Number 285 (Story #3), September 9, 1996 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein THE PROSPECT OF ORGANIC ELECTRONIC DEVICES , mass produced on huge, cheap, lightweight, flexible sheets, has been hampered by the fact that certain components, such as organic LEDs, tend to burn out prematurely; the problem stems mostly from hotspots which develop in the vicinity of undesired impurities. Recently, however, research in a number of labs, such as Kodak and UC Santa Barbara, has mitigated the impurity problem and device lifetimes of thousands of hours have been achieved. Furthermore, full-color displays are possible with organic LEDs; the Pioneer Electronic Corp. in Saitama, Japan has developed a system with 16,000 picture elements (and a lifetime of 5000 hours) based on blue-light emitting diodes. Now researchers are working on improving device efficiency, the rate of light out to the electricity in. (Science, 16 August 1996.)