杏吧原创

Trying to read an unwieldy newspaper on a crowded train is tricky鈥攁nd
annoy your fellow passengers. But researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center in California have the answer. They say a newspaper could be beamed by
radio to a 40-centimetre wide plastic rod called a 鈥渘ewsreader鈥�. Inside the rod
is a coiled transparent rubber sheet coated with plastic. The sheet contains
millions of microscopic metal balls in oil-filled cavities, each ball coloured
half-black and half-white. Electric fields simply flip selected balls over so
that they look either white or black and display the words in response to the
radio signal. 鈥淵ou have a row of electrodes along the slit in the newsreader,鈥�
says Xerox鈥檚 Nick Sheridan. 鈥淲ith those, the page can be written as you pull it
辞耻迟.鈥�