Features

HP has unveiled a 3D object scanner at Shanghai, named the HP TopShot LaserJet Pro M275, that's suitable for small businesses or home offices. It is equipped with HP top shot scanning technology that captures six separate images of a document or 3-D object and produces one final image. With this technology, SMBs can quickly produce high-quality images for immediate use in printed materials or on the web. "While printing in the traditional sense will continue to be integral to what we bring to the world, we are disrupting the market with leading innovations beyond the page as well," said Amin Mortazavi, general manager, Imaging and Printing Group, HP ME.

Dr. Vertegaal unveiled his paper computer at the Association of Computing Machinery's CHI 2011 (Computer Human Interaction) conference in Vancouver. Being able to store and interact with documents on larger versions of these light, flexible computers means offices will no longer require paper or printers. "This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years," says creator Roel Vertegaal, the director of Queen's University Human Media Lab. "This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen."

Scientists are reporting on a new material containing an ingredient used to make bricks that shows promise as a transparent coating for improving the strength and performance of plastic food packaging. The coating could help foods and beverages stay fresh and flavourful longer and may replace some foil packaging currently in use, they note. The scientists described the new, eco-friendly material in Anaheim, California at the 241st National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS). Ordinary plastic soda bottles tend to loose their fizz after just a few months of storage on grocery store shelves. If manufacturers apply the new coating to these bottles, the material could slow the loss of carbon dioxide gas and help sodas stay bubbly for several more months or even years, the scientists said. "This is a new, 'outside of the box' technology that gives plastic the superior food preservation properties of glass," said Jaime Grunlan, Ph.D., who reported on the research. "It will give consumers tastier, longer lasting foods and help boost the food packaging industry." Harmful mineral oils from the printing inks used on cardboard can migrate into food if recycled cardboard is used for food packaging. It may contaminate food even if the recycled cardboard is used for the corrugated card transport box that holds individual packs. In tests on experimental packs of fine noodles, researchers in Zurich, Switzerland, found that food rapidly absorbed 10 times the recommended limit for concentration of these contaminating oils from the transport box. Many foods such as rice, noodles, cornflakes and muesli are sold in paperboard boxes, where the recommended limit may be exceeded over 100 times. Even more foods are stored and transported in larger boxes largely consisting of recycled paperboard. The research showed that even if the food was contained in clean paperboard boxes from fresh fibres, printed with inks free of mineral oil and wrapped into a polyethylene film (also free of mineral oil); mineral oils from the corrugated card transport box far exceeded the limit.