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The bulk "spam" that now accounts for as much as three-quarters of all e-mail traffic could soon insinuate its way into movie theaters, subways, and anywhere else Americans take their cell phones, experts said at a forum on spam on Thursday.

Text-messaging services on newer cell phones could enable spammers to reach a tempting new audience, conference panelists said.

Federal law prohibits most telemarketers from dialing cell phones, but no such regulations prevent spammers from sending messages to addresses like 2025551212+cellphonecarrier.com. Because many text services carry a per-message charge, costs to consumers could mount quickly.

Wireless spam is already a problem in Japan, where text messaging has been a popular feature of cell-phone service for years, said an official with NTT DoCoMo Inc., the Japanese telecommunications giant.

News source: CNN

Silicon Substitute

This is the first time light has ever been generated from a molecule by applying electricity, said Phaedron Avouris, manager of nanometer-scale science at IBM Research's Watson Labs.

Light, already the foundation of today's high-speed communication networks, could someday be used to process data in computers and other electronic devices, as engineers run out of ways to cram more performance into silicon chips. Carbon nanotubes with semiconductor properties can be made into transistors much smaller than current silicon transistors, increasing the number of transistors that can be placed on a single chip.

Silicon, the main material used in semiconductors, does not emit light, and therefore can't be used in optoelectronic products, Avouris said. The capability of these nanotubes to generate light means the same type of material is suitable for both electronic and optoelectronic uses, he said. Optoelectronic components include solar cells, light-emitting diodes (LED), and optical-fiber communications products.

Current optical-fiber communications devices are much larger than those that could be constructed from carbon nanotubes, said David Tomanek, professor of physics at Michigan State University. Carbon nanotubes could allow the manufacture of extremely small optical fibers, allowing a greater number of fibers to be placed in a smaller device, he said.

The more fibers in a communications device, the larger the pipe for information to flow through, Tomanek said.