This is one reason why optical fibres are replacing electricity-carrying copper wires for communications.
"They typically had a steel casing, copper for conducting power down them and optical fibres for collecting data, " he said.
Conventional optical fibres (the most common form of waveguide at the moment) generally consist of two concentric layers of glass.
The nose's sensors consist of microscopic plastic beads coated in fluorescent dye and perched on the ends of optical fibres.
The changing colours are transmitted through the optical fibres to a camera, and thence fed into a neural net for analysis.
Beneath the carpet is a mesh of optical fibres that detect and plot movement as pressure bends them, changing the light detected at the carpet's edges.
She has striking blue eyes - or rather, her headlights are surrounded by flashing blue optical fibres and they follow you as you move around the room.
The high number of optical fibres passing through its territory gives Panama the best connectivity in Latin America, making it attractive for call centres and regional headquarters.
"By bringing optical fibres in some of the networks, by just closing the loops, you will avoid excessive Internet transit costs, bringing down the cost by two-thirds, " he said.
The Venus flower basket, for example, a kind of deep-sea sponge, has spiny skeletal outgrowths that are remarkably similar, both in appearance and optical properties, to commercial optical fibres, notes Joanna Aizenberg, a researcher at Lucent Technology's Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.
Though there is no reason to use Dr Knight's invention to replace existing optical fibres, it could, by varying the spacing of the air-filled tubes, make a handy filter allowing selected wavelengths (and the messages they carry) to enter or leave the waveguide while the others are contained.
The company has developed advanced software tools for predicting the optical properties of new fibres so that it can quickly identify which types of hole array out of the literally infinite range of possibilities have industrially interesting properties.
The optical fibre network at the heart of the effort makes use of the same types of fibres that transmit data to homes and across oceans, in which light bounces along the fibres' length.
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