The transistor ushered the modern world of gadgets that we all love, and now optical transistors could help to bring us to the proper next generation of the internet. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have demonstrated successful electromagnetically induced transparency, or EIT, which is effectively a way of enabling one beam of light to control another. In their experiments, researchers used a rubidium atom to indicate state, blocking a beam of light in one direction but, when a laser hit it at a perpendicular angle, turning it transparent to allow the first beam through. The idea is that this could serve as a sort of optical gate for quantum computers
; the building block of a next-gen internet for next-gen devices. There's reason for excitement about the potential here, but researchers have a long, long way to go before anything like this is ready for reality, so don't give up those handlinks just yet.