Doc Brown's flux capacitor? A blinged-out religious relic from the future? A Tron 2.0 prop?

Sci-fi tales are full of electromagnetic-pulse devices that blow out every computer from here to Kalamazoo. But US Army researchers are testing a short skinny high-powered microwave bomb that could actually be used in combat.

Researchers at Boston University (whose football mascot, incidentally, is a giant light-emitting germanium diode) think they'll be able to combine LED bulbs with wireless networking technology, allowing for nearly complete ubiquity of wireless access points. The technology will be able to communicate data with visible…