Trying to read an unwieldy newspaper on a crowded train is trickyand annoy your fellow passengers. But researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in California have the answer. They say a newspaper could be beamed by radio to a 40-centimetre wide plastic rod called a "newsreader". Inside the rod is a coiled transparent rubber sheet coated with plastic. The sheet contains millions of microscopic metal balls in oil-filled cavities, each ball coloured half-black and half-white. Electric fields simply flip selected balls over so that they look either white or black and display the words in response to the radio signal. "You have a row of electrodes along the slit in the newsreader," says Xerox's Nick Sheridan. "With those, the page can be written as you pull it out."
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