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Today, we can send messages instantly to just about anyone, anywhere on the globe. "Light Speed" tells the story of fiber optics -- the intricate system of glass and light that carries enormous amounts of information around the world -- and traces the history of communications from telegraph to telephone to the discovery of lasers used in today's high-tech systems.
Find out more about this episode or get the video.
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Remote Surgery
How Canadian surgeons operate over the Internet
A patient is prepped for surgery, but one critical person is missing -- the surgeon. In fact, he's not even in the same hospital, or on the same continent! He's performing surgery from thousands of miles away in a room with dimmed lights, multiple television monitors, a surgical console, and a computer that connects him via a high-speed fiber-optic link to robotic arms in the operating room. It's called telesurgery -- a technology with far-reaching implications.
At left, new technology in the operating room brings remote surgeons to their patients' bedsides.
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Tom Standage, technology editor at The Economist and series producer Jared Lipworth discuss the impact of fiber optics on long distance communications.
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