A new cool result showed up in Science this week, implying that we may be able to increase the information-carrying capacity of fiber optics beyond what had been thought of as (material-dependent) fundamental limits.  To appreciate this, it's good to think a bit about the way optical fiber carries information right now, including the bits of this blog post to you.  (This sort of thing is discussed in the photonics chapter of my book, by the way.) Information is passed through optical fibers in a