wavelength of light

Those mad scientists at Mitsubishi have built the ultimate entertainment weapon—the laser TV! Lasers shooting out of a television screen isnt as scary as it may sound. But it does have one big benefit-color.

Lasers can be tuned to the exact wavelength of light you like—down to the nanometer. So TV makers can produce the ideal shades of red, green, and blue to produce the best colors possibly. Mitsubishi claims this allows them to reproduce about 80 percent of all the colors humans can see—versus about 40 percent for other TVs.

Have you ever printed out an e-mail message or meeting agenda, only to throw it out a few hours later? If Xerox researchers are to be believed, promiscuous printing happens all the time. Based on studies at their own office and elsewhere, the researchers claim that up to 40 percent of all documents printed in offices are discarded within a day.

The company has a solution: erasable paper. Hailed by Time magazine as one of the best inventions of 2007, the paper is coated with a chemical that changes color when exposed to a certain wavelength of light but fades back to its original shade in 16 to 24 hours, making the paper reusable. Of course it doesn't last forever. Dirt happens. But a Xerox
spokesman says the paper can survive about 50 passes through a
printer.

Erasable paper may save trees but not printers: Xerox research suggests you'll want to have a separate printer for disappearing documents. Send your document to the wrong printer, and you could turn your company's annual report into a daily report.—Dawn Stover

Seeing is believing, check out Xerox's video here.