starting with some breaking news from yesterday.

There was a mass shooting at a conference center in San Bernardino, California.

It's a city east of Los Angeles. Police say, quote, upwards of 14 people were killed,

and upwards of 14 more were injured.

Officials did not know yesterday if this was a terrorist attack.

Witnesses reported seeing three gunmen, who were believed to drive away in an SUV,

after the shooting. The CNN security analyst says that suggests the attack

was planned in advance. Teachers, cnn. com will have the latest details on this incident.

Next today, after the November 13th terrorist attacks in Paris,

France's government asked its allies to increase their military action against the ISIS terrorist group.

The governments of Britain and Germany are considering doing exactly that.

And the US is expanding its military involvement in Iraq. America is adding a new strike force

to the 3, 000 plus US troops who are currently in the Middle Eastern country.

After frequent White House denials that US troops would face

combat in Iraq and Syria, today the President is ordering dozens of US special forces

into combat roles involving direct action against ISIS.

These special operators will, over time be able to conduct raids, free hostages,

gather intelligence, and capture ISIL leaders.

The new expeditionary force will number in the dozens.

Those support forces will expand its total footprint to about 200.

This force in the operations, this force will conduct, will provide us with additional intelligence

that'll make our operations much more effective.

Part of their mission, raids like this one in northern Iraq in October.

A daring joint operation involving Kurdish commandos and the US Army's Delta Force,

to free these ISIS held prisoners.

Demonstrating the added danger of direct action, one Delta Force operator,

Master Sargent Joshua Wheeler, was killed.

This new deployment to Iraq is in addition to the 50 special forces

the US is already deploying on the ground in Syria.

It puts everybody on notice in Syria that you don't know

at night who's gonna be coming in the window.

And that's the sensation that we want all of ISIL's leadership and followers to have.

So it's an important capability.

The expanded US combat role comes in the aftermath of Paris

and as progress against ISIS on the battlefield has been halting.

Okay, now for something that blends history, journalism, science, media.

We're kicking off a two part series today

that looks at the past and potential future of communication as we know it.

Most changes in the way two people are able to reach each other

have been tied to and limited by the technology available to them.

Course, it's possible for us to speak to someone else live at virtually any other place on Earth.

What's next could be an illusion.

How we communicate, how we say hello,

how we stay in touch has changed dramatically.

Going back to the mid- 19th century,

it's been something of an epic story.

The telegram developed in 1844 by Samuel Morse, the inventor of the Morse code,

allowed us to stay in touch over long distance.

The first message read what hath God wrought? 1876 saw the telephone ring

for the first time invented by a Scotsman, Alexander Graham Bell.

The first words he uttered, Mister Watson, come here, I want to see you.

By 1960, we could talk to each other from anywhere on Earth

via satellite thanks to the Echo 1 satellite launched by NASA.

The first electronic message, or email, was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson,

an American computer engineer. His message simply said QWERTYUIOP,

or the top ten letters on a keyboard. By 1973,

we had the first cellphone, developed by another American, Martin Cooper.

It was known as The Brick. But the great game changer came in 1991,

the World Wide Web, invented by a British computer scientist Tim Berners- Lee.

It led to everything we have today, Skype, Twitter, Facebook.

A new world of online communication.

So what can we expect next? Well, what better for inspiration than the movies.

Help me Obi One Kenobi. Everybody remembers the scene, Princess Leah sending

an SOS in the 1977 movie Star Wars. Well, a scientist in California

is absolutely convinced that we'll all be communicating just like this holographically, pretty soon.

David Fattal is a French- born physicist.

His field, controlling and manipulating light.

We've invented a new type of display, a holographic display

able to produce interactive holograms at the tip of your finger,

in the palm of your hand, for cellphones and for the future of this place.

Of course we associate holography, the art of making holograms with magic.

Most famously, the Victorian illusion known as Pepper's ghost,

conjured on stage using lights and mirrors. Fattal's discovery is fundamentally different.

The normal display you have a bunch of pixels.

That pixel will look the same whether you look at it from top, from the left, from the right, from any direction.

What we actually do is we actually manage to produce multiple views. The prototype today

has 64 different views. But what that allows us to do is not only perceive the scene in 3D,

meaning the depths, but also that lets you move your head above the display

or rotate the display in any directions and you'll see actually a round object

like it is in the real world. Initiating virtual crime scene reconstruction.

It's something that's been predicted in the movies for a while,

holographic displays in Iron Man, Prometheus, and of course Star Wars.

Help me, Obi- Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope. What's this?

Well, I was about to experience it for myself for the first time,

and crucially unlike the movies, no need for 3D glasses.

So here I am, a guinea pig, in an experiment I'd never thought I'd undertake.

On screen, to my right, the camera is mapping my face.

You can see my face mask, it's captured me.

And that's transferred to a holographic image in front of me.

In fact, I've been transferred, as you can see, into a rather handsome monkey.

And it picks up my gestures exactly. I can move my mouth here and there make,

wiggle my eye brows, kiss a bit. Sadly, the camera is limited.

Not as good as my eyes. Can only see me in 2D, but in reality, this looks like a real monkey.

The aim here is clear.

Communicating by hologram on our mobile phones,

talking to each other from the palm of one hand to another.

They also intend to develop the technology for playing games

and even navigating from A to B.

Fattal and this small young team are working creatively to this end here

in their so- called nano fabrication facility and are well aware they're not alone.

Samsung and Apple have actually filed or are filing patents in this field.

Do you still have the game? Yes. Obviously we think so.

If we thought Apple and Samsung were ahead of us, we wouldn't have a company.

So patents are one thing and then there's actually making things work as you saw. Right?

Making a prototype. It's how you see yourself.

I mean I'm thinking are you part David Blaine, part illusionist.

Serious scientist. How do you see yourself.

Yeah it's 99 % serious scientist and 1 % of an illusionist.

This is how I like to see myself.

All the schools on today's Roll Call segment made a request at cnnstudentnews. com.

From Southeast China, we heard from the city of DongGuan.

It's where you'll find the TLC International School.

In the city of River Falls, Wisconsin, hello to the Wildcats,

great to see you at Meyer Middle School.

And in northern Arkansas, good to see the Panthers today.

Yellville- Summit High School is in the city of Yellville.

Before we go, vanilla, candy canes, sugar cookies,

all smells typically associated with the Christmas season.

How about Texas BBQ sauce? How about infusing your home with the unmistakable

aroma of pigs in blankets? And if neither one of those works for you,

there's always cheesy cheese, as in dude, it smells like cheese in here! Yeah,

Merry Christmas. So do these alternative potato chip flavored options surpass sugarplums

and cinnamon? You'd have to follow your nose to see if it makes sense. But if you think it

pigs the season to be jolly. You've decked you halls with barbecued holly

and you're ready to trim your Christmas cheese, arranging some odoriferous ornamentation may not be more than you can candle.

I'm Carl Azuz for CNN Student News.