This post contains spoilers for The Adam Project. The villain in Netflix's The Adam Project is meant to seem like a familiar face, but there's something fundamentally wrong with them--their face, specifically. In the new time-travel thriller, Ryan Reynolds zaps back to the early 21st century to stop the invention of the technology that will eventually ruin the world. The problem isn't the tech itself, which was invented by his late father shortly before his death. The problem is the unscrupulous hands it will eventually fall into--the hands of his dad's ruthless business partner, Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener).

Sub-terahertz wavelengths, which are between microwave and infrared radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum, can be detected through fog and dust clouds with ease, whereas the infrared-based LiDAR imaging systems used in autonomous vehicles struggle. To detect objects, a sub-terahertz imaging system sends an initial signal through a transmitter; a receiver then measures the absorption and reflection of the rebounding sub-terahertz wavelengths. That sends a signal to a processor that recreates an image of the object. But implementing sub-terahertz sensors into driverless cars is challenging. Sensitive, accurate object-recognition requires a strong output baseband signal from receiver to processor.