A printer that automatically reformats pages to reduce clutter could save on ink and make printouts easier to read. But would you accept a few additional ads on your document in return? Researchers at HP's labs think so.

"By some statistics, almost half of the printouts on HP's printers come from the Web, but the experience is really terrible compared to office or PDF documents," says Parag Joshi, a member of HP's Multimedia Interaction and Understanding Lab in Palo Alto, California. Joshi and his colleague Sam Liu led the development of software that extracts the pertinent text and images from an online article and discards the rest of the page, making for a much cleaner printout. The system removes clutter such as navigation elements or online ads, so less ink and paper are needed.At the same time, the system can insert advertisements chosen to match the content. [Read the full article]

Hawking's prediction came from thinking about what might happen to particle pairs that form at the edge of a black hole. He realised that if one of the pair were to cross the event horizon, it could never return. But its partner on the other side would be free to go.To an observer it would look as if the black hole were producing a constant stream of quantum particles, which became known as Hawking radiation.Since then, other physicists have pointed out that black holes aren't the only place where event horizons can form. Any medium in which waves travel can support an event horizon and in theory, it should be possible to see Hawking radiation in these media too.Today, Franco Belgiorno at the University of Milan and a few buddies say they've produced Hawking radiation by firing an intense laser pulse through a so-called nonlinear material, that is one in which the light itself changes the refractive index of the medium. [Read the full article]