New ‘rainbow’ chip can make your internet a lot faster: While tinkering with LiDAR technology, scientists claim to have “accidentally” stumbled upon a new chip design that transforms a single laser into dozens of powerful light channels, achieving lab-grade precision on a tiny silicon device. It could eventually replace racks of individual lasers with one compact device, drastically cutting costs and energy consumption in data centers and potentially supercharging internet speeds while shrinking hardware footprints.