PRACTICE ‘You are going to read an article about electric paper. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the article. om Pouce ola reef one which best fs each gap (27-83) There's one extra paragraph which You do neh need to use. ‘Tired of staring at the same four walls? Cream is so 1990s, Would a lick of paint help? Don't reach for the brush just yet. With electronic wallpaper, your ‘chameleon-like walls would change to suit the mood or ‘occasion, Flick a switch and watch as cream wallpaper lick it . You'll agai never need to lift a paintbrush ay Scientists have been trying to modernise paper for decades. Most research so far has concentrated on replacing paper with other materials such as plastic and glass. Companies like Gyricon Media in Silicon Valley and E-ink in Cambridge, Massachusetts now offer relatively cheap paper substitutes made of plastic for personal organisers and advertisements. But these substitutes miss one simple point: people like paper. Bia se 8) Paper does have one major disadvantage, though: once text or an image is printed, you can't change it. It's a weakness that Gyrican and E-ink are exploiting with their electronic ‘paper’. But what if you could transform normal, run-of-the-mill paper into electronic displays? | ‘Their current display is an ‘active matrix’ similar to the thin-film transistor (TFT) sereens found in laptops. Each pixel on a laptop screen is made of a liquid crystal display cell connected to a transistor, which controls the voltage across the cell, its chemical properties and hence its colour. Most screens, including TFTS, rely on expensive silicon electronics, but the Scandinavian team, makes both the transistors and display cells by printing semi-conducting polymers onto paper. With just 40 pixels, each slightly larger that a postage stamp, Berggren's display hardly competes with TFT but it is proof that paper electronic displays do work. The real application of the technology, Berggren stresses, is huge low-resolution displays. His team has already demonstrated a seven-segment display similar toa digital clock. ‘There are still some hurdles to overcome though. At present, each pixel takes around five seconds to update. ‘As the speed of the chemical reaction is inversely proportional to the cell area, a pixel as large as a poster or a strip of wall paper would take anything from minutes up to several hours to change hue. This shouldn't be a problem for advertisements that are updaged overnight, but it might limit other uses. meee | More pressing than pretty colours is a power supply. At the moment, the power comes from batteries connected to the paper with crocodile clips which obviously won't work for magazines or cereal packets. Because the displays operate at such low voltages, the team is thinking about using radio waves to transmit power over less than a metre, or attaching flexible, printable batteries, In the latter option, chemical inks act as the anode and cathode and can produce up to 15 volts, which is enough to run the paper displays. aaa Back at home, your livid green walls still don’t look right. Overwhelmed by choice, with a rainbow of colours available at the flick of a switch, a return to cream seems the only sensible choice. Like our inability to give up paper after some two thousand years, old habits die hard. M