 University of Rochester doctoral candidate. "We don't have complete control over flake motion yet. Sometimes a flake will flip completely over instead of stopping at the point in its rotation that we want it to." PAPER-LIKE VIDEO DISPLAYS The size and shape of flakes largely influence how they move, but making uniform flakes is a difficult task. The initial method for producing flakes required melting the pCLC material and spreading it out at high temperature with a knife edge to form a thin layer or film. This motion helped to align the pCLC molecules uniformly to produce the bright reflection of a given color. The film was then fractured into tiny, randomly shaped flake-like particles by pouring liquid nitrogen over it. Now, the team can create square, regularly sized flakes by molding the mate- rial through the openings of a wire mesh. They hope to make the fabrication process more efficient and to measure the behavior of the new flakes in an electric field to understand the best ways to manipulate them. "When we finally are able to make them behave uniformly," says Kosc, "we'll be able to think more about applications in actual devices." Understanding exactly how and why an electric field causes each flake to reorient is crucial to creating a system that can be used reliably for products that can camouflage a vehicle, store encoded information, or bring the latest news in full color to a folded flexible film in your pocket. 9.9.1 Electronic Paper Display for Mobile Phones A paper-like video display that's fast enough to present video content could allow the development of smaller, less power-hungry mobile phones, PDAs, and related devices with brighter displays. The new display technology, developed by Philips researchers, utilizes elec- trowetting, a technique that's based on controlling the shape of a confined water/oil interface with an applied voltage. With no voltage applied, the colored oil forms a flat film between the water and a water-repellent coating, resulting in a colored pixel. When a voltage i