If I could get to the International Consumer Electronics Exhibition in Berlin next week, I'd be heading straight for the virtual mirror, a product developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut. It's not really a mirror and the only optics involved are in the camera and display, the main story here being the power of computing.

Perhaps it has something to do with the high cost of fuel these days, or the increasing concern over greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, but, for whatever reason, there appears to have been an abundance of articles about solar power reported in recent weeks. The subject is approached from various angles, focusing on different aspects of the technology, but whether the stories are regarding research or development, a common thread among them is that they're all striving to make solar power as cheap as any conventional power source that currently feeds the electrical grid.

Optical fibres can be used in a variety of ways to perform remote sensing operations. Take the case of the Fibre Fabry-Pérot (FFP) interferometer, for example. Working on the principle of light interference produced by two parallel reflecting surfaces either side of a small cavity, they can be constructed in different ways, either with an external cavity, or with the cavity located within the body of the fibre itself. They can be used to measure pressure, temperature or strain, all by detecting changes in the optical path length of the cavity due to environmental influences. They can even be used as chemical sensors because the optical path length in the cavity is related to the refractive index of the medium inside. Researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology have come up with a way in which to do just that, in such a way that produces a highly robust device suitable for chemical sensing¹.

LIDAR (light detection and ranging) is the latest tool for Olympic sailors seeking to fill their sails to the max and beat the competition.

After having just reported on a new and novel use of the photo-acoustic effect for use in the printing industry (Photo-acoustics measure ink thickness), here's another story that's (cliché alert!) hot of the press: Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee have used

I couldn't resist reporting on this research that I originally came across in an article at PhysOrg.com¹, which had all the right ingredients to make it jump out of the page and slap me around the face: lasers and Mars.

Researchers in the US have brought us one step closer to the practical integration of optical and electronic circuitry on a chip.

In an effort to add a little variety and step away from all the new biomedical applications out there that exploit the endless wonder of light, here's a paper describing the use of light to make measurements of ink thickness! Okay, that might seem a little mundane, but it’s a classic example of the way in which light is used to solve an everyday problem, in this case to measure the thickness of black ink, typically a few microns or so, whilst it is spinning on the roller of a printing press at 300 rpm¹.

It's hard to keep up with the ever-increasing number of ways in which light can be used to push on the frontiers of medical science. Here are just a few that have been reported on in recent days.

One treatment for abnormal tissue growths, including cancerous tumours, is to close off the vessels supplying blood to that region, thereby killing it off. In some parts of the body, such as the eye and the brain, this requires an extraordinary level of precision. Researchers in the UK, Canada and the US, have recently produced a photo-activated drug and demonstrated that it is able to achieve far greater precision than any existing techniques, without causing damage beyond the treated region¹.