Li-Fi: 10 ways visible-spectrum wireless will make your life better

LED Bulb image courtesy tuanyick/Shutterstock

Li-Fi — that just-over-the-horizon wireless technology which could transform your everyday LED lighting fixtures into 10 Gbps wireless modems — has a lot of people talking these days. With a commercial product promised later this year and the tech already in beta, we might all be trippin' the lamplight fantastic real soon.
But other than really, really awesome movie streaming speeds, what do we care? According to its inventor Harald Haas, Li-Fi offers a bundle of niche applications that regular Wi-Fi just doesn't measure up to. Here are a few of those unique benefits.

How Li-Fi Works

The basic principle of Li-Fi is this: visible light has 10,000 times as broad a spectrum as the radio frequencies which Wi-Fi uses, allowing for much more bandwidth, once tapped. This is accomplished by the flickering of LED lightbulbs to create binary code (on = 1, off = 0), and is done at higher rates than the human eye can detect. The more LEDs in your lamp, the more data it can process.
A side effect of Li-Fi is that your power cord immediately becomes your data stream, so if you have power, you have Internet. The only infrastructure is an equipped lightbulb. Your internet provider doesn't even need to bring you a box, they just connect you to their power-grid-mounted signal relays, and you're online.

7 fresh photos of Mars, courtesy Curiosity

Doesn't look like Mars has much life. (Image credit: NASA)

The race is on. After sending back a few grainy landscape photos, it's time for Curiosity to deliver Mars's close-ups. NASA's received new high-resolution photos taken from the rover's 34 and 100-millimeter Mast cams and as predicted, Mars's surface has a diverse range of geological layering that could help scientists learn if the planet harbors any form of life or not.
NASA announced today that Curiosity has successfully transmitted the first human voice from Earth to Mars and back, no doubt paving way for the transmission of will.i.am's "Reach for the Stars."
Here's what Charles Bolden, Administrator of NASA, had broadcast to Mars through a recorded message:

"The knowledge we hope to gain from our observation and analysis of Gale Crater will tell us much about the possibility of life on Mars as well as the past and future possibilities for our own planet. Curiosity will bring benefits to Earth and inspire a new generation of scientists and explorers, as it prepares the way for a human mission in the not too distant future."

In addition to the recorded message transmission, NASA also released these photos of Mars, reaffirming Curiosity's mission to explore the layers and composition of nearby mountain Mount Sharp:

"This is an area on Mount Sharp where Curiosity will go," said Mastcam principal investigator Michael Malin, of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. "Those layers are our ultimate objective. The dark dune field is between us and those layers. In front of the dark sand you see redder sand, with a different composition suggested by its different color. The rocks in the foreground show diversity — some rounded, some angular, with different histories. This is a very rich geological site to look at and eventually to drive through."

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Photo taken from Curiosity's Navigation camera as the rover drove around to inspect a patch of bedrock. (Image credit: NASA)

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Via NASA