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It was the end of 2008, October, right before the holiday shopping season. Talk-show host Oprah Winfrey released her highly anticipated Favorite Things list, with the Amazon Kindle topping the gadget category. • This is the moment that the concept of electronic paper, or e-paper, went mainstream. • But this black-and-white, reflective display that always appeared to be on was invented well before the Amazon Kindle made it famous. Its story began a decade earlier, in 1997, at the MIT Media Lab, when it was created by two students, J.D. Albert and Barrett Comiskey, who were inspired by their professor Joseph Jacobson. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

You wake up with a heavy head. Was it the half dozen glasses of champagne last night or are you getting sick? In your bathroom is a little strip of paper that can tell you for sure. You place it on your tongue and after a few seconds, you pull it back to see the bad news: There's a small green dot next to the word "flu." When you fish your doctor's business card out of your wallet, you notice it looks different from the last time you looked at it. The phone number for his office was originally black. Now it's displayed in blinking red letters, a sign that the number was changed recently. The electronics in this scenario are not far off; in fact the basic technological breakthroughs needed to make them work have all been achieved in the past few years. At the moment the costs are still too high for them to be used in things like business cards or package labels, but remarkable advances in materials science and simpler fabrication methods are setting the stage for a whole new breed of cheap, bendable, disposable, and perhaps even recyclable electronics. And some of the most exciting work in this field is happening with paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bad things happen when demand outstrips supply. We learned that lesson too well at the start of the pandemic, when demand for toilet paper, disinfecting wipes, masks, and ventilators outstripped the available supply. Today, chip shortages continue to disrupt the consumer electronics, automobile, and other sectors. Clearly, balancing the supply and demand of goods is critical for a stable, normal, functional society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE YEAR IS 2028. IT'S 8 P.M. ON A Wednesday night and you're famished. You're staring wistfully at the only remaining item in your refrigerator: a package of sausages with an unappetizing grayish hue. Ugh. Did they always look like that? Are they still safe to eat? In 2018, you'd have to rely on your sense of smell and take a gamble. But in 2028, you might simply wave your smartphone over the package. The smartphone interrogates the package's embedded sensor, which measures the concentration of gases associated with meat decomposition. The smartphone displays the message "Safe to eat within the next 20 hours," and then offers a list of recipes for cooking with sausages. Too hungry to bother with the recipes, you tear open the package, toss the sausages into a frying pan, and discard the package-along with its sensor technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the LCD technology used by manufacturers in the electronic paper (e-paper) display. It states that today's e-paper has readability, low power and liquid crystal display (LCDs) have brilliant colors as well as full video motion. Moreover, the multimode display from Pixel Qi, in San Bruno, California, has taken a brute-force approach, which combines reflective and transmissive liquid crystal technologies.

The article focuses on the liquid crystal display (LCD) created by Mary Lou Jepsen of Pixel Qi Corp. It states that Pixel Qi display offers black and white reflective mode for power savings and sunlight readability electronic paper (e-paper). Moreover, the prototype screen has outperformed 3Qi display and has beaten E Ink Corp. by its color quality and video playback. It mentions that Jepsen is finding ways to improve the screen like adding touch-sensitive overlays and flexible back planes.

Newsha Ghaeli reached down an open manhole one morning in April and grabbed a hose dangling in the rushing streams of the sewer below. As she pulled up the hose, she spotted a wad of toilet paper clinging to its end and recoiled in disgust, accidentally splashing a few drops of dirty water on strands of exposed hair sticking out from her face mask. A Cambridge, Mass., sanitation worker offered comfort: "A little caca won't hurt you," he said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It sounds like a trick question, but it's not: Do white papers need to be either white or paper? Authors are preparing a small but growing number of technical documents today that are intended to be read on a tablet or smartphone screen. And some of these multicolored, multimedia presentations and PowerPoint-style slideshows are having as big an impact as that of any traditionally arranged document. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the decline in industrial researches in electrical engineering in the U.S. as of September 2003. Reasons for the decline in industry papers; State of the research system during the dot-com boom; Examination of papers included in the 2003 IEEE International Communications Conference by the author.

Since the invention of paper money, counterfeiters have churned out fake bills. Some of their handiwork, created with high-tech inks, papers, and printing presses, is so good that it's very difficult to distinguish from the real thing. National banks combat the counterfeiters with difficult-to-copy watermarks, holograms, and other sophisticated measures. But to give money the ultimate protection, some quantum physicists are turning to the weird quirks that govern nature's fundamental particles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Every child's fantasy has now been lived out by engineer Art Thompson and workers at the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson. On 21 March, they hooked up a 13.7-meter-long paper airplane to a helicopter, pulled the airplane to a height of 800 meters, and released it over the desert. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article announces that an electronic paper display, which forms images through expulsion and repulsion of a glob of ink, have been created by researchers in Ohio.

Provides information on a computer system that digitalizes and transmits hand-written messages from Anoto AB in Lund, Sweden. Background of the company; Features of the system; How the system works.

In the 13th century, the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan embarked on a bold experiment. China at the time was divided into different regions, many of which issued their own coins, discouraging trade within the empire. So Kublai Khan decreed that henceforth money would take the form of paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The basic tabletop microscope hasn't changed much in fundamental design in nearly 100 years. At least its design hadn't changed until a Stanford engineer started playing with innovative microscopy ideas in 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early 2010, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published an analysis of economic data from many countries and concluded that when debt levels exceed 90 percent of gross national product, a nation's economic growth is threatened. With debt that high, expect growth to become negative, they argued. □ This analysis was done shortly after the 2008 recession, so it had enormous relevance to policymakers, many of whom were promoting high levels of debt spending in the interest of stimulating their nations' economies. At the same time, conservative politicians, such as Olli Rehn, then an EU commissioner, and U.S. congressman Paul Ryan, used Reinhart and Rogoff's findings to argue for fiscal austerity. □ Three years later, Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, discovered an error in the Excel spreadsheet that Reinhart and Rogoff had used to make their calculations. The significance of the blunder was enormous: When the analysis was done properly, Herndon showed, debt levels in excess of 90 percent were associated with average growth of positive 2.2 percent, not the negative 0.1 percent that Reinhart and Rogoff had found. □ Herndon could easily test the Harvard economists' conclusions because the software that they had used to calculate their results—Microsoft Excel—was readily available. But what about much older findings for which the software originally used is hard to come by? □ You might think that the solution—preserving the relevant software for future researchers to use—should be no big deal. After all, software is nothing more than a bunch of files, and those files are easy enough to store on a hard drive or on tape in digital format. For some software at least, the all-important source code could even be duplicated on paper, avoiding the possibility that whatever digital medium it's written to could become obsolete. □ Saving old programs in this way is done routinely, even for decades-old software. You can find online, for example, a full program listing for the Apollo Guidance Computer—code that took astronauts to the moon during the 1960s. It was transcribed from a paper copy and uploaded to GitHub in 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I'll be honest: when the original AxiDraw came out from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories in 2016, I thought it was cute but a curiosity. My thought was that if you were going to play around with reintroducing the venerable technology of the pen-and-paper X-Y plotter, why not do something really different, like the iBoardBot remote-controlled erasable miniature whiteboard? And the AxiDraw's US $475 price tag felt steep for a spindly-looking contraption that required the user to manually position each sheet of paper, one at a time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the possible use of plastic for newspapers in 2020 and mentions the history and commercial application of electrophoresis.