Yadong Yin [...] and his colleagues at the University of California at Riverside have invented a type of paper that can be printed on using just light, erased by heating, and reused up to 80 times.
Yin created nanoparticles, which are a million times smaller than the thickness of human hair, with the dye Prussian blue, or its chemical analogues, and titanium oxide, which is commonly used in white wall paint. This mixture is then applied to normal paper.
When the coating is exposed to ultraviolet light, electrons from titanium oxide move to the dye in the nanoparticle. This addition of electrons makes the blue dye turn white. Focusing the ultraviolet light into shapes, you can print white words on a blue background—or blue words on a white background, which are easier to read.
If left alone, the paper reverts to its original state in five days. That process can be accelerated by heating the paper to 120 °C (250 °F) for 10 minutes.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday February 05 2017, @11:48PM
Is anyone else seeing a blurry green/white blob as the page-wide image on the article?
It's even captioned with "Soon to be a thing of the past?" but I have no idea what that's supposed to mean...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday February 05 2017, @11:52PM
Ugh, never mind. It's because the stupid page is trying to be clever and fade in the real images, or something, but uBlock stops it from loading its crappy javascript.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @01:09AM
If they're trying to say regular paper is to be a thing of the past, I highly HIGHLY doubt it. How often do you write things down that you expect to be auto-erased within 5 days. (And likely illegible well before that.)
This kind of paper will probably do well for post-it notebooks where you're writing down a grocery list or something, and even with that the cost of the paper and/or needed writing implements can make the entire thing fail commercially.