On a 1990 episode of the BBC TV show Tomorrow’s World, presenter Peter McCann showed off a new plastic named “Starlite” in a rather unusual way: by pointing blowtorches at a pair of eggs. While one egg shattered in seconds, the other stolidly bore the heat, glowing red hot as the flame hit it for minutes on end. More surprisingly, the egg’s shell was no more than warm to the touch after the blowtorch was removed, and when cracked open hadn’t even begun to cook. This egg was coated with Starlite, a plastic developed by Maurice Ward who was an eccentric former hairdresser from Hartlepool, northern England.

An article in New Scientist describes how Ward negotiated with the British Department of Defence, Boeing, and even NASA but gained a reputation for being impossible to negotiate with, asking for “£1 million one day, then £10 million the next.” He was understandably self-conscious that he might be unable to protect his property in court when fighting with some of the world’s biggest companies. His belief in the product never diminished, though, with him even approaching BP to suggest that his material could solve the Deepwater Horizon crisis.

Ward died in 2011 without ever commercializing or patenting his revolutionary material. He suggested in an interview with Utah-based K-Talk radio that his family might hold the key to this strong, heat-proof and non-toxic plastic, but they’ve been quiet on their plans ever since his passing.

Artist Tom Sachs’ latest installation could be seen as a “what might have been” if the golden age of space exploration had been allowed to continue unabated. In Space Program: Mars, he has taken on the Park Avenue Armory in New York City — a 55,000-square-foot space — and built up a fully immersive space exploration experience. A lot of this is firmly tongue in cheek, though: from the research tools constructed from everyday discarded objects like umbrellas and boomboxes, to the acronym-laden naming scheme (like the golf-buggy based Mars Excursion Roving Vehicle, or MERV, or the MILF fridge), but there’s a definite sense of retro noststalgia about the whole project.

Space Program began in 2007, though it has grown significantly since its first exhibition. Sachs uses plywood to create the mounds and craters of the mars floor, while an audience looks on from a NASA-branded tier of seats. The NASA logo is everywhere here, and the exhibition acts as a poignant comment on whether our imagination, ingenuity, and drive matches that of the Apollo missions of the 1960s — especially following the closure of the space shuttle program last year. Space Program: Mars runs until the 17th of June, with tickets available from the exhibition’s website.

Researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology have achieved 3Gbps transfers over a 542GHz wireless connection, which falls into the 300GHz-3THz band that’s classed as terahertz spectrum. This doubles the previous record held by chipmaker Rohm, set back in November, which managed 1.5Gbps transfers on a 300GHz connection. As with that record, these impressive speeds come at a price — the connection will only work over a range of about 10 meters (just over 30 feet) before it becomes affected by interference. However, this massive short-range bandwidth could be perfect for transmitting media from your AV rack to your TV, or for super-fast Wi-Fi Direct transfers.

The enormous speeds were gained through the use of a resonant tunneling diode, or RTD. This component acts as an oscillator, transmitting electro-magnetic signals at very high frequencies as it vibrates. The RTD was developed especially for the project, and replaces other far more complex systems like quantum cascade lasers.

It’s clear that terahertz transfers are the next big thing in wireless communication, with AT&T even holding a conference in December that dubbed the band “the next frontier for radio.” The interest in terahertz communication is so widespread not only because of its speed, but because it’s unregulated around the world, meaning that the white space is widely available. The project’s leader, Dr Safumi Suzuki, says he believes that “everybody will use products related to THz technology within the next decade”.