No ink required: paper can be printed with light

One possibility is to take advantage of the color-switching ability of certain chemicals when exposed to light, although in the past this approach has faced challenges in terms of stability, limited reversibility, high cost, toxicity, and difficulty in applying the coating to ordinary porous paper.
The light-printable paper developed in the new study improves in all of these areas, bringing the technology closer to applications, which could include any medium on which information is printed and needed for only a short time.

"We believe the rewritable paper has many practical applications involving temporary information recording and reading, such as newspapers, magazines, posters, notepads, writing easels, product life indicators, oxygen sensors, and rewritable labels for various applications," Yin said.

The new coating consists of two types of nanoparticles: those made of Prussian blue, which is a common inexpensive, nontoxic blue pigment that turns colorless when it gains electrons; and titanium dioxide (TiO2), a photocatalytic material that accelerates chemical reactions upon UV light exposure.

When the Prussian blue and TiO2 nanoparticles are evenly mixed and coated onto paper, the plain unprinted paper appears solid blue. To print text or images, the paper is exposed to UV light, which photoexcites the TiO2 nanoparticles. These nanoparticles then release electrons that are picked up by the adjacent Prussian blue nanoparticles, which turn from blue to colorless.

Since it's easier to read blue text on a colorless background than colorless text on a blue background, it's the background rather than the text that is typically printed by light, turning colorless (although the paper can also be "reverse-printed" to show colorless text on a blue background). Different colors besides blue can also be achieved by using Prussian blue analogues of various colors.

Once printed, the paper retains its configuration for at least five days with high (5-µm) resolution, and then slowly fades back to solid blue through oxidation under ambient conditions. To erase the paper more quickly, the paper can be heated for about 10 minutes to return it to its solid blue state.

The researchers predict that light-printable paper will be inexpensive when produced on a commercial scale.
"The light-printable paper is indeed cost-competitive with conventional paper," Yin said. "The coating materials are inexpensive, and the production cost is also expected to be low as the coating can be applied to the surface of conventional paper by simple processes such as soaking or spraying. The printing process is also more cost-effective than the conventional one as no inks are needed. Most importantly, the light-printable paper can be reused over 80 times, which significantly reduces the overall cost."
Future plans focus on bringing the technology closer to practical use.

"Our immediate next step is to construct a laser printer to work with this rewritable paper to enable fast printing," Yin said. "We will also look into effective methods for realizing full-color printing."

>>107575
>What is a photo

What is email,blog and PDF

I uh... ask for paper to keep a pretty permanent record. Imagine a 30 page contract or 200 page bill printed on this stuff... gone in 5 days. Anything labeled with this stuff after 5 days, unknown substance from an unknown time.

Imagine a world that used this for newspapers. The only source would be an online one that could be altered easily, a printed article would need all the copies altered. Collecting printed information as a hobby wouldn't exist. It's a fascinating technology but the suggested applications are utter garbage.

>>107607
This

>>107607
>>107619

The suggested application is to reduce waste, utter garbage indeed

A year's worth of waste paper in the USA could be stacked up to make a 12 foot wall from coast to coast, it's 50% of business waste and 33% of municipal waste, and manufacturing paper takes 650+ gallons of oil and 5,000 gallons of water per paper ton

But if it was reusable then we wouldn't have to throw it all out

You would have to be literally retarded to print a contract on a non permanent medium, and I sure hope you're using acid free paper for that matter, and newspaper has inherent vice built into it; it's already not permanent, this is why microfilm exists

Nobody is suggesting that all paper should be replaced with Snapchat paper overnight, but as far as a technology goes it's pretty damn useful

>>107599
I'll take "things which are not physical, permanent forms of media" for 1000, Alex

>>107642
>it's 50% of business waste and 33% of municipal waste, and manufacturing paper takes 650+ gallons of oil and 5,000 gallons of water per paper ton
The paper is biodegradeable

The water turns into rain (magic)

Burning oil is greening the Earth. Plants love it.

>>107666

shut the fuck up

>>107671
>not recognising such an obvious joke

>>107675
I'm not who told you stfu but the joke was awful

>>107575
>There is also the issue of deforestation: in the US, about one-third of all harvested trees are used for paper and cardboard production.
and the largest part of that is from forests planted specifically for that industry, so actually the paper industry creates forests

>>107671
>i dont like facts

Fuck it

http://www.euronews.com/2017/01/04/a-laser-printer-without-ink-or-toner

I'd prefer this for inkless printing.

>>107607
They could come up with a seal to put around the paper to stop oxidization of the paper.

>>107575
These university morons keep trying to make paper alternatives, when these shouldn't even be using substances that become unusable within 100 years.

They should be using creating imprints on glass that can be read and projected. What can be compared to a memory card, but with tiny imprint of a binary code, that can be translated and projected via a display.

>>107575
What about paperless offices? More lies and bullshit from retards: like the retard that predicted we'd never need more than 64K memory. That guy doesn't merely look old, perverted and diseased, he looks like a dead thing from some zombie show. Best thing he'll ever do for society is die. Hopefully he does us this favor soon.

>>107642
A better alternative would be to not use paper or a paper substitute but to build the functionality into a product.

Keep the paper mags and newspapers but print less and have an online database and promote that.
Use a washable marker for temporary labels, like a tiny whiteboard on the container or shelf.
Whiteboard instead of a notepad.
Electronic displays for posters.

I used the example of a contract/bill so that you could abstract the idea that people would need time to not only consume the media, but also reference it later down the line. You can't do that with media on a temporary medium.

>>107732
What's the point then? The original idea is to reduce paper by replacing paper with this reusable and temporary paper-like product. Now you need to create another product to prolong the life of the reusable paper? How does this not sound wasteful?

>>107607
Do you fucking heat your paper to 120 Celsius?

>>107711
Monoculture forests which aren't that good.

>>107735
Microfilm brah

>>107935
Fucking paper to heat it to 120 Celsius is inefficient, I recommend using a heating element to uniformly heat the entire page using dirty coal electricity. That way you put pollution in the air and not the landfill.

>>107940
Or you could wait 5 days for the ink to fade.

>>107945
OH, you... I got a good giggle from that.