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.
And on February 7th Alcatel-Lucent unveiled technology that reduces the size of a wireless base station from a filing cabinet's to that of a Rubik's cube.