Back when I was in grade school, we had to look up words in the dictionary as punishment. I hated it. Today people don’t really use dictionaries; most of us just look up words online. The online use of one of the oldest dictionaries around called the Oxford English Dictionary has grown so much, the next version may not even be offered in print.

The third edition of the Oxford dictionary will be ready to publish in about ten years; it is only about a quarter complete right now. While the second edition printed in 1989 has sold 30,000 volumes, the online version is much more popular.

The creators of the recently constructed Internet2 network have achieved a breakthrough in boosting the speed of transmission. When the network went online in August the fastest believed speed would be somewhere approaching 10 gigabits per second (Gbps). That’s already plenty more speed than the high-speed connections people have in their homes and offices (about 5 megabytes per second).

Now the Internet2 team has achieved speeds up to 100 Gpbs, ten times the previous fastest speed, by sending data via ten different wavelengths over the same cable. Ten different colors of light to transmit the data means that the data gets there ten times faster. As fast as that is, the administrators working at Internet2 are already planning on upgrading their technology sometime in the next 12 to 18 months which could boost the speeds even further, up to 400 Gbps.