Optics

Wall Street has seen the light, and it's hurtling down fiber-optic lines, bringing fast Internet access to a growing number of speed-hungry customers. Now investors are racing to buy shares of Ortel Corp. and other firms that make equipment for those advanced communications networks. For Alhambra-based Ortel, the boost from traders has been electric, sending the company's share price up nearly tenfold to $60 in a little over six months. In Nasdaq trading Thursday, the stock jumped $12.

Consider some of the things that have bound our nation together: Universal postal service at a flat rate, whether you live in Santa Monica or Sitka, Alaska. Interstate highways, built with taxpayer funds and free of tolls. Regulated phone and electric service, with lifeline rates for the economically disadvantaged. These were all based on a social contract honoring the notion that essential infrastructure should be available to all - indeed, that those normally left by the side of the economic road might be most in need.

Researchers at Bell Laboratories have developed the first practical micro-electromechanical optical switch, which turns the flow of light on and off in the same manner in which a transistor controls the flow of electricity.

An alleged stock tip has gone from a home run to a strikeout for Hall of Fame baseball player Eddie Murray. The onetime Dodgers first baseman agreed Friday to pay $358,151 to settle an investigation into whether he broke insider-trading laws when he bought shares of a Santa Ana company, allegedly on a tip from former major leaguer Doug DeCinces. The Securities and Exchange Commission accused the longtime Baltimore Orioles superstar of making $235,314 in illegal profit on advance knowledge of the 2009 buyout of Advanced Medical Optics Inc. by Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories Inc. Shares of Advanced Medical Optics, a medical eye-products company, shot up 143% after the acquisition was announced.

Since the days of Galileo, astronomers have been plagued by one consistent drawback: the Earth's atmosphere. Starlight can travel undisturbed through empty space for hundreds of light-years. But in the last few nanoseconds before it hits Earth and its telescopes, the light gets distorted by swirling winds and air currents.

Advanced Medical Optics Inc. said it was cutting about 150 jobs, or 4% of its global workforce, to reduce costs. The job cuts and other restructuring activities will result in pretax charges of about $25 million to $30 million this year, the Santa Ana-based maker of eye-care products said in a regulatory filing. Advanced Medical Optics last year mounted, and later abandoned, a takeover bid for rival Bausch & Lomb.

An experimental class at the University of Rochester is helping optics graduate students learn to create viable high-tech businesses. "Optical Enterpreneurship" pairs MBA candidates with the optics students, and takes teams through the steps of construction a business plan--from cash-flow charts to attraction venture capital and to developing a client base.

Gary Patten, 39, resigned as chief financial officer of Sierracin Corp., becoming the fourth CFO to leave the Sylmar-based aerospace and electronics company since 1980. Sierracin said it is looking for a replacement. Patten, who joined Sierracin seven years ago and became CFO in mid-1982, said he quit to become chief financial officer of Optical Radiation, a fast-growing industrial and medical optics concern in Azusa. The move had nothing to do with controversy at Sierracin, he said.

Look inside an expensive camera lens and you'll typically find glass--elaborately ground and coated glass that enables the photographer to shoot in wide angles, at close range or in poor light, depending on the type of lens used. But Lockheed Corp. hopes to produce better, cheaper lenses by using a different medium: liquid.

At his kitchen table, orthodontist Bob Smith tried to solve a problem that dogged him on the ski slopes in the early 1960s by using dental tools and foam to fashion prototypes of fog-resistant goggles. As he developed what is commonly called the modern ski goggle, he often traded early versions of the eyewear for lift tickets. His were the first to feature a sealed thermal lens and breathable foam venting, according to Smith Optics, the company he founded in 1965 in Ketchum, Idaho, to manufacture them.

Seeing the movements of a healthy hand mirroring one's own movements plays a welcome trick on the brains of arthritis sufferers, a new study shows: It reduces the perception of pain. The observation, reported this week at the Society for Neuroscience's annual conference , could offer a safe, inexpensive means of dampening chronic pain by enlisting the brain's power of suggestion. The small  arthritis study, which tested just eight subjects, comes from the lab of UC San Diego neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran -- who first used mirror-based trickery to treat phantom-limb pain in patients who have had an amputation.

Opponents say a plan to use aerial surveillance to monitor neighborhoods in Lancaster raises the potential for government-sanctioned snooping. But city leaders insist the new initiative will be used strictly to fight crime. The aerial surveillance program, slated to begin by May, will involve a piloted Cessna 172 fixed-wing aircraft with high-tech optical equipment that will record the movements of people on the ground. The plane will circle the Antelope Valley city at altitudes of 1,000 to 3,000 feet some 10 hours a day. The technology, developed by the Lancaster-based Spiral Technology, Inc., includes the use of infrared imaging.

Former Angels baseball player Doug DeCinces has agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle allegations that he used inside information to score big profits trading the stock of Santa Ana-based Advanced Medical Optics Inc. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced the settlement Thursday. Authorities said DeCinces, acting on an illegal tip, bought more than 83,000 shares of Advanced Medical Optics in the weeks leading to its 2009 acquisition by Abbott Laboratories Inc. Shares of Advanced Medical Optics increased 143% after a public announcement in January 2009 that it would be acquired by Illinois-based Abbott.

With the advent of the Internet, new-home marketing has changed drastically over the last few years. Yet one thing remains constant: the model home. Builders aren't putting up as many of them as they did when the market was flourishing. Nowadays, one model might suffice when three or even four were necessary a decade ago to showcase a builder's wares. After all, sample homes are expensive to carry, let alone outfit, and construction money is tough to come by these days. Still, more often than not, models are decorated to the hilt.

A gunman targeting his live-in girlfriend opened fire at a fiber optics manufacturing plant Monday, killing two people and wounding four others before turning the weapon on himself, police say. The gunman was identified by police as Robert Reza, a former employee of Emcore Corp., where hundreds of workers fled after the shooting broke out shortly before 9:30 a.m. "We believe it is a workplace domestic violence situation," Albuquerque Police Chief Ray Schultz said, adding that the girlfriend, who had told co-workers that she feared for her safety, was among those wounded.

Its vision is flawed and it is a little jittery, but the Hubble Space Telescope celebrated its first birthday last week, and its creators would like the world to know that it is producing scientific results. "A lot of people have the idea it's dead and useless," said Ed Weiler, project scientist. On the contrary, he said, the $1.5-billion instrument is now spending more than half its time "doing science."

HealthTrade International Inc., a Mission Viejo trading company specializing in medical and health care equipment, said it has recently signed an agreement to provide artificial lenses to several hospitals in Southern China. Dr. Bart S. Chapman, president of HealthTrade, said the value of the contract is small but may open the door to future sales in China. He said Chinese officials have already indicated that they plan to order more artificial lenses next year.

Google Inc.'s announcement last month that it would build a high-speed broadband network set off fierce competition among 600 communities, the Internet powerhouse said in a blog post Friday. Google hasn't been specific about the criteria in selecting which community will get the experimental fiber optic hookup, simply saying it wants to increase Internet access and spur competition. The service would offer connection speeds of 1 gigabit per second -- 100 times faster than many high-speed home connections, the company said.

Three American "masters of light" who created technologies that made it possible to capture digital images and transmit them and other electronic information long distances today won the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics. Charles K. Kao, a naturalized American who did most of his work in England and Hong Kong, will share half the $1.4-million prize for demonstrating that highly purified fibers of glass can carry light waves for long distances, setting the stage for the globe-girdling fiber-optic networks that transmit the bulk of everyday television, telephone and other communications.