BEND IT LIKE E-PAPER
Electronic paper is getting almost as bendy as real paper, thanks to a new way of making the plastic electronics that drive the display. The material has a flexible plastic base, rather than the thin steel or glass of other e-papers.
Philips of the Netherlands this week unveiled the e-paper, which is only 0.3 millimetres thick and flexible enough to wrap around your thumb. Previous e-papers broke if wrapped around a drinks can. The ultimate aim is to have a display that can be rolled up into a cylinder the thickness of a ballpoint pen for use in tiny pull-out displays.
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The e-paper鈥檚 top layer comprises 鈥渆-ink鈥� capsules that switch from black to white when an electric field changes. Beneath these is the layer of plastic circuits that apply the field, supported on a thin, flexible film of polyimide plastic. Each layer of the circuitry is made by spinning layers of a conducting plastic onto the substrate. Previously, this circuitry had to be made using brittle organic materials. But Philips has perfected 鈥� and is keeping secret pending patent filing 鈥� a combination of flexible organic materials that works on the delicate polyimide film (Nature Materials, doi: 10.1038/nmat1061).
THE HEADBONE鈥橲 CONNECTED鈥�
Worried about mobile phone radiation? If so, skip this story. The Japanese company Sanyo has this week begun selling a mobile phone using your skull to transmit sound from a small sonic vibrator directly to the inner ear.
Designed for use in noisy areas, the TS41 is pressed to the forehead, cheekbone, jaw or back of the head. The sound of the caller鈥檚 voice then travels via the bone to the cochlea, bypassing the eardrum. It is the first mobile to use cranio-mandibular audio transmission 鈥� or bone conduction. The phone is already selling well in Japan.
SOAK UP THE POISON
A polystyrene-based resin could help to cleanse lakes and rivers of atrazine, a weedkiller. Linked with cancer and 鈥済ender-bending鈥� effects in fish, atrazine leaks into waterways via runoff. It is being phased out in Europe.
The resin reacts with atrazine, binding it irreversibly. Developer Eric Simanek and his team at Texas A&M University in College Station says resin granules the size of grains of sand were able to extract atrazine from dirty pond water. They hope to apply the resin to fibre sheets which could be left in lakes and rivers to soak up the pollutant.
