New machine prints sheets of light

[Dover]

NISKAYUNA, New York (AP) -- On a bank of the Mohawk River, a windowless industrial building of corrugated steel hides something that could make floor lamps, bedside lamps, wall sconces and nearly every other household lamp obsolete.

It's a machine that prints lights.

The size of a semitrailer, it coats an 8-inch wide plastic film with chemicals, then seals them with a layer of metal foil. Apply electric current to the resulting sheet, and it lights up with a blue-white glow.

You could tack that sheet to a wall, wrap it around a pillar or even take a translucent version and tape it to your windows. Unlike practically every other source of lighting, you wouldn't need a lamp or conventional fixture for these sheets, though you would need to plug them into an outlet.

The sheets owe their luminance to compounds known as organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. While there are plenty of problems to be worked out with the technology, it's not the dream of a wild-eyed startup.

OLEDs are beginning to be used in TVs and cell-phone displays, and big names like Siemens and Philips are throwing their weight behind the technology to make it a lighting source as well. The OLED printer was made by General Electric Co. on its sprawling research campus here in upstate New York. It's not far from where a GE physicist figured out a practical way to use tungsten metal as the filament in a regular light bulb. That's still used today, nearly a century later.

The invention of the incandescent bulb created the pattern for home lighting: Our light sources are small and bright. Maybe there are a few in the center of the ceiling, and a few in the corners of the room. Because they're too bright to look at, they need to be reflected and diffused with lamp shades and frosted glass.

OLEDs could overturn all that, with broad, diffuse light sources bathing rooms in a gentle glow. Photographers go to great lengths to diffuse the illumination they use when shooting portraits, because they know we look our best in soft light....>

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/10/10/sheets.of.light.oleds.ap/index.html

[grannylib]

1. Wow, very cool! I would love that. I HATE overhead lighting.

[Dover]

2. Well I'll bet this invention makes plug in electric lights obsolete...the 'glowing jellyfish'

'Glowing' jellyfish grabs Nobel

A clever trick borrowed from jellyfish has earned two American researchers and one Japanese-born scientist a share of the chemistry Nobel Prize.

Martin Chalfie, Roger Tsien and Osamu Shimomura made it possible to exploit the genetic mechanism responsible for luminosity in the marine creatures.

Today, countless scientists use this knowledge to tag biological systems.
Glowing markers will show, for example, how brain cells develop or how cancer cells spread through tissue.

But their uses really have become legion: they are now even incorporated into bacteria to act as environmental biosensors in the presence of toxic materials.

Colour palette

Jellyfish will glow under blue and ultraviolet light because of a protein in their tissues. Scientists refer to it as green fluorescent protein, or GFP.
Shimomura made the first critical step, isolating GFP from a jellyfish (Aequorea victoria) found off the west coast of North America in 1962. He made the connection also with ultraviolet light...>

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7658945.stm




And the lightening bug has them all beat.

[bbgrunt]

3. very interesting...

[krispos42]

4. Your entire ceiling could light up.

Sweet!

[Sequoia]

5. Great for camping I'll bet !!

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