'Invisible Glass' Solves Screen Reflection Problems 216
An anonymous reader writes "The days of dealing with very reflective glass panels may soon be behind us. Nippon Electric Glass has used the FPD International 2011 conference in Japan this week to show off its new 'invisible glass' panel. What NEG has done is added anti-reflection films to both the front and back of the glass that are only nanometers thick. Look at a typical sheet of glass and you will see about 8% of the light reflected off of it. With NEG's anti-reflection film in place, that is reduced to just 0.5%."
Re:But Apple (Score:2, Informative)
News? (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't news, this is an advertisement.
1. AR (anti-reflection) coatings [wikipedia.org] have been available on photographic lenses for decades. Even the ultra tiny lenses in your iPhone/Blackberry/Android phone have AR coating. AR coatings are *always* nanometers thick, by their very nature.
2. AR coatings have been available on eyeglass lenses for nearly as long. Most people these days get some sort of AR coating on their lenses.
3. AR coatings have been available on framing glass to protect valuable paintings, photographs, and other items in picture frames for the same scale of time. Drop by your local framing / art supply store and check out what's usually called museum glass.
4. AR coatings were used on nearly every CRT by the time sales started to plummet in favor of the LCD. I use a couple of them in my lab to this day.
5. AR coatings are already available on some laptop screens (eg, by Sony and Samsung, no doubt among others).
So, news about a new technology ("Solves Screen Reflection Problems")? No. Product announcement? Yes.
Re:News? (Score:5, Informative)
I have a painting with AR glass. It's a big improvement over regular glass, but it's way, way more reflective than the glass seen in the photo.
Also note from the WP article you cited:
It is possible to obtain reflectivities as low as 0.1% at a single wavelength. Coatings that give very low reflectivity over a broad band can also be made, although these are complex and relatively expensive.
TFA claims broadband 0.5% reflectivity.
Knowing basic high school chemistry would help (Score:4, Informative)
Coal is mostly carbon. Carbon weighs about 12 g/mol *.
To burn, coal requires oxygen. Oxygen is found in the air. Oxygen has an atomic weight of about 16 g/mol and is found in the form of O2, which weighs twice as much, 32 g/mol.
1 mol C + 1 mol O2 => 1 mol CO2 *
CO2 weighs about 44 g/mol, or about 3.66 times the weight of carbon.
How could burning 1 pound of coal result in 3 pounds of CO2? Well, apparently the coal was only about 82% pure carbon.
* The mole, abbreviated "mol", is just a number of atoms or molecules. A very large number. It's a constant. As a matter of fact, it's exactly defined to be the number of atoms of C-12 in 12 grams of pure carbon-12 [wikipedia.org]. So that equation is perfectly balanced; there are equal numbers of molecules of C and O on both sides.