DARPA, the United States military’s R&D division, has been awarded a Guinness World Record for creating the world’s fastest solid-state chip, clocked at 1THz (or 1,000GHz). Computers and radio systems that operate up in the terahertz range have some powerful potential, from the creation of handheld tricorders and security scanners through to wireless networks that are hundreds of times faster than 2.4 and 5GHz Wi-Fi. DARPA has been interested in terahertz chips for a long while now—not so much for super-fast computers as for creating radio waves in the submillimeter-wave terahertz range. These waves (aka T-rays), as far as the military is concerned, are a prime way of supercharging everything from radar to imaging and reconnaissance and even ultra-high-bandwidth wireless networks. Basically, because the wavelength of T-rays is so short (less than a millimeter), the rays can provide much higher resolution than, say,