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The underwhelming box-office debut of Supergirl has drawn an admission of disappointment from DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran , but he stopped short of admitting defeat. Supergirl is the second installment of the recently launched DC Universe franchise, which was set up following the disappointing DC Extended Universe . At a similar point in their respective runs, the DCEU had produced more commercially successful films than the DCU, which began with last year's Superman . That film was directed by Safran's co-CEO James Gunn ; it grossed around $620 million worldwide against a reported budget of $225 million, falling short of the lifetime haul of Zack Snyder 's Man of Steel , which was released in 2013.

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A breakthrough in photonic chips could make large, costly, ultrafast lasers dramatically smaller, leading to portable and affordable imaging, diagnostic and information-processing devices, researchers say.

By using a decades-old overlooked laser architecture, scientists managed to fit an ultrafast laser onto a tiny photonic chip — a chip that uses light, rather than electricity, for computing operations.

In a new study published June 3 in the journal Nature , the team demonstrated that a tiny laser on the photonic chip could deliver 1.05 nanojoules of energy in 147-femtosecond (147 quadrillionths of a second) bursts — thereby competing with the output of laboratory-class ultrafast lasers.

Ultrafast lasers are used in a variety of applications, from precision manufacturing and eye surgery to biological imaging and atomic clocks, but the systems needed to power them tend to take up whole tabletops in labs or factories. Yet the powerful output of these laser pulses made them difficult to miniaturise onto photonic chips.

"For more than twenty years, a high-pulse-energy femtosecond laser on chip was widely regarded as a holy grail of integrated photonics," Tobias Kippenberg , a photonics professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology(EPFL), said in a statement .

"Our result shows that it is not only possible, but that it can be achieved with a surprisingly elegant architecture that the integrated-photonics community had overlooked."

Forward-thinking breakthrough comes from looking back

Photonic chips manipulate light by using microscopic structures called waveguides — usually in the form of optical fibers or etched cavities — to carry information. They aren't particularly novel, and can be found in fiber-optic communications , medical sensors and lidar systems.

But photonic chips have previously struggled when handling high-powered, ultrafast lasers. That's because they need to contain light to extremely small waveguides, leading the light to interact strongly with itself and destabilizing the laser pulses.

To tackle this problem, the researchers looked at a laser architecture called the Mamyshev oscillator , created in 1998 by Pavel V. Mamyshev, a physicist and engineer at Bell Labs.

EPFL's chip-based ultrafast laser operates in a testing set up. (Image credit: Zheru Qiu/EPFL) This oscillator, which has received little attention in the world of photonic chips, works by placing a nonlinear waveguide between two optical filters. This causes a high-intensity laser pulse to expand into a broader range of colors that can then pass through both filters while weaker light, which can cause laser destabilization, is blocked out. This technique essentially means that a high-intensity laser pulse can be maintained.

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Because the Mamyshev oscillator doesn't require extra components to manufacture on a chip, it presents an attractive design for use on photonic chips. And although the laser cavity needed to direct an ultrafast laser is 16.5 inches (42 centimeters) long, it can be folded to occupy around the same area as a match head. This can't be done with conventional fiber-optic-based lasers, often used in photonic chips.

That takes care of the size, but the cost of ultrafast laser systems is another challenge. But because photonic chips can be fabricated using silicon wafers in the same fashion as computer chips, more than 1,000 laser cavities could potentially be produced in a single batch, the researchers said. As such, photonic chips with ultrafast laser capabilities could be produced at scale, in turn reducing manufacturing costs and even expanding their use.

Photonic chips capable of handling ultrafast lasers could, in the future, lead to portable tools for tasks like detecting pollutants or performing advanced medical diagnostics in the field, the researchers noted in the study. The technology also opens the door to smaller atomic clocks that can benefit navigation and future communications.

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Microsoft's habit of adding unnecessary features to Notepad is a symptom of broader bloating in the Windows codebase. But it is possible to go back to basics with a version of the editor that fits in less than 3 kilobytes. Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer comes from an era at Microsoft when Notepad handled the simple stuff, and WordPad handled everything else. "We had some clear rules," said the Task Manager author on his YouTube channel, Dave's Garage. "Notepad was for plain text. WordPad was for RTF. And we were taught how important it was to never cross the streams. "So, Notepad stayed lean. WordPad got the fancy fonts, the spell check, and, for all I know, a recipe card feature." A few decades on, things are very different. WordPad is no more, and Notepad has endured multiple indignities as features have been piled onto it. Heck, it will even come up with Copilot-powered suggestions to tweak writing. Plummer is less than keen on the current iteration of Notepad, "so I rebuilt it from scratch. 2.5 kilobytes. No bloat. No telemetry. No nonsense. Just pure old school Windows done right." The result is TinyRetroPad, a fork of Dave's Tiny Editor (DTE) by Matt Power. Written in assembly and using the RICHEDIT50W from the WinAPI, the application relies heavily on components already available in Windows. There are Open and Save As dialogs. Font selection. Even printing. Plummer said, "Printing in Windows is kind of spooky. It's one of those subsystems that feels like you're opening a hatch in the floor and you discover a second operating system underneath." It looks and feels, as Plummer states, "exactly like you might remember Notepad Circa Windows XP," just with an even smaller binary. We ran up the code, and, after dire warnings from Windows about the safety of doing such a thing, TinyRetroPad ground into life, transporting us back to a time before Microsoft decided that what Windows users really wanted was new features added to simple tools rather than for their operating systems to just… work. Of course, while the binary might clock in at 2,686 bytes according to Plummer (it came in at 2,794 bytes after we attempted to compile it and occupied a mighty 4,096 bytes on disk due to the cluster size), the requirement while running is quite a bit higher. That is fair enough, considering the application demonstrates that the wheel does not need to be reinvented when there are perfectly acceptable components already available in Windows. Plummer asked, "If Notepad was the canary in the coal mine that signaled our descent into mediocrity, then what's the antidote?" To rebuild it without all the fluff accumulated over the years, maybe? The binary for today's Notepad.exe is more than 100 times the size of Plummer's executable, but we'd argue it is not 100 times better. And yes, there are plenty of Notepad alternatives, but few that are quite so aggressively trim. In the current era of skyrocketing storage costs, there is a definite appeal to keeping code lean and binaries leaner. Ditching decades of cruft is simply a bonus. ®