These products also enable system builders to build high-performance, high-capacity systems, including new thin and light laptops, at mass-market price points.

ENGADGET: Seagate ships its first desktop hybrid drive, third-gen laptop models

Tony Tyson and David Wittman, who work at Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories, in New Jersey, and their collaborators have proposed building a telescope that estimates the distribution of mass in the past by analysing these deflected light-waves, a technique known as three-dimensional mass tomography.

ECONOMIST: Cosmology

When this sort of star implodes, to create a black hole, it generates jets of material that punch their way out of the collapsing mass at near light-speed, to produce extremely high-energy emissions of light.

BBC: Telescope spies cataclysmic blast

These early structures are "supermassive" -- perhaps millions of times the mass of our sun -- and most of the light around them doesn't make it out of their galaxies, Schawinski said.

CNN: Black holes abound in early universe

Moreover, the creators have already found a Minnesota-based firm willing to mass produce the nanobandages should they receive the green light, but the professors are hoping to build the new manufacturing plant in Ohio if at all possible, and have products on retail shelves "by 2008" at the latest.

ENGADGET: Nanofiber bandages slated to heal en masse next year