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This article reports that scientists at Infineon Technologies AG in Erlangen, Germany have fabricated organic transistors and circuits on commercially available cotton-fiber paper. Its fibrous surface is rough, whereas a typical semiconductor substrate such as silicon is smooth.

At a meeting in mid-town Manhattan, Kris Myny picks up what looks like an ordinary paper business card and, with little fanfare, holds it to his smartphone. The details of the card appear almost immediately on the screen inside a custom app. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

September 14, 2000, is a date which will live in, well, "nonfamy," if I may be permitted such a neologism. That day, Microsoft released Windows Millennium Edition, its most forgettable operating system. It was also the day I posted the entry p-book to my Word Spy site, along with the following prognostication: "Within a few years, using the word 'book' without any kind of modifier will be confusing because people won't know if you?re talking about a book printed on paper or one that's printed on electrons (so to speak). So I predict that 'p-book'...will become a common noun that will help us distinguish between the paper and electronic formats." · For a while it looked like I couldn't have been more wrong. The number of citations for "p-book" (as well as "pbook") in the Nexis media database went from 20 in 2000 and 19 in 2001 to just 1 in 2003 and 2 in 2004. But as e?books have become more popular, the word p-book has been showing renewed signs of life, with 20 citations in 2010, 24 in 2011, and 28 in 2012. · Language prediction is a mug's game, but it's certain that digital books (as opposed to printed analog books) are here to stay. Sales of e-books (also known as ebooks or eBooks; there is much hand-wringing in the industry over the correct spelling) have slowed down recently, but they remain the fastest growing (or, for some companies, the only growing) segment of the publishing industry. The past few years have seen a steady increase in the number of writers?amateurs as well as professionals?who are getting into digital publishing (or e-publishing). For many writers, breaking into DIY publishing is a simple matter of saving a word processing document as a PDF, then putting up that file on a website along with a PayPal donation form. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The country's first manned science sub goes for global bragging rights – When a team of Chinese engineers set out to build the deepest-diving submersible in the world, they had never laid eyes on a manned deepsea vehicle. "We had only read some reference papers that had pictures; there was no chance for us to see a real manned submersible," says Cui Weicheng, deputy director of the China Ship Scientific Research Center and project manager for the new sub. "We were starting from the very beginning." [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]