Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have reached a new milestone on the way to optical computing, or the use of light instead of electricity for computing. They explored a new way to select and send light of a specific color using long silicon wires that are several hundred nanometers in diameter (about 1,000 times smaller than a human hair) and their work enabled a new type of nanoscale “light switch” that can turn on and off the transmission of one color of light over very long distances.