Lighting the way to skin cancer cure

A breakthrough in organic chemistry has resulted in extremely bright, inkjet-printable red lights – lasting up to 30 hours! The first intended application is for light bandages for treating skin cancer, where the tumour area alone is treated. While the technology is of no use for domestic lighting, it is more than adequate for applications in which the light source is disposable. And a number of applications in smart labelling are already envisaged and doubtless it will not be too long before such printed lights are also seen in greetings cards and night-legible reading matter. This particular set of breakthroughs comes not from the usual OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) teams in Cambridge and Enfield, but from a rival company near Oxford,