Getting Submarines Talking to Airplanes

Until recently, there has never been a way to send communication signals between air and water. If an underwater submarine passes beneath a plane in the sky, there's been no way for them to communicate with each other without having the submarine surface, jeopardizing its location to an adversary. Fadel Adib and Francesco Tonolini of MIT Media Lab, have developed a way to connect these seemingly dissonant mediums through something called Translational Acoustic-RF communication, or TARF. Using sound waves from underwater, and Radar from the air, messages can be transmitted by creating faint ripples on the surface of the water.