Nyhetsarkiv

You’ve got a cell phone at o­ne ear, an iPod at the other, you know that Blackberry is now a verb and Spam is not o­nly canned meat of questionable origin. But just how did we get here? Blame William Shatner – yes, that William Shatner. Premiering Sun., Nov. 13 at 8 p.m. ET/9 p.m. PT o­n Discovery Channel, How William Shatner Changed the World boldly goes where few have gone before to reveal how scientists are surpassing the far-out vision of the future foreshadowed in Star Trek.

The proposal involves using plasmons -- tiny electronic excitations on the surfaces of some metals -- to cancel out the visible light or other radiation coming from an object.

"A proper design … may induce a dramatic drop in the scattering cross-section, making the object nearly invisible to an observer," Nader and Alu write in a scientific paper that was made available to the public Feb. 14.

But cloaking ability would depend on an object's size, so that only with very small things -- items that are already microscopic or nearly so -- could the visible light be rendered null. A human could be made impossible to detect in longer-wavelength radiation such as microwaves, but not from visible light.

Ofta har det i Enterprise varit Hoshi Sato som fått ordna med tolkning. Till sin hjälp har hon haft en universalöversättare som dock inte alltid fungerat på bästa sätt.

Nu verkar det ändå som om översättarna börjar bli verkliga. I ett väntat krig mellan USA och Irak kommer handburna översättare att användas för att snabbt lösa problematiken med språket. Detta enligt CNN:s artikel som STARTREK.com citerar.