What can we see with light?

I See Light ~ I See Color

“Your nose is green on one side and purple on the other,” Chance yelled out. “Your hands are weird. Your thumbs are orange.” Chance and I were looking through a prism at one another for the first time and laughing. Some of the other children were watching the small animals playing on the ground in the bright summer light. “That squirrel is rainbowed,” they yelled out in excitement. “Hey, you’re way over there.”

Rose red light and lemon yellow light looked like they were pouring out of things; things like leaves, branches and shoe laces. Tangible things. Blueberry blue and grape purple layers of light as thick as your thumb curled around shadows. Intangible things. This tiny prism had suddenly rolled us out of our familiar world where leaves are green and noses are fleshed and we found ourselves eye deep in color, colored light.

Our familiar world was now very strange. Our everyday world had vanished. It had vanished with the blink of an eye. Trees were not barked. Instead, they were wrapped in red, orange and yellow light on one side of the trunks, and green, blue and purple light on the other side of the trunks. The yellow petals of the Black-eyed Susan of summer were rimmed with red light on one side and green light on the other side. Miner's lettuce along the meadow's edge was shining brilliantly with yellow light on one side of each leaf and blue light on the other side.

The children anxiously called out the names of the colors of light as if they were naming the colors in a new crayon box. "I see blue. I see red. I see green." I too began naming colors of light while imagining that I was looking, not at colors in a crayon box, but rather, at the vivid red of expanding universes and the mysterious blue of nuclear energy, of spectra of colored light streaming out of the atoms in the stars, the rocks under my feet, the matter in my hair, my skin-- every tiny piece of matter in my body.

'It's like Disneyland,"Jill shouted in a rush of excitement. "There’s color everywhere I look."

"It's like fairyland." Serene stood close to me, quietly looking through her prism at the summered meadow in amazement. "I want to take this, all of this, to heaven with me," She whirled around to Nissa with a boldness that was at odds with the soft folds of her lilac ballerina skirt. "Fairyland," she squealed out.

"Light. It's light. It's everywhere." Joshua could not wait to show his mother. "It's on the bark. See. It's on the flowers, and on my hands even." He shoved one of his hands out in front of him, displaying it boldly as if showing her his muscles.

“What is really happening anyway inside this prism?" Joshua’s mother asked me while looking at a young redwood through a prism of her own.

I took a prism up to my eye and looked through it before I began to answer. “Each time I look through a prism I am reminded of two fundamentals in the physical universe,” I began. ”The first one is captured in the following expression ‘Between us two there is nothing between that doesn’t belong between us'. I waited then repeated the expression slowly, 'Between us two there is nothing between that doesn't belong between us.' Meaning, between you and the physical universe there is nothing between but energy and information. Universe is rich with information and energy.” By now she was turning her head away from the redwood and was looking at the entire meadow through the prism. “When I look through a prism I can see that it is flooded with the energy of light. It is rich with this raw energy that I can't touch, can't taste, can't smell, can't hear, can't feel with my hands, pick up and put in my pocket. It is rich with information that doesn't command me to taste it, touch it, listen to it, or smell it. It is just raw energy.” Now she was looking straight at me. “The second fundamental thing that I am reminded of when I look through a prism is: There is order in the universe. Nature flashes order every time I look through a prism. Look at that flower over there through the prism. The one with the white petals. I think it is a rock rose. You can see different colors of light layered on top of the stem, the leaves and the petals. And they are ordered from red to violet.

This photo is of a rainbow over Idaho on June 3, 2006. See the order of the colors? What information is in this order? How is it that we can harvest this energy and invent marvelous things like lasers, telescopes, microscopes, just to name a few? Your child can understand the information in a rainbow. All you have to do is involve your child in the bending of light, or refraction. Refer to:

StarChild Science: Teach Your Own Chapter 1

“Yes. I see the order. But what does that tell you? Why is that a fundamental?” she asked.

"It is this order in the form of a spectrum that has revealed to us that we are star stuff, we are made of the same atoms as are the stars. This is the major discovery of the last century in physics. A spectrum of light is fundamental to all the atoms in all the stars and the atoms in our bodies. To quote Guy Murchie, ’to all energy and to all interactions between things and things in the world’. We will light up atoms in a few more lessons and see order spewing out of them."

"Atoms? Light up atoms?" she looked at me with a slight smile. "That sounds fascinating. That makes me feel like I'm talking to a scientist."

“Come with me. Bring the children with you. I am going to show you all how light behaves before it enters the prism or a drop of water.” She and the children followed me into the shade of a stand of redwoods. I gave some of the children empty, clear plastic glasses while others, apple juice jars, some plastic empty water bottles and a few of the children got a clear vase. "How many of you think you can catch light in your container?" They looked at me in silence, rather perplexed. "How many of you can catch light in your container?" I repeated. Even though the older children had been around the sun at least eight times and the younger five times, their natural curiosity forced their hands into the air. "Hold the container I gave to you up in the air with the mouth facing my flashlight. I will shine the light from the flashlight into your container." They held their containers up into the air and we watched as my flashlight light moved like a searchlight from apple juice jar to vase to plastic glass, flooding each one with its light as it passed. "When you think your container is full of flashlight light put your other hand over the mouth of the container as fast as you can,” I instructed the children. “Remember, try to keep the flashlight light in the container."

After the mouth of every apple juice jar, vase and plastic glass was covered with a hand, I turned the flashlight off. “Look closely. Do you see any light in your container? Is there any speck of light in your container?” At this point I asked Serene if she had caught light in the apple juice jar. She raised the jar into the air so we could see it more clearly. “No,” she replied softly. “I didn't catch any.”

“Well, maybe it slipped through her fingers,” Chance was always willing to offer a reasonable explanation. “I saw it go straight in. It went straight. I saw it.”

“Well, I know,” Nissa hadn't been more sure of anything in her life. “She's got such a big jar.” The air was suddenly filled with a thousand eyes. Nissa demanded that I shine more flashlight light into her vase over and over until she was convinced that not a speck of light, not a drop was left in the vase. The children tried over and over to catch flashlight light in their container. Finally I said, “If you can't catch this flashlight light, then can you catch some other light? Candle light maybe? Moonlight? Or maybe light from a firefly?” I asked. “Or maybe light from far away from other galaxies.” If moonlight had appeared here and now the children would have tried to catch it. If a firefly flashing its glow were to float by us the children would have tried to catch its light as well. If they could reach up into the heavens they would have tried to catch the light from Venus. They wanted to catch all the different light energies that fathered their world right here in this stand of redwoods on this summer afternoon.

By trying to catch light in a jar, we had cut to the core of the essence of light. We had begun to get a glimpse of the behavior of the fastest thing in the universe; seeing with our own eyes that this fast moving energy travels from one point to another through the soft forest air; seeing with our own eyes that it bounces off surfaces, goes through surfaces lighting up our tee shirts through the bottom of the container or is absorbed by surfaces without making a sound; seeing with our own eyes that not a speck of light was left in any container, not an apple juice jar was weighted down, not a vase was sagging when full of flashlight light.

"Light must be lighter than a cork." I heard Chance whisper to Joshua.

After we tried to catch light in a jar, I gave a prism to the children. "I want you to lay down and look up through the top of these redwoods and tell me what you see. This is a kind of cave and I call it a lightcave."

“Wow, I can see colored light everywhere up there. The clouds are red on one side and purple underneath.” Chance told us immediately while lying down on the ground and looking up through the redwoods. All the other children quickly spread a towel on the forest floor, laid down on it and looked through a prism just like Chance was doing. “See? The colors? That’s information too. Light from the sun too. Not just flashlight light.” Chance's voice was the last voice to be heard for many minutes. We all laid there, cradled in silence, while we watched rainbowed clouds drifting by as slowly as the water in a creek.

“So,” I spoke softly as not to disturb any observation. “You’re right, Chance. Light comes in different colors doesn't it? I can see red light at one end of a cloud up there and purple light underneath it."

"Oh and look at the other cloud. I can see yellow on one end and blue on the other end." Serene wasn't far behind with her observations. "I wish I could take handfuls of those clouds home with me,” she muttered to herself.

After the children left the lightcave they continued to look at everything through a prism as if they were addicted to colored light. "This dandelion flower has green light on one side of the petals and blue light on the other side of the petals. That’s weird information to me." Jill yelled out, pushing aside a giggle..

"Oh, look over here. It’s a grasshopper. And it’s orange, bright orange on one side and purple on the other side.” Serene pulled Nissa closer for a look.

"How did we see the colors inside of a prism? Does it have to do with the speed of light? Or the fact that it is a kind of energy that travels from one point to another point?" Joshua's mother approached me just outside of the lightcave.

"Well, from the experience we just had with trying to catch light what would you speculate about the behavior of light as it passes through a prism?"

"I think it is moving," she began in earnest.

"Good. That is a great start. Movement is the essence of the entire physical world. Energy that is moving. For a complete discussion of this I refer you to my ebook Teach Your Own. In this book you will find the answer to your question about the behavior of light inside of a prism. In fact, you will find other experiences with light and learn more about its behavior."

"You know," she began, “I’ve been thinking about the word ‘energy’. I guess that’s because you focus on energy and information, two things I have thought very little about except when I am tired, or when I don’t want to talk to anyone on the phone.” She chuckled then looked through her prism once again and saw the different colors of light in a new light, so to speak. She saw them as separated energies, but then again, not separated because there was an order to the spectrum. “What is energy anyway?"

In StarChild Science:Teach Your Own I address that particular question right away. “Classically, energy is defined as the capacity to do work.” I began at the beginning. “When you think of work you can readily see that it is movement; movement against the resistance of an opposing force. As you sensed earlier, movement is the key word here. Without movement of energy there would be no work done to oppose forces and there wouldn't be any 'thing', any 'things' I should say, in the universe. Universe would be blah, gray, have nothing in it. There would be no atoms to make molecules; no plants to make sugars and starch molecules for animals and humans to eat, and no humans to understand and appreciate the beauty in the universe.

The prism, flashlight and diffraction glasses are only $8.75. Your chid can experience both refraction and diffraction as well as have a perfect little flashlight all his/her own!

Click on any of these images to go to catalog.

I find that when a prism is made to go around a child's neck, it is far less prone to being lost or damaged. I drill a prism at the top and place an eye into it. Then I string a cord through the eye so a child can wear the prism around his neck. You never know when you might want to look at something through a prism.

“The best way I can answer your question about light traveling through a prism and producing a spectrum is to go back to a childhood experience that I had in the cob-weather of Saskatchewan, Canada. When I was around ten I would sit for hours at a time on the top of a hill and watch a vast field of wheat pulsate in the wind. I was captivated as ripples in the wheat grew then disappeared, grew once again then disappeared.

"I was mesmerized as I watched wave after wave travel through the wheat field without once carrying with it a single blade of wheat. Even as young as I was, I intuitively knew that each wave was not a thing, tangible thing like a piece of gum or a bicycle. It was not made of some material stuff. Each wave was energy that was moving, moving through the wheat field. And this movement had a pattern. It created areas of high activity with calm areas in between. And these highs and lows moved through the field continuously.

“When we relocated down to California, I found myself watching ocean waves for whole afternoons at a time under blue, sunny skies. Again, I noticed not a single piece of kelp, not one sea otter or boat would be carried along with a wave. They, like the blades of wheat, were left behind. I could see that

the waves were not the ocean just as they were not the wheat. They passed through the ocean just as they had passed through the wheat. I didn't know it at the time but I was watching each ocean wave borrow the water as it traveled through the water just as I had watched each wheat wave borrow the wheat as it traveled through the wheat. I was twelve years old before I found myself not thinking of things anymore but thinking of non- things, not of thinking of tangible objects to thinking of processes. I guess you can say I started feeding on 'process' then and it has captivated my attention ever since."

I reached into my lessons basket and drew out a diagram of a wave. “The energy we call light also travels in the form of a wave. Each wave of light has high parts called crests and low parts called troughs. Ups and downs. This is a pattern that all waves have.

"A wave is an interesting phenomenon in that it is larger than itself. It can separate itself from its source and carry information away. Remember the light from the flashlight? Waves of light carried information away from the flashlight and entered our jars, some of it went through the bottom of our jars and lit up our tee shirts.

"Notice in this diagram that a wave has an up and a down to it. A wavelength is made up of an up, a crest, and a down, a trough. As it moves along it manifests a frequency, the number of ups and downs that pass a certain point in a unit of time, say one second. Our eyes have cone shaped cells in the back of the retina that can respond to a range of frequencies from red light all the way to the higher frequencies of violet light. This is the visible spectrum. As you go from red light to violet light the wavelengths become shorter and shorter while frequency and energy increase. When the cone shaped cells are stimulated by these frequencies they send chemical messages to the brain and the brain interprets these messages as 'colored light'."

Joshua’s mother interrupted me with such abruptness it startled me. “So a white beam of visible light like from the flashlight is a mixture of seven visible colors. And each color has its own wavelength.“

“Yes." I reached into my lessons basket again and took out a model of a lightbeam I had invented for the children. I called over to Nissa and asked her to hold it up to her eye and bend it. "This lightbeam is just a model. Models are used all of the time in science to help illustrate certain phenomena. "Nissa, bend the white ribbon slightly and let's see what happens to the colored ribbons inside of it." She obliged and bent the lightbeam ever so slightly. "Oh my. The colors separate out and now you can see all seven of them." Joshua's mother wanted a lightbeam of her own so we set about making one for her.

As we closed the edges of her lightbeam firmly with masking tape, Nissa began to draw a rainbow on the white ribbon of her own lightbeam. "I know what I'm going to do with my lightbeam. I'm going to hang it around my neck so everybody can see what happens to white light when I bend it," she told Joshua's mother.

“I see now. With that model I can see that visible light is made up of seven different colors or wavelengths. And when white light bends all the seven different wavelengths separate out into a spectrum." Joshua's mother leaned in closer to the lightbeam and added, "I can see the order too."

Our ebook StarChild Science: Teach Your Own gives you many hands-on experiences with light and bubbles.

"After entering the prism all of these different colors, all of these different wave- fronts of light are bent, or as scientists say, 'refracted’, by different amounts. This bending causes the wave- fronts to change direction.” I reached into my lessons basket again and pulled out an illustration for her to follow. “Take a close look at this illustration of the bicycle wheels and the sidewalk.”

She turned to the illustration and immediately saw what she had seen many times with Joshua while watching him ride his tricycle in front of their house. "This is a familiar scene for me. Whenever one of the wheels of Joshua's tricycle would drift off the sidewalk and into the grass he always turned and slowed down. If he was going real fast his tricycle would tip over and he would end up crying."

"This picture gives the classical description of what happens to light as it travels through a prism. The path of light changes direction just like Joshua's path changed direction when one wheel went into the grass. When this happens to a wave-front of light it sets the stage for a change in speed."

"Oh, yes, that too. Joshua always lost speed when one wheel got caught in the grass."

"The same thing happens with light going through a prism. As it travels through the prism the straight beam of white light bends. The red end of the spectrum with its long wavelengths bends more than the violet end of the spectrum with short wavelengths.” I watched her raise the prism up in front of her eyes and stare at layers of red and orange light on top of Joshua’s blond hair.

"Each color of light, each wavelength of visible light, now travels at a different speed. This creates a 'speed gradient' inside the prism. Some wavelengths of visible light are now traveling slower than others. The 'speed gradient' allows the wavelengths to separate, creating a multicolored band or spectrum. This spectrum of colors is then scattered inside the prism. The same thing happens with drops of water to make a rainbow."

"I can see that there is energy, the energy of light, and information, The Information here is in the form of a spectrum isn't it?"

"Very good. Yes. That's the information. Now you are getting the hang of it."

"It is an interesting world, this world of light waves. I had no idea all these things were happening with light and the prism. I can't believe it." The degree of her own ignorance had suddenly magnified in front of her. "But I do want to be able to answer Joshua's questions about the world as he grows up. The other day he asked me about the energy crisis. I really couldn't tell him much because I don't understand it. And now, coming into this class all I hear about is energy and information. It sounds to me like there is no energy crisis. There is energy everywhere." (click on rainbow picture to see video of children making a model of a light beam)

"Energy is abundant in universe. You are right. It is just that we have depended on one kind of energy source that is finite. There is a limit to how much fossil fuel there is under the surface of the earth. There is only so much oil available. We didn't realize this soon enough."

"The news media is flooded with news about rising gasoline prices, with stories about disastrous things that are going to happen in the near future because we are running out of oil." She found herself frightened and overwhelmed again. She often wondered what life was going to be like for Joshua's children and their children. Would we ever get out from under these terrible times? she asked herself frequently.

"I'm an optimist. I think we can make it but it isn't going to be easy. Our children are going to have to understand nature's ways much better than the schools are preparing them to if they are going to solve the problems we have created. To my way of thinking, if our children understood that energy and information are what is between nature and themselves then they would not be put off by science. They would realize that universe is full of energy. Energy is everywhere. To me, this one realization would inspire them to find other sources of energy. There is no shortage. Not really."

"I agree. I don't know one parent who thinks we are doing a good job teaching our children science. Everyone knows our children are scoring so low now we are behind the Indian kids from India and the Japanese kids. Summer camps are springing up all over this country that are science summer camps. Parents pay as much as $4000.00 for one summer for their child to attend and learn good science This is crazy."

"If you are going to teach a child anything you have to draw on similarities, a sound story line, have numerous small experiences wrapped around the story line. When I started thinking about designing this science program I realized that if I started with a program that studies light first thing then everything else will fall into place."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean Einstein's famous equation is a key expression for my program. It expresses the relationship between energy and matter. Einstein discovered that matter is a form of energy. Energy can turn into matter and matter can turn into energy when it is traveling at the speed of light. Particles such as electrons, whether they are inside of an atom or outside in an electrical circuit, and protons inside the nucleus of an atom are created by the energy of light, photons of light, Also, the motion of electrons causes them to emit light or absorb light. To me, light was involved with too many things to ignore it as being the prime energy to begin studying in a science program.

"I learned early on that the behavior of particles and that of light is similar. We have found the similarity and that is waves. Electrons move in waves just as light moves in waves. This was an important realization for me as a homeschooling mom because I knew then I had to create a method of teaching science that was based on information and energy.

"So wavelike movement is kind of basic to your science program."

"Yes, indeed. It is not kind of. It is basic. That is a very important point."She cocked her head as if she heard a new sound in the forest. "A wave is fascinating to me. One fascinating thing about a wave is that it can do things that matter cannot do because it has no location. It is energy that is traveling in a particular pattern. In this regard it can have a larger reality than something that has mass like a rock, or an electron or proton inside of an atom. Electrons have mass. They have a location. They are close to the nucleus of an atom or farther away from it. Or maybe they are completely outside of one atom and are being shared by two atoms in a chemical bond .A wave doesn't have any of that. It can go beyond itself." I picked up a pebble and tossed it into the creek. Ripples of circular waves fanned out from a center sending the message 'a pebble just landed in the water' through the water in the the creek. "It can separate itself from its source and travel. Watch those ripples travel. This ability gives a wave the exotic quality that it can affect distant objects with its information or signal. Pieces of matter cannot do this. They are their source."

"Wait a minute." She watched the ripples of water fan out far from the place where the pebble entered the water. "I can see waves don't have a location. They move out like those ripples in the water." As she watched the ripples travel through the water she noticed some of them were arriving on the shore in front of her. They tossed the dry leaves around that were lying on the shore like they were specks of dirt. Some of the leaves were pushed up onto the rocky bank. "I can see how it can affect distant things because it leaves its source and carries its information far away from its source." She found herself watching the surface of the creek much more carefully than before. "That pebble you tossed into the creek was matter." She turned to me, realizing this for the first time. "It plunged into the water and didn't travel after that. It sank. It fell down to the bottom while the wave traveled through the water and over to this side of the creek. Now I can see how a wave can do things that objects cannot do."

"Yes. That's because the wave is not the water. Just as a map is not the land. The wave is a pattern." I watched her bring the prism up to her eye again and look through it with more care than last time. "Let's consider the most recent wave that hit the news media; the tsunami wave in Asia. That wave carried information that a crack in the earth had moved. In fact, it was a 700 mile long rupture in the earth's crust near the floor of the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sumatra. There's no material or 'stuff' in a tsunami wave itself or any other wave. A wave is weightless. A wave exists independently of matter, of the medium it is flowing through. It is a weightless design, a pattern of nature made visible by water, air, wheat, any medium that it passes through."

"The tsunami wave had such power." (click picture to read The Math of Deadly Waves from Science Daily News

"Yes. Waves can be very powerful. They can deliver a message great distances, a signal far far away from their source. They are particularly powerful when they are traveling at the speed of light, which is 670,000,000 miles per hour or Mach 900,000." She turned and looked at me in amazement. "That's how big this number is,“ I continued. “One very good author, David Bodanis in his book E =mc², gives a great example of the curious effects this tremendous speed has. Say you are at a restaurant and a gentleman is on his cell phone a few tables away. It seems to you that you are hearing his voice almost as soon as the words leave his mouth. But sound waves travel through the air at a speed of Mach 1, just a whisper of the speed of light. But the radio signals shooting upward from the cell phone are traveling as fast as light, Mach 900,000. The person this man is talking to, even if she lives hundreds of miles away from the source of the waves of sound, the restaurant, will hear the words before they have traveled a few yards through the air in the restaurant to reach you."

"Wow. That’s a great example.”

"Therein lies the power of a wave. Nature uses waves of light to deliver information. It's highly efficient in that it doesn't require any matter for the signal to be carried. Messages can go though air, water, wheat, outer space, or the inner space of an atom at the speed of light. And it's friction free. There is no drag on a wave going up to a satellite thousands of miles above the earth. I like to think of a wave in the same manner as Thomas L. Friedman thinks of work-flow software. This software enabled us to ''shape things, he writes, to design things, create things, sell things, buy things, keep track of inventories, do somebody else's taxes and read somebody else's X-rays from half a world away." All of these tasks are possible because of the properties of information traveling large distances as a wave. This is the inherent value of waves. They act as a new kind of force."

"So in your science program children become aware of waves because they are what nature uses to carry messages, signals, information." As we started walking toward the children she asked, "What other lessons do you have in store for Joshua?”

"Oh, a few more on light. We do about three more very interesting hands-on experiences with light. In my program you don't need a lot of lessons. That's because I believe it is quality not quantity that is important in any educational program. If you have one or two highly integrated and memorable lessons then you don't need four or five barely recognizable ones. Once the child has the basic knowledge about light we go on to study electricity and magnetism and discover they are connected. One is always with the other."

"And then what?"

"We study local rocks and the minerals inside of them. Then we burn powders which have those minerals in them and watch those particular atoms emit light of different colors."

"Interesting. And then?"

"We study the two molecules that are necessary for life; carbon dioxide and water. We make water from fire and carbon dioxide gas from kitchen substances. Then we return to the forest and feed this precious gas to our favorite plant."

"You feed a plant gas?"

"That's where the plant gets its carbon from, carbon dioxide, so it can build starch molecules and sugars."

"Really? I thought kids produced carbon dioxide gas when they made volcanos in science class. I've never heard of any science class teaching the children that carbon from carbon dioxide gas is the source of carbon for the plant world. And you actually go into the forest and feed this gas to plants? Unreal." She looked away toward the stand of redwoods then swung around and stared at me for a moment. "You sound like Al Gore. I mean he has made carbon dioxide a major player in our survival with his global warming scenario."

"Yes. He has. In fact, carbon dioxide is the most talked about molecule of the twenty first century thanks to Al Gore. Al Gore has zero-ed in on the one molecule that is in our air that retains a great deal of heat, and because of that is causing global warming. To deny global warming is to deny this stark reality. He expresses it this way, “One can only attempt to create one’s own reality for so long."

"For years it bothered me that schools would teach the children to build volcanoes to produce carbon dioxide gas then they just left a wonderful opportunity to teach them that this gas is the source of all the carbon for the plant world. This is the source of carbon to make carbohydrates like sugars and starches. How many children have seen a volcano? Yet the plant world is all around us! I could never understand this oversight.“

“I see your point.”

“Well, after that lesson we put a pair of daddy's socks on and venture into the forest to study seeds, all kinds of seeds."

"Dad's socks on? That sounds interesting."

"We do interesting things in StarChild Science. One mother once told me she would never forget what we did with daddy's socks."

"What did you do?"

"It's in my book, StarChild Science: Teach Your Own."

"After you gather seeds what do you do?"

"We explore their shapes and textures with our microscopes before we plant them. We water them. We create gardens of our own."

"Then what?"

"Then we study animals and how they move and what they eat."

"Then what?"

"The last lesson in this science program is designed to bring together all the other lessons into some coherent whole. We finish with wholeness by making a model of Earth. Then we add various things we gather from the forest onto our planet that we think are important. We use this model to explore the water cycle and the motion of Earth around the sun."

Electrical Engineers And Medical Technologists Create Easier Way To Diagnose Diabetes It projects light into the skin in order to measure the presence of advanced glycation endproducts.   FDA Suggests New Sunscreen Standards Scientists are working on an 'all-day' sunscreen. Someday, we'll have that. But, for now, you got to re-apply."   Metamaterials Found To Work For Visible Light This 6 year old already knows you can bend light. She has even made a model of a white lightbeam and bends it to show the spectrum of colored light inside. So, she will be able to understand the science behind this article about bending light in a few years. StarChild Science gets to the basics early. We encourage a teacher and parent to make a model of a beam of light with a child to encourage a child to imagine what a white lightbeam must be like.   Optical Technique Provides Improved 'Virtual Biopsies' Of Internal Surfaces "Our hope is that, through one minimally invasive probe, clinicians will be able to diagnose and precisely treat diseased tissue while sparing adjacent healthy tissue." Bouma is an associate professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School. My close friend just lost her husband from esophageal cancer. This new kind of light probe could have saved his life. Their two girls are 4 and 6 years old. Ultrasound Generates Intense Mechanoluminescence Have you ever broken a Wint-O-Green Lifesaver in the dark?   Low energy light can be converted into high energy light. Solar panels will become much more efficient and therefore, cheaper to use. Remember seeing al the different colors of light in the prism? What these scientists have done is to change the low energy light into high energy light. It's analogous to taking the red light, low energy light, and changing it into blue or violet, high energy, light.   Hawaii Island Dims Lights to Save Crashing Birds Kauai Hawaii needs the new 'wildlife friendly' bulbs in the worst way to protect this Hawaiian petrel chick.   Shedding light on call to ban bulb "The environmental costs of lighting should be shared by all light bulbs, if well-intentioned laws are not to hinder efforts to save energy."   How does this happen ? What is it about light that allows this to happen? Read chapter 1 in StarChild Science: Teach Your Own to find out.   Sunscreens are not doing the job? The terms "waterproof", "all day protection", "sunblock" are far from the truth. Once you know the frequencies in light are separate from one another, then you can understand this article and why the sunscreen companies are fighting in court. Your child's protection from the sun by using sunscreens depends upon the court's ruling.     Next-generation cameras inspired by fruit flies and moths Camera lens can fit on a credit card?   Let There Be Light "This is a wonderful display of light invented by Dr. Nakamura "This is not just a source of light that makes enormous energy savings possible. It is also an innovation that can be used in the sterilization of drinking water and for storing data in much more efficient ways," said Shuji Nakamura, a professor and inventor of a variety of new light technologies. (Shuji Nakamura)

Energetic Nanoparticles Swing Sunlight Into Electricity Electricity-generating solar cells are one of the most attractive alternatives for creating a long-term sustainable energy system, but thus far solar cells have not been able to compete economically with fossil fuels. Researchers are now looking at how nanotechnology can contribute in bringing down the cost.   Screen-printed Solar Cells In Many Colors And Designs, Even Used In Windows The solar cells also can be used on windows, providing shading from glare while generating electricity.   Australia pulls plug on old bulbs The decision will make Australia the first country to ban the light bulbs, although the idea has also been proposed in the US state of California.   Adding Color Untangles the Brain’s Gray Secrets “I take a view that this is like the Hubble telescope,” said Dr. Jeff Lichtman, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard who is the paper’s senior author. “We’ve never been able to look at the brain this way before. Why not just start looking and see what we observe?”   Energy-Saving Bulbs Sell Big At Wal-Mart Environmentalists and manufacturers said Wal-Mart's push has helped boost national demand for the efficient bulbs.   Hot off the grid   Power station harnesses Sun's rays 1. The solar tower is 115m (377ft) tall and surrounded by 600 steel reflectors (heliostats). They track the sun and direct its rays to a heat exchanger (receiver) at the top of the tower 2. The receiver converts concentrated solar energy from the heliostats into steam 3. Steam is stored in tanks and used to drive turbines that will produce enough electricity for up to 6,000 homes.   Do Fluorescent Bulbs Light the Way to the Future? "There is a real desire right now for action," Rubin said. By buying CFLs, customers know they are helping curb greenhouse gases. "Everyone can do this."   Military Develops Non-Lethal Ray Gun Waves of eneryg come to our defence once again.   Green-tinged farm points the way "The green fluorescent protein marker gene means we can see instantly if an animal is carrying the gene; there is no need for any biopsies or tests, and as far as we know all of the animals are normal in every other way," said Dr Whitelaw.   Intense Light Still Best Treatment for Winter Blues To beat his blues, Pennycooke creates his own sunshine. He uses a therapeutic light box to replace what the Earth's winter tilt has stolen away.   'Ancient light' takes Nobel Prize "In total there were 1,500 people, so it's a huge team effort that we're recognising today," he told Reuters.   LEDs work like butterflies' wings "The way light is extracted from the butterfly's system is more than an analogy - it's all but identical in design to the LED." Pete Vukusic, University of Exeter     The language of science is universal

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