Science Fiction Meets Science Reality

Remember the movie “Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home”? Scotty needed to create a tank onboard to house two hump backed whales. He gave the technical specs to a manufacturer to create a sheet of transparent aluminum. A lab at Oxford University has now created such a transparent aluminum sheet. Now a company called Skiff will be releasing an ebook reader later this year which uses a thin transparent metallic layer instead of glass to protect the screen underneath. The silicon thin film transistors (TFT) are also on a flexible stainless steel substrate which makes the whole screen shatterproof and crack proof.