Radioisotope thermoelectric generator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qkvoVRdoNg

I watched a Discovery Channel special on the Mars Rover Curiosity. The generators for the extended space exploration missions depend on the decay of radioactive isotopes. Russia uses these to power lighthouses in the arctic. That means China probably uses them to cook with.

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Well I am closing out my two week break between Summer and Fall semesters. I happen to catch an actual educational program on the NASA channel. They were discussing a next generation communications satellite being placed into orbit to upgrade their communications to a state of the art LASER optics network. I was interested in what they would use to receive and process the signal, because we have been learning about semiconductor devices in our Networks class this summer. This is what I found after fumbling through the NASA garbage. 
http://www.ll.mit.edu/publications/technotes/TechNote_NanowirePhotodetector.pdf 
Superconducting Nanowire Photodetector Arrays. 

"An SNPD array can take advantage of a spatially multiplexed approach that allows detection of photons at a higher rate than a single SNPD would support without requiring complex optical coupling techniques typical of other photoncounting arrays. When illuminated by a single photon, only one of the SNPDs loses its superconductive properties. The remaining SNPDs remain available to detect the next photon, while the first SNPD recovers its superconductive properties."

Then the IBM TrueNorth chip with over 4000 cores and 4.5 billion transistors is touted to be the closest thing to the human brain's processing ability http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187612-ibm-cracks-open-a-new-era-of-computing-with-brain-like-chip-4096-cores-1-million-neurons-5-4-billion-transistors.