New Type of Paper Won't Let You Just Rip It Apart.

This newspaper is printed on paper made from cellulose fibers obtained from wood pulp. The fibers are fairly large, on the order of tens of micrometers wide, and the resulting paper is fairly weak -- pull on it and it tears easily. Researchers in Sweden and Japan have developed a much stronger paper, made from much smaller fibrils of cellulose. This ''nanopaper,'' they report in the journal Biomacromolecules, has a tensile strength greater than that of cast iron. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]