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Scientists have created a printer that uses just water to print instead of ink. After about 22 hours, the paper fades back to a plain sheet of white paper, allowing it to be reused. A group of chemists assert that the “water-jet” technology, that is capable of reprinting numerous times, spares people their money and saves trees.
"Several international statistics indicate that about 40 percent of office prints [are] taken to the waste paper basket after a single reading," Sean Xiao-An Zhang, a chemistry professor at Jilin University in China, who supervised the work, said. The paper alone is not ordinary at all, as it is coated with an invisible dye that shows color when water hits it. Later on, the print slowly fades away within a matter of 22 hours, but disappears much faster if exposed to high levels of heat. According to the designers, the print comes out clear and the technology is not expensive at all. "Based on 50 times of rewriting, the cost is only about 1 percent of the inkjet prints," Zhang said in a video. If one page were reused just 12 times, the cost would only be one-seventeenth that of its inkjet counterpart. Zhang said dye-treating the paper, of the type generally used for printing, added about five percent to its price, but this is more than compensated for by the saving...
