Laser-powered cell phone transmitters could be in your future

The problem with scientific papers is that they hide about half of the interesting stuff. Recently, a group of scientists set out to directly measure a property of a laser, something that goes by the exciting-sounding name of "spatial hole burning." In the process, though, they discovered how to turn a laser into a very high-speed microwave device, a discovery that may make the next generations of Wi-Fi and mobile data much easier to implement.