine is using genealogy websites to trace her family tree and persuaded me to have a go at mine too.

Algorithms have replaced trips to the library for Zoe

I have quite a few relatives who have tried and fallen at almost the first hurdle as nobody has ever been able to find a copy of my paternal grandmother's birth certificate.

Even a search by Somerset House proved fruitless, and when she died we had to estimate her age as nobody - including her - knew for sure when she was born.

We all knew her as Cissie, which we presumed was short for Cecilia.

But this particular website - ancestry.co.uk - threw up the name Zesel - it turns out that her Russian parents had anglicised her birth name very early on, and it had stuck. Oh - and her maiden name had also been mis-spelt on the document.

I never thought I would say this - but well done to the algorithm that put 2 and 9 together and came up with that.

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RORY CELLAN-JONES

This was the year that I put my trust in the cloud - perhaps foolishly.

Rory has tentatively put his life into the clouds

In other words, I started to rely more and more on services which take much of the storage and processing of my data off my computer and into giant data-centres dotted around the world.

So I now write just about everything as a Google document, and use Evernote to store important e-mails, pictures and other notes.

Then there is Spotify, which streams music from its cloud to my computer, and the various online photo-sharing services, from Flickr to MobileMe.

Towards the end of the year Google unveiled an operating system, Chrome, which would store most of its users' data and applications in the cloud.

Having got used to watching the vast empty space on the hard disk of each new computer rapidly fill up, this is the first year I can remember when I haven't worried about spare storage capacity. That has been replaced by another concern - just how secure is all that data I have entrusted to those various clouds?

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JONATHAN FILDES

For me, 2009 has been the year of the mobile app, the small, specialist pieces of software that run on a smartphone.

Jonathan - and his wife - have embraced the world of apps

It is a market still dominated by Apple's App store, which now offers more than 100,000 of them. However, everyone from Nokia and Google to Symbian and Research in Motion (Blackberry) now offer apps.

Over the last 5 months I've collected more than 70 of them on my iPhone, and tried, tested and discarded many more. Some I've paid for, but many others have been free.

I use some on a daily basis, browsing Twitter (Tweetdeck) or the news (New York Times, Guardian, WSJ or FT) over breakfast or on the train to work.

They allow me to keep in touch with my social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Yammer), upload pictures to Flickr (Mobile Fotos or Flickr), listen to music (Spotify) or play games (Crash Kart, Rolando and Worms.)

They really come into their own when the app taps into the phone's in-built GPS. For example when I hit the Next Train Home button on the National Rail app it works out where I am, the nearest station and the times of the services which will get me home most quickly. Useful for making sure you catch the last train home.

I've also tried out augmented reality apps, such as Nearest Tube, which overlays large colourful arrows on to the view through the camera to point you towards the nearest Tube stop. It's a compelling use of the technology but not one that I find myself using every day.

That, however, cannot be said about an app that my wife has discovered. BabyBrain allows her to keep track of our newborn - his feeds, nappies and sleeping patterns.

It's become her surrogate brain - invaluable when you're operating on less than four hours sleep a day.

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MARK WARD

For me the technology of the year has been Google, but only in the sense that I'm turning away from it.

Mark and Google have grown apart

This is because its myriad services are proving less and less useful to me.

I've switched to NetVibes because it is far more customisable than iGoogle.

Twitter helps keep up with news about the people I need to watch as does Facebook. I'm also about to start the process of migrating away from Gmail.

Perhaps most worryingly for Google is that its raw search leads me to the right places less than ever.

Increasingly I find myself forlornly clicking through the pages of results to see if it what I want is hidden elsewhere.

Even when sites such as Google Without Google and Give Me Back my Google strip out the search giant's ancillary services, other sites and tools are proving more helpful.

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MAGGIE SHIELS

I wracked my brain long and hard to think about what new and exciting gadget has wowed me this last year.

I confess my choice is not something new and earth shattering, but it has made a massive difference in my life. It is my BlackBerry smartphone. And the killer app remains an old favourite: e-mail.

Maggie can't live without her smart phone

I am in good company here with Jen-Hsun Huang, the president and co-founder of graphic-chip firm Nvidia, agreeing with me.

"I am willing to give up my PC but not my BlackBerry. I would even give up the phone and squint at a small screen but I am not willing to not have my computing device with me at all times and so that says something about the future of computers."

Indeed it does, which is perhaps why Google, with it Android operating system for phones, is set to launch its own hardware.

The blogosphere has been ripe with rumours, photos and discussion of the so called Nexus, but at Google's xmas party at the Googleplex not one member of staff would admit to owning one. It seems they all checked them at the door with their coats.

Still the big rumour is that come January, the wraps will be taken off the Nexus at the Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

And while my smartphone might be seen as a lame choice by some, it is undoubtedly going to be the basis of one mighty land grab over the next year or so.

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