“
In the bathroom two water tumblers were sealed in cellophane sacks with the words: "These glasses are sterilized for your protection." Across the toilet seat a strip of paper bore the message: "This seat has been sterilized with ultraviolet light for your protection." Everyone was protecting me and it was horrible.
”
”
John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)
“
Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives.
To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates.
'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic.
They've served their purpose.
Nature is unsentimental.
Death is built in.
”
”
Carl Sagan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Earth Before Humans by ANN DRUYAN' 'CARL SAGAN (1992-05-03))
“
...the entire electromagnetic spectrum— from radar to TV, infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, X-rays, microwaves, and gamma rays— is nothing but Maxwell waves, which in turn are vibrating Faraday force fields.
”
”
Michio Kaku (Physics of the Impossible)
“
They put on fresh gloves and got back to business. Jazz wiped up the blood splatters in the freezer and tossed the tissues in with Howie’s waste. It bothered him that he was leaving evidence behind without some sort of oxygenated bleach, those blood splatters would still show up under Luminol. Of course, the odds of anyone deciding to spray down the morgue freezer and switch on an ultraviolet light were pretty minimal, so it’s not like it was evidence that anyone would ever find or use. Still: Billy Dent’s First Commandment was “Thou shalt not leave evidence.
”
”
Barry Lyga (I Hunt Killers (I Hunt Killers, #1))
“
It was dusk and the light had an ultra-violet quality to it, a final burst of pigmentation as night and day rushed at each other in a clash of colour prisms before darkness finnaly, inevitably won out.
”
”
Karen Swan (Christmas in the Snow)
“
The takeaway message here, as Jablonski points out, is that there is no such thing as different races of humans. Any differences we traditionally associate with race are a product of our need for vitamin D and our relationship to the Sun. Just a few clusters of genes control skin color; the changes in skin color are recent; they’ve gone back and forth with migrations; they are not the same even among two groups with similarly dark skin; and they are tiny compared to the total human genome. So skin color and “race” are neither significant nor consistent defining traits. We all descended from the same African ancestors, with little genetic separation from each other. The different colors or tones of skin are the result of an evolutionary response to ultraviolet light in local environments. Everybody has brown skin tinted by the pigment melanin. Some people have light brown skin. Some people have dark brown skin. But we all are brown, brown, brown.
”
”
Bill Nye (Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation)
“
If you were to look at human skin under an electron microscope, you would not be able to tell where the human being begins and ends.
There is no fine barrier between the person and the universe. There is just a flow from one thing to the next and the only reason we perceive separateness is because of the limitations of our senses.
Human beings can only see .0001 % of the spectrum of light and we can only hear .0001 % of the spectrum of sound. If we could see infrared, and if we could see ultraviolet and x-rays, and energy, and hear the whole spectrum of sounds, the universe would appear very differently, there would be no empty space. It would be so full we would just see this sea of energy and there would only be oneness.
There is no separate you. No separateness. There's a deep interconnectedness. There's only oneness.
”
”
Todd Perelmuter (Spiritual Words to Live by : 81 Daily Wisdoms and Meditations to Transform Your Life)
“
dark light. [Not actually an oxymoron. It's the color past ultra-violet. The technical term for it is infrablack. It can be seen quite easily under experimental conditions. To perform the experiment simply select a healthy brick wall with a good run-up, and, lowering your head, charge. The color that flashes in bursts behind your eyes, behind the pain, just before you die, is infra-black.]
”
”
Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
“
I'm the soft light compared to their ultraviolet.
”
”
Calla Devlin (Tell Me Something Real)
“
At Madame’s suggestion, they lie down in the weeds, and Marie-Laure listens to honeybees mine the flowers and tries to imagine their journeys as Etienne described them: each worker following a rivulet of odor, looking for ultraviolet patterns in the flowers, filling baskets on her hind legs with pollen grains, then navigating, drunk and heavy, all the way home. How
”
”
Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
“
melanin absorbs and reflects ultraviolet light and provides protection from the sun, melanocytes also respond to biological, physical, and chemical stimuli and are part of the immune system.
”
”
Jennifer Gunter (The Vagina Bible: The Vulva and the Vagina: Separating the Myth from the Medicine)
“
Visible light has a wavelength of between only forty and eighty millionths of a centimeter. Even shorter wavelengths are known as ultraviolet, X rays, and gamma rays. Maxwell’s theory predicted that radio or light waves should travel at a certain fixed speed.
”
”
Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time)
“
Electricity, Werner is learning, can be static by itself. But couple it with magnetism, and suddenly you have movement—waves. Fields and circuits, conduction and induction. Space, time, mass. The air swarms with so much that is invisible! How he wishes he had eyes to see the ultraviolet, eyes to see the infrared, eyes to see radio waves crowding the darkening sky, flashing through the walls of the house.
”
”
Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
“
surprisingly dramatic glow some minerals gave off when illuminated with ultraviolet light, or “black light.” In daylight, for instance, the mineral fluorite is a drab, chalky color; in a dark room under UV light, though, fluorite glows a brilliant blue; the mineral calcite shines bright red; and aragonite gives off a neon green. If you’ve ever stepped into a teenager’s cavelike room decorated with black-light posters (less common now than they were in the 1970s, when my three sons were growing up), you’ve seen another version of UV fluorescence in action.
”
”
William M. Bass (Beyond the Body Farm: A Legendary Bone Detective Explores Murders, Mysteries, and the Revolution in Forensic Science)
“
I stretched my arms towards the sky like blades of tall grass
The sun beat between my shoulders like carnival drums
I sat still in hopes that it would help my wings grow
So then I could really be fly
And then she arrived
Like day break inside a railway tunnel
Like the new moon, like a diamond in the mines
Like high noon to a drunkard, sudden
She made my heart beat in a now-now time signature
Her skinny canvas for ultraviolet brushstrokes
She was the sun's painting
She was a deep cognac color
Her eyes sparkled like lights along the new city
She lips pursed as if her breath was too sweet
And full for her mouth to hold
I said, "You are the beautiful, the stress of mathematics."
I said, "For you, I would peel open the clouds like new fruit
And give you lightning and thunder as a dowry
I would make the sky shed all of it's stars, light and rain
And I would clasp the constellations across your waist
And I would make the heavens your cape
And they would be pleased to cover you
They would be pleased to cover you
May I please, cover you, please
”
”
Mos Def
“
In the museums we used to visit on family vacations when I was a kid, I used to love those rooms which displayed collections of minerals in a kind of closet or chamber which would, at the push of a button, darken. Then ultraviolet lights would begin to glow and the minerals would seem to come alive, new colors, new possibilities, and architectures revealed. Plain stones became fantastic, “futuristic…” Of course there wasn’t any black light in the center of the earth, in the caves where they were quarried; how strange that these stones should have to be brought here, bathed with this unnatural light in order for their transcendent characters to emerge. Irradiation revealed a secret aspect of the world.
Imagine illness as this light; demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears. I think this is what is meant when we speculate that death is what makes love possible.
”
”
Mark Doty (Heaven's Coast: A Memoir)
“
Trees might not have eyes but we have vision. I respond to light. I detect ultraviolet and infrared and electromagnetic waves. If
”
”
Elif Shafak (The Island of Missing Trees)
“
Here you come with
your lips closed tight
you never smile
you know it
wouldn't look right
'Cause your dentures glow
in ultra-violet light
you're the oldest
swinger in town
”
”
Fred Wedlock
“
Irony, he had come to realise, was as vulnerable to the accidents of life and time as any other sense. You woke up one morning and no longer knew if your tongue was in your cheek; and even if it was, whether that mattered anymore, whether anyone noticed. You imagined you were issuing a beam of ultraviolet light, but what if it failed to register because it was off the spectrum known to everyone else?
”
”
Julian Barnes (The Noise of Time)
“
We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life and death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness and answer any question we are capable of asking. We cannot hold ten thousand words in short-term memory. We cannot see in ultraviolet light. And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience.
”
”
Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works)
“
They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. Dark glasses! Twenty miles away, you couldn't see a damn thing through dark glasses. So I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes ( bright light can never hurt your eyes) is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield, because the ultra Violet can't go through glass, so that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing.
(Feynman was the only one to actually see the test bomb explode)
”
”
Richard P. Feynman
“
Normal cells could acquire these cancer-causing mutations through four mechanisms. The mutations could be caused by environmental insults, such as tobacco smoke, ultraviolet light, or X-rays—agents that attack DNA and change its chemical structure. Mutations could arise from spontaneous errors during cell division (every time DNA is replicated in a cell, there’s a minor chance that the copying process generates an error—an A switched to a T, G, or C, say). Mutant cancer genes could be inherited from parents, thereby causing hereditary cancer syndromes such as retinoblastoma and breast cancer that coursed through families. Or the genes could be carried into the cells via viruses, the professional gene carriers and gene swappers of the microbial world. In all four cases, the result converged on the same pathological process: the inappropriate activation or inactivation of genetic pathways that controlled growth, causing the malignant, dysregulated cellular division that was characteristic of cancer.
”
”
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
“
Excessive ultraviolet A radiation causes sunburns, which are associated with cancer, so we decided with no evidence that we should remove all sources of ultraviolet radiation. But our bodies were not designed to be in an environment without any UV light.
”
”
Dave Asprey (Head Strong: The Bulletproof Plan to Activate Untapped Brain Energy to Work Smarter and Think Faster-in Just Two Weeks)
“
Consider, for example, how little we know of how ultraviolet light looks to a finch; of how echolocation feels to a bat, or a dolphin; of the way that a red fox, or a homing pigeon, experiences the Earth’s magnetic field. Such uncharted experiences exist in minds much less sophisticated than our own. What experiences, possibly of immense value, could be accessible, then, to minds much greater? Mice know very little of music, art or humor. Toward what experiences are we as mice? What beauties are we blind to?
”
”
Toby Ord
“
So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you’re going to test that too? Sounds interesting right?
Then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. Is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside? Or almost a cleaning, ‘cause you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it’d be interesting to check that. So you’re going to have to use medical doctors but it sounds interesting to me, so we’ll see but the whole concept of the light. The way it kills it in one minute, that’s pretty powerful.
”
”
Donald J. Trump
“
there is no such thing as different races of humans. Any differences we traditionally associate with race are a product of our need for vitamin D and our relationship to the Sun. Just a few clusters of genes control skin color; the changes in skin color are recent; they’ve gone back and forth with migrations; they are not the same even among two groups with similarly dark skin; and they are tiny compared to the total human genome. So skin color and “race” are neither significant nor consistent defining traits. We all descended from the same African ancestors, with little genetic separation from each other. The different colors or tones of skin are the result of an evolutionary response to ultraviolet light in local environments. Everybody has brown skin tinted by the pigment melanin. Some people have light brown skin. Some people have dark brown skin. But we all are brown, brown, brown. Our reactions to other groups are real enough, but evolutionary biology shows that those reactions have nothing to do with race, because race is not real. Scientifically speaking, there is tribalism and group bias, but there cannot be any such thing as racism. We are all one.
”
”
Bill Nye (Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation)
“
Giant hogweed is considered extremely dangerous because its sap, in combination with ultraviolet light, can burn human skin. Every year, millions are spent digging up plants and destroying them, without any great success. However, hogweed can spread only because the original forested meadows along the banks of rivers and streams no longer exist. If these forests were to return, it would be so dark under the forest canopy that hogweed would disappear. The same goes for Himalayan balsam and Japanese knotweed, which also grow on the riverbanks in the absence of the forests. Trees could solve the problem if people trying to improve things would only allow them to take over.
”
”
Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World)
“
High above the visible cloud deck, at about 70 kilometers altitude, there is a continuous haze of small particles. At 60 kilometers, we plunge into the clouds, and find ourselves surrounded by droplets of concentrated sulfuric acid. As we go deeper, the could particles tend to get bigger. The pungent gas, sulfur dioxide, SO2, is present in trace amounts in the lower atmosphere. It is circulated up above the clouds, broken down by ultraviolet light from the Sun and recombined with water there to form sulfuric acid- which condenses into droplets, settles, and at lower altitudes is broken down by heat into SO2 and water again, completing the cycle. It is always raining sulfuric acid on Venus, all over the planet, and not a drop ever reaches the surface. p79
”
”
Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
“
Bumblebees detect the polarization of sunlight, invisible to uninstrumented humans; put vipers sense infrared radiation and detect temperature differences of 0.01C at a distance of half a meter; many insects can see ultraviolet light; some African freshwater fish generate a static electric field around themselves and sense intruders by slight perturbations induced in the field; dogs, sharks, and cicadas detect sounds wholly inaudible to humans; ordinary scorpions have micro--seismometers on their legs so they can detect in darkness the footsteps of a small insect a meter away; water scorpions sense their depth by measuring the hydrostatic pressure; a nubile female silkworm moth releases ten billionths of a gram of sex attractant per second, and draws to her every male for miles around; dolphins, whales, and bats use a kind of sonar for precision echo-location.
The direction, range, and amplitude of sounds reflected by to echo-locating bats are systematically mapped onto adjacent areas of the bat brain. How does the bat perceive its echo-world? Carp and catfish have taste buds distributed over most of their bodies, as well as in their mouths; the nerves from all these sensors converge on massive sensory processing lobes in the brain, lobes unknown in other animals. how does a catfish view the world? What does it feel like to be inside its brain? There are reported cases in which a dog wags its tail and greets with joy a man it has never met before; he turns out to be the long-lost identical twin of the dog's "master", recognizable by his odor. What is the smell-world of a dog like? Magnetotactic bacteria contain within them tiny crystals of magnetite - an iron mineral known to early sailing ship navigators as lodenstone. The bacteria literally have internal compasses that align them along the Earth's magnetic field. The great churning dynamo of molten iron in the Earth's core - as far as we know, entirely unknown to uninstrumented humans - is a guiding reality for these microscopic beings. How does the Earth's magnetism feel to them? All these creatures may be automatons, or nearly so, but what astounding special powers they have, never granted to humans, or even to comic book superheroes. How different their view of the world must be, perceiving so much that we miss.
”
”
Carl Sagan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)
“
For years, Britain operated a research facility called the Common Cold Unit, but it closed in 1989 without ever finding a cure. It did, however, conduct some interesting experiments. In one, a volunteer was fitted with a device that leaked a thin fluid at his nostrils at the same rate that a runny nose would. The volunteer then socialized with other volunteers, as if at a cocktail party. Unknown to any of them, the fluid contained a dye visible only under ultraviolet light. When that was switched on after they had been mingling for a while, the participants were astounded to discover that the dye was everywhere—on the hands, head, and upper body of every participant and on glasses, doorknobs, sofa cushions, bowls of nuts, you name it. The average adult touches his face sixteen times an hour, and each of those touches transferred the pretend pathogen from nose to snack bowl to innocent third party to doorknob to innocent fourth party and so on until pretty much everyone and everything bore a festive glow of imaginary snot.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
In addition, there's a whole universe full of electromagnetic energy, radiation that somehow seems to be both waves in an electromagnetic field and particles at the same time. It exists in a spectrum of wave-lengths that includes cosmic rays, gamma rays, X rays, ultraviolet radiation, visible light, infrared radiation, microwaves, and radio waves.Together, electromagnetic fields and energies interact in many complex ways that have given rise to much of the natural world, not to mention the whole technology of electronics.
”
”
Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
“
For years, Britain operated a research facility called the Common Cold Unit, but it closed in 1989 without ever finding a cure. It did, however, conduct some interesting experiments. In one, a volunteer was fitted with a device that leaked a thin fluid at his nostrils at the same rate that a runny nose would. The volunteer then socialized with other volunteers, as if at a cocktail party. Unknown to any of them, the fluid contained a dye visible only under ultraviolet light. When that was switched on after they had been mingling for a while, the participants were astounded to discover that the dye was everywhere—on the hands, head, and upper body of every participant and on glasses, doorknobs, sofa cushions, bowls of nuts, you name it. The average adult touches his face sixteen times an hour, and each of those touches transferred the pretend pathogen from nose to snack bowl to innocent third party to doorknob to innocent fourth party and so on until pretty much everyone and everything bore a festive glow of imaginary snot. In a similar study at the University of Arizona, researchers infected the metal door handle to an office building and found it took only about four hours for the “virus” to spread through the entire building, infecting over half of employees and turning up on virtually every shared device like photocopiers and coffee machines. In the real world, such infestations can stay active for up to three days. Surprisingly, the least effective way to spread germs (according to yet another study) is kissing. It proved almost wholly ineffective among volunteers at the University of Wisconsin who had been successfully infected with cold virus. Sneezes and coughs weren’t much better. The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch. A survey of subway trains in Boston found that metal poles are a fairly hostile environment for microbes. Where microbes thrive is in the fabrics on seats and on plastic handgrips. The most efficient method of transfer for germs, it seems, is a combination of folding money and nasal mucus. A study in Switzerland in 2008 found that flu virus can survive on paper money for two and a half weeks if it is accompanied by a microdot of snot. Without snot, most cold viruses could survive on folding money for no more than a few hours.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.
”
”
Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
“
Just as the spectrums of light and sound are far broader than what we humans can see and hear, so the spectrum of mental states is far larger than what the average human perceives. We can see light in wavelengths of between 400 and 700 nanometres only. Above this small principality of human vision extend the unseen but vast realms of infrared, microwaves and radio waves, and below it lie the dark dominions of ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays. Similarly, the spectrum of possible mental states may be infinite, but science has studied only two tiny sections of it: the sub-normative and the WEIRD. For
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
It became clear that light was the visible manifestation of a whole spectrum of electromagnetic waves. This includes what we now call AM radio signals (with a wavelength of 300 yards), FM radio signals (3 yards), and microwaves (3 inches). As the wavelengths get shorter (and the frequency of the wave cycles thus increases), they produce the spectrum of visible light, ranging from red (25 millionths of an inch) to violet (14 millionths of an inch). Even shorter wavelengths produce ultraviolet rays, X-rays, and gamma rays. When we speak of “light” and the “speed of light,” we mean all electromagnetic waves, not just the ones that are visible to our eyes.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
“
It did, however, conduct some interesting experiments. In one, a volunteer was fitted with a device that leaked a thin fluid at his nostrils at the same rate that a runny nose would. The volunteer then socialized with other volunteers, as if at a cocktail party. Unknown to any of them, the fluid contained a dye visible only under ultraviolet light. When that was switched on after they had been mingling for a while, the participants were astounded to discover that the dye was everywhere—on the hands, head, and upper body of every participant and on glasses, doorknobs, sofa cushions, bowls of nuts, you name it. The average adult touches his face sixteen times an hour, and each of those touches transferred the pretend pathogen from nose to snack bowl to innocent third party to doorknob to innocent fourth party and so on until pretty much everyone and everything bore a festive glow of imaginary snot. In a similar study at the University of Arizona, researchers infected the metal door handle to an office building and found it took only about four hours for the “virus” to spread through the entire building, infecting over half of employees and turning up on virtually every shared device like photocopiers and coffee machines. In the real world, such infestations can stay active for up to three days. Surprisingly,
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
Ode to a Cluster of Violets
Crisp cluster
plunged in shadow.
Drops of violet water
and raw sunlight
floated up with your scent.
A fresh
subterranean beauty
climbed up from your buds
thrilling my eyes and my life.
One at a time, flowers
that stretched forward
silvery stalks,
creeping closer to an obscure light
shoot by shoot in the shadows,
till they crowned
the mysterious mass
with an intense weight of perfume
and together
formed a single star
with a far-off scent and a purple center.
Poignant cluster
intimate
scent
of nature,
you resemble
a wave, or a head of hair,
or the gaze
of a ruined water nymph
sunk in the depths.
But up close,
in your fragrance’s
blue brazenness,
you exhale the earth,
an earthly flower, an earthen
smell and your ultraviolet
gleam
in volcanoes’ faraway fires.
Into your loveliness I sink
a weathered face,
a face that dust has often abused.
You deliver
something out of the soil.
It isn’t simply perfume,
nor simply the perfect cry
of your entire color, no: it’s
a word sprinkled with dew,
a flowering wetness with roots.
Fragile cluster of starry
violets,
tiny, mysterious
planet
of marine phosphorescence,
nocturnal bouquet nestled in green leaves:
the truth is
there is no blue word to express you.
Better than any word
is the pulse of your scent.
Pablo Neruda, Odes to Common Things. (Bulfinch; Bilingual edition May 1, 1994) Originally published 1961.
”
”
Pablo Neruda (Odes to Common Things)
“
For years, Britain operated a research facility called the Common Cold Unit, but it closed in 1989 without ever finding a cure. It did, however, conduct some interesting experiments. In one, a volunteer was fitted with a device that leaked a thin fluid at his nostrils at the same rate that a runny nose would. The volunteer then socialized with other volunteers, as if at a cocktail party. Unknown to any of them, the fluid contained a dye visible only under ultraviolet light. When that was switched on after they had been mingling for a while, the participants were astounded to discover that the dye was everywhere—on the hands, head, and upper body of every participant and on glasses, doorknobs, sofa cushions, bowls of nuts, you name it. The average adult touches his face sixteen times an hour, and each of those touches transferred the pretend pathogen from nose to snack bowl to innocent third party to doorknob to innocent fourth party and so on until pretty much everyone and everything bore a festive glow of imaginary snot. In a similar study at the University of Arizona, researchers infected the metal door handle to an office building and found it took only about four hours for the “virus” to spread through the entire building, infecting over half of employees and turning up on virtually every shared device like photocopiers and coffee machines. In the real world, such infestations can stay active for up to three days.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
connection between skin color and sunlight. The results were as clear as the sky on a cloudless day—there was a near-constant correlation between skin color and sunlight exposure in populations that had remained in the same area for 500 years or more. They even produced an equation to express the relationship between a given population’s skin color and its annual exposure to ultraviolet rays. (If you’re feeling adventurous, the equation is W = 70-AUV/10. W represents relative whiteness and AUV represents annual ultraviolet exposure. The 70 is based on research that indicates that the whitest possible skin—the result of a population that received zero exposure to UV—would reflect about 70 percent of the light directed at it.)
”
”
Sharon Moalem (Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease)
“
yeah’! Page stopped in front of a smaller room, enclosed by heavy quartz. Inside that room was the great bank of mercury-vapor rectifiers. From them lashed a blue-green glare that splashed against his face and shoulders, painting him in angry, garish color. The glass guarded him from the terrific blast of ultra-violet light that flared from the pool of shimmering molten metal, a terrible emanation that would have flayed a man’s skin from his body within the space of seconds. * * * * The scientist squinted his eyes against the glare. There was something in it that caught him with a deadly fascination. The personification of power—the incredibly intense spot of incandescent vapor, the tiny sphere of blue-green fire, the spinning surge of that shining pool, the intense glare of ionization. Power…the breath of modern mankind, the pulse of progress.
”
”
Clifford D. Simak (The Fourth Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®: Clifford D. Simak)
“
Tanya Latty and Madeleine Beekman of the University of Sydney were studying the way slime molds handled tough choices. A tough choice for a slime mold looks something like this: On one side of the petri dish is three grams of oats. On the other side is five grams of oats, but with an ultraviolet light trained on it. You put a slime mold in the center of the dish. What does it do? Under those conditions, they found, the slime mold chooses each option about half the time; the extra food just about balances out the unpleasantness of the UV light. If you were a classical economist of the kind Daniel Ellsberg worked with at RAND, you’d say that the smaller pile of oats in the dark and the bigger pile under the light have the same amount of utility for the slime mold, which is therefore ambivalent between them. Replace the five grams with ten grams, though, and the balance is broken; the slime mold goes for the new double-size pile every time, light or no light. Experiments like this teach us about the slime mold’s priorities and how it makes decisions when those priorities conflict. And they make the slime mold look like a pretty reasonable character. But then something strange happened. The experimenters tried putting the slime mold in a petri dish with three options: the three grams of oats in the dark (3-dark), the five grams of oats in the light (5-light), and a single gram of oats in the dark (1-dark). You might predict that the slime mold would almost never go for 1-dark; the 3-dark pile has more oats in it and is just as dark, so it’s clearly superior. And indeed, the slime mold just about never picks 1-dark. You might also guess that, since the slime mold found 3-dark and 5-light equally attractive before, it would continue to do so in the new context. In the economist’s terms, the presence of the new option shouldn’t change the fact that 3-dark and 5-light have equal utility. But no: when 1-dark is available, the slime mold actually changes its preferences, choosing 3-dark more than three times as often as it does 5-light!
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Jordan Ellenberg (How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking)
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Young developing leaves on normal trees are often tinged red thanks to a kind of sun block in their delicate tissue. This is anthocyanin, which blocks ultraviolet rays to protect the little leaves. As the leaves grow, the anthocyanin is broken down with the help of an enzyme. A few beeches or maples deviate from the norm because they lack this enzyme. They cannot get rid of the red color, and they retain it even in their mature leaves. Therefore, their leaves strongly reflect red light and waste a considerable portion of the light’s energy. Of course, they still have the blue tones in the spectrum for photosynthesis, but they are not achieving the same levels of photosynthesis as their green-leaved relatives. These red trees keep appearing in Nature, but they never get established and always disappear again. Humans, however, love anything that is different, and so we seek out red varieties and propagate them. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure is one way to describe this behavior, which might stop if people knew more about the trees’ circumstances.
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Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World)
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Salo had a skin with the texture and color of the skin of an Earthling tangerine. Salo had three light deer-like legs. His feet were of an extraordinarily interesting design, each being an inflatable sphere. By inflating these spheres to the size of German batballs, Salo could walk on water. By reducing them to the size of golf balls, Salo could bound over hard surfaces at high speeds. When he deflated the spheres entirely, his feet became suction cups. Salo could walk up walls. Salo had no arms. Salo had three eyes, and his eyes could perceive not only the so-called visible spectrum, but infrared and ultraviolet and X-rays as well. Salo was punctual—that is, he lived one moment at a time—and he liked to tell Rumfoord that he would rather see the wonderful colors at the far ends of the spectrum than either the past or the future. This was something of a weasel, since Salo had seen, living a moment at a time, far more of the past and far more of the Universe than Rumfoord had. He remembered more of what he had seen, too. Salo’s head was round and hung on gimbals.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (The Sirens of Titan)
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No teacher of RE ever said to me: “Beyond the limited realm of the senses, the shallow pool of the known, is a great untamable ocean, and we don’t have a fucking clue what goes on in there.” What we receive through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch is all we know. We have tools that can enhance that information, we have theories for things that we suspect lie beyond that information, filtered through an apparatus limited once more to those senses. Those senses are limited; the light range we detect is within a narrow spectrum, between infrared light and ultraviolet light; other species see light that we can’t see. In the auditory realm, we hear but a fraction of the sound vibrations; we don’t hear high-pitched frequencies, like dog whistles, and we don’t hear low frequencies like whale song. The world is awash with colors unseen and abuzz with unheard frequencies. Undetected and disregarded. The wise have always known that these inaccessible realms, these dimensions that cannot be breached by our beautifully blunt senses, hold the very codes to our existence, the invisible, electromagnetic foundations upon which our gross reality clumsily rests. Expressible only through symbol and story, as it can never be known by the innocent mind. The stories are formulas, poems, tools for reflection through which we may access the realm behind the thinking mind, the consciousness beyond knowing and known, the awareness that is not connected to the haphazard data of biography. The awareness that is not prickled and tugged by capricious emotion. The awareness that is aware that it is aware. In meditation I access it; in yoga I feel it; on drugs it hit me like a hammer—at sixteen, staring into a bathroom mirror on LSD, contrary to instruction (“Don’t look in the mirror, Russ, it’ll fuck your head up.” Mental note: “Look in mirror.”). I saw that my face wasn’t my face at all but a face that I lived behind and was welded to by a billion nerves. I looked into my eyes and saw that there was something looking back at me that was not me, not what I’d taken to be me. The unrefined ocean beyond the shallow pool was cascading through the mirror back at me. Nature looking at nature.
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Russell Brand (Revolution)
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Arthur tried to gauge the speed at which they were traveling, but the blackness outside was absolute and he was denied any reference points. The sense of motion was so soft and slight he could almost believe they were hardly moving at all. Then a tiny glow of light appeared in the far distance and within seconds had grown so much in size that Arthur realized it was traveling toward them at a colossal speed, and he tried to make out what sort of craft it might be. He peered at it, but was unable to discern any clear shape, and suddenly gasped in alarm as the aircar dipped sharply and headed downward in what seemed certain to be a collision course. Their relative velocity seemed unbelievable, and Arthur had hardly time to draw breath before it was all over. The next thing he was aware of was an insane silver blur that seemed to surround him. He twisted his head sharply round and saw a small black point dwindling rapidly in the distance behind them, and it took him several seconds to realize what had happened. They had plunged into a tunnel in the ground. The colossal speed had been their own, relative to the glow of light which was a stationary hole in the ground, the mouth of the tunnel. The insane blur of silver was the circular wall of the tunnel down which they were shooting, apparently at several hundred miles an hour. He closed his eyes in terror. After a length of time which he made no attempt to judge, he sensed a slight subsidence in their speed and some while later became aware that they were gradually gliding to a gentle halt. He opened his eyes again. They were still in the silver tunnel, threading and weaving their way through what appeared to be a crisscross warren of converging tunnels. When they finally stopped it was in a small chamber of curved steel. Several tunnels also had their termini here, and at the farther end of the chamber Arthur could see a large circle of dim irritating light. It was irritating because it played tricks with the eyes, it was impossible to focus on it properly or tell how near or far it was. Arthur guessed (quite wrongly) that it might be ultraviolet. Slartibartfast turned and regarded Arthur with his solemn old eyes. “Earthman,” he said, “we are now deep in the heart of Magrathea.
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Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide, #1))
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James Clerk Maxwell helped to enshrine this wave theory when he successfully conjectured a connection between light, electricity, and magnetism. He came up with equations that described the behavior of electric and magnetic fields, and when they were combined they predicted electromagnetic waves. Maxwell found that these electromagnetic waves had to travel at a certain speed: approximately 186,000 miles per second.* That was the speed that scientists had already measured for light, and it was obviously not a mere coincidence.4 It became clear that light was the visible manifestation of a whole spectrum of electromagnetic waves. This includes what we now call AM radio signals (with a wavelength of 300 yards), FM radio signals (3 yards), and microwaves (3 inches). As the wavelengths get shorter (and the frequency of the wave cycles thus increases), they produce the spectrum of visible light, ranging from red (25 millionths of an inch) to violet (14 millionths of an inch). Even shorter wavelengths produce ultraviolet rays, X-rays, and gamma rays. When we speak of “light” and the “speed of light,” we mean all electromagnetic waves, not just the ones that are visible to our eyes.
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Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
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With the introduction of radio, we now had a superfast. convenient, and wireless way of communicating over long distances. Historically, the lack of a fast and reliable communication system was one of the great obstacles to the march of history. (In 490 BCE, after the Battle of Marathon between the Greeks and the Persians, a poor runner was ordered to spread the news of the Greek victory as fast as he could. Bravely, he ran 26 miles to Athens after previously running 147 miles to Sparta, and then, according to legend, dropped dead of sheer exhaustion. His heroism, in the age before telecommunication, is now celebrated in the modern marathon.)
Today, we take for granted that we can send messages and information effortlessly across the globe, utilizing the fact that energy can be transformed in many ways. For example, when speaking on a cell phone, the energy of the sound of your voice converts to mechanical energy in a vibrating diaphragm. The diaphragm is attached to a magnet that relies on the interchangeability of electricity and magnetism to create an electrical impulse, the kind that can be transported and read by a computer. This electrical impulse is then translated into electromagnetic waves that are picked up by a nearby microwave tower. There, the message is amplified and sent across the globe.
But Maxwell's equations not only gave us nearly instantaneous communication via radio, cell phone, and fiber-optic cables, they also opened up the entire electromagnetic spectrum, of which visible light and radio were just two members. In the 166os, Newton had shown that white light, when sent through a prism, can be broken up into the colors of the rainbow. In 1800, William Herschel had asked himself a simple question: What lies beyond the colors of the rainbow, which extend from red to violet? He took a prism, which created a rainbow in his lab, and placed a thermometer below the color red, where there was no color at all. Much to his surprise, the temperature of this blank area began to rise. In other words, there was a "color" below red that was invisible to the naked eye but contained energy.
It was called infrared light.
Today, we realize that there is an entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, most of which is invisible, and each has a distinct wavelength. The wavelength of radio and TV, for example, is longer than that of visible light. The wavelength of the colors of the rainbow, in turn, is longer than that of ultraviolet and X-rays.
This also meant that the reality we see all around us is only the tiniest sliver of the complete EM spectrum, the smallest approximation of a much larger universe
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Michio Kaku (The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything)
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Suppose a glowing blob of some unknown substance were parked right in front of us. Without some diagnostic tool like a tricorder to help, we would be clueless to the blob’s chemical or nuclear composition. Nor could we know whether it has an electromagnetic field, or whether it emits strongly in gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, microwaves, or radio waves. Nor could we determine the blob’s cellular or crystalline structure. If the blob were far out in space, appearing as an unresolved point of light in the sky, our five senses would offer us no insight to its distance, velocity through space, or its rate of rotation. We further would have no capacity to see the spectrum of colors that compose its emitted light, nor could we know whether the light is polarized. Without hardware to help our analysis, and without a particular urge to lick the stuff, all we can report back to the starship is, “Captain, it’s a blob.
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Anonymous
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An archetype is an inborn inherited latent constellation similar to an instinct, but differing from the instinct because it has to do with something like symbols of meaning not biological drives. On a light spectrum, Jung said instincts would be infrared and archetypes ultraviolet.
Someone, long after Jung died, on a completely topic, tried to assign almost a Tarot card like identity to Jung’s psychological 'types', erroneously and confusingly also calling those 'archetypes'. They’re not what Jung called archetypes.
Anyway, Jung’s archetypes have to do with something like DNA and are independent, in the short run, from individual biographies. They arise mysteriously within us at moments of destiny and cannot be identified until they overcome us with their gripping power.
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Craig Nelson
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Thus after electricity and magnetism had been united, both were now united to light. Electro-magnetic radiations came to be regarded as rapid alternations of electrical and magnetic stresses in space, where each change in the electric stress gives rise to a magnetic stress, which again gives rise to an electric stress and so on. Soon the range of these radiations was shown to comprise not only the visible spectrum between the ultra-violet and the infra-red of radiant heat, but to extend to the ultra-short gamma rays of radioactivity, and to the kilometre-long waves used in radio-communication.
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Arthur Koestler (The Act of Creation)
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some fungi, like mushrooms, can create vitamin D if they are exposed to ultraviolet light, but that usually only occurs if humans deliberately intervene.)
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Catherine Price (Vitamania: How Vitamins Revolutionized the Way We Think About Food)
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For 200 years pessimists have had all the headlines, even though optimists have far more often been right. Archpessimists are feted, showered with honours and rarely challenged, let alone confronted with their past mistakes. Should you ever listen to pessimists? Certainly. In the case of the ozone layer, a briefly fashionable scare of the early 1990s, the human race probably did itself and its environment a favour by banning chlorofluorocarbons, even though the excess ultraviolet light getting through the ozone layer in the polar regions never even approached one-five-hundredth of the level that is normally experienced by somebody living in the tropics – and even though a new theory suggests that cosmic rays are a bigger cause of the Antarctic ozone hole than chlorine is. Still, I should stop carping: in this case, getting chlorine out of the atmosphere was on balance the wise course of action and the costs to human welfare, though not negligible, were small.
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Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist (P.S.))
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It has been suggested that a Vitamin C deficiency can reduce our ability to handle stress and anxiety. As it's primarily found in fruit and veggies, it's important to make sure that your body is getting it's fair share of the stuff! We often associate oranges with having the highest vitamin C content but other great sources are strawberries, green peppers and kale. Vitamin D comes from a number of food sources such as eggs and oily fish, but also from exposure to the sun's ultra-violet light. As anxiety sufferers may avoid leaving the comforts of their own home, it is no surprise that we may be deficient in this important vitamin. It is therefore important that we acquire this from other sources.
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Darren Sims (Conquering Health Anxiety: How To Break Free From The Hypochondria Trap)
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To understand light is to understand its spectrum. It is a long spectrum but there is reason to it. Ultraviolet comes after violet and infrared comes before red. If you take everything back to first principles, you will never have to memorize anything again.
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Weike Wang (Chemistry)
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Imagine a genetic mutation that gave everyone born after 1995 the ability to see ultraviolet light. Imagine that these people developed an identity around UV light, started calling themselves “UVers” and became suspicious of any media product made exclusively on the visible spectrum. As an old person with normal eyes, you would experience this change as a kind of slow cognitive decline. Every day, as more and more of the world played out in UV, you would struggle to catch glimpses of it.
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Mark Bergen (Like, Comment, Subscribe: How Youtube Drives Google's Dominance and Controls Our Culture)
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Glowing technology was also used to track success while engineering the first transgenic dog, Ruppy, short for Ruby Puppy. Ruppy was born in South Korea in 2009, one of a litter of four cloned beagles engineered by scientists at Seoul National University to express a red fluorescent protein gene. The experiment was a proof of concept; the team only intended to show that transgenic dogs could be cloned. Ruppy and her genetically identical littermates looked like perfectly normal beagles under natural light. But under ultraviolet light, they all glowed a charming, bright, ruby red. When Ruppy was mated to a non-transgenic dog, half her puppies inherited the red protein gene, indicating that the transgene had incorporated successfully into her germ line.
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Beth Shapiro (Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature)
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Many amphibian eggs are black with the pigment melanin that protects their delicate cells from damage by ultra-violet light. Newt eggs, however, are white and lack pigment so they need protection of leaves.
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David Attenborough (Life in Cold Blood)
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The eye, lulled by the all-around green all around, registers the difference and rouses. Bees, once thought to be color-blind, do in fact see color, though they see it differently than we do. Green appears gray, a background hue against which red—which bees perceive as black—stands out most sharply. (Bees can also see at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, where we’re blind; a garden in this light must look like a big-city airport at night, lit up and color-coded to direct circling bees to landing zones of nectar and pollen.)
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Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)
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Red Light Therapy (RLT) is also a new alternative method of healing the body from protocol side effects and helps with external scarring. It is still in its infancy stage, yet deserves more delving into the research that is being done. It appears to be safe and unlike Ultraviolet light, may prove to be an option to help alleviate internal fibrotic tissue.
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Ron Baron (Confronting Radiation Fibrosis: A Cancer Survivor's Handbook (A Basic Understanding))
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That collapse gives an impulse to what we think of as the vacuum that surrounds the atom, and the impulse generates a pulse of light, a photon. The colour of the photon depends on the energy released in the collapse, with high-energy collapse giving a pulse of ultraviolet radiation and lower energy pulses giving visible light.
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Peter Atkins (What is Chemistry?)
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voles make up 85 percent of the diet. (One feature of vole biology that inadvertently helps out hawks is that these rodents mark their territories with urine, which Scandinavian researchers recently discovered reflects ultraviolet light. Hawks can see UV light—and may well use the voles’ territorial markings as signposts to the nearest restaurant.)
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Sy Montgomery (The Wild Out Your Window)
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Far and away the safest means of obtaining vitamin D is through exposure to sunlight (which contains ultraviolet B, or UVB, light). This allows the body to make what it needs as it needs it. It is possible now to buy UVB-based vitamin D–enhancing light systems for home use. It is very difficult to ascertain just how much
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Nora T. Gedgaudas (Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond Paleo for Total Health and a Longer Life)
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WHY DOES QUININE GLOW UNDER ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT? Shine a blacklight on a bottle of tonic water and it will glow a bright radioactive blue. The quinine alkaloid is “excited” by ultraviolet light, which means that the electrons absorb the light and take on extra energy, throwing them out of their regular orbit. In order to return to their natural position—their “relaxed” state—they release the energy, causing a bright glow.
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Amy Stewart (The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks)
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To a heat-sensing snake, reality is far different than it is to us. The universe looks far different through a telescope that interprets infrared, ultraviolet than it does through a telescope that interprets visible light.
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B.C. Chase (Paradeisia: Fall of Paradise)
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More than fifty years have passed since the flask experiments by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey rekindled the primordial soup hypothesis for the origin of life. Scientists now realize, however, that generating miniscule amounts of a few amino acids is irrelevant to the origin of life because the chemicals in Miller and Urey’s experiment were exposed to neither oxygen nor ultraviolet light. The fact that Earth never possessed measurable quantities of prebiotics (see p. 73) and that the universe appears devoid of reservoirs for life’s fundamental chemical building blocks (see p. 74) also argues for the famed experiment’s irrelevance. As far back as 1973, a deep sense of frustration over any possible naturalistic explanation for life’s origin on Earth or anywhere else within the vast reaches of interstellar space led Francis Crick (who shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix nature of DNA) and Leslie Orgel (one of the world’s preeminent origin-of-life researchers) to suggest that intelligent aliens must have salted Earth with bacteria about 3.8 billion years ago.[24] This suggestion, however intriguing or bizarre, fails to answer the question of where the aliens might have come from. It also contradicts evidence that shows intelligent life could not have arrived on the cosmic scene any sooner than about 13.7 billion years after the cosmic origin event. The implausibility of interstellar space travel also remains an intractable problem. Ruling out a visit by aliens from a planetary system far, far away narrows the reasonable options down to one: Something or Someone from beyond the physics and dimensions of the universe, who is not subject to them, placed life and humanity in the only location in the universe at the only time in cosmic history where and when such creatures could survive and thrive.
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Hugh Ross (Why the Universe Is the Way It Is (Reasons to Believe))
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a million different theories exist as to the weaponization of most diseases so let’s start at the top. In the case of any bioterrorist event involving plague, the healthcare system of a region will be easily overwhelmed. Yes, I said will. Especially if strict isolation is implemented indiscriminately for most patients. The Yersinia pestis virus can be destroyed with drying, heat and ultraviolet light, making weaponization a very tricky process.
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David Leadbeater (The Plagues of Pandora (Matt Drake, #9))
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There is a misapprehension with regard to the possibility that humans may obtain enough of the vitamin D group of activators from our modern plant foods or from sunshine. This is due to the belief viosterol or similar products by other names, derived by exposing ergosterol to ultraviolet light, offer all of the nutritional factors involved in the vitamin D group. I have emphasized that there are known to be at least eight D factors that have been definitely isolated and twelve that have been reported as partially isolated. Coffin has recently reported relative to the lack of vitamin D in common foods as follows: (5) 1. A representative list of common foods was carefully tested, by approved technique, for their vitamin D content. 2. With the remote possibility of egg yolks, butter, cream, liver and fish it is manifestly impossible to obtain any amount of vitamin D worthy of mention from common foods. 3. Vegetables do not contain vitamin D. It will be noted that vitamin D, which the human does not readily synthesize in adequate amounts, must be provided by foods of animal tissues or animal products. As yet I have not found a single
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Anonymous
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Reindeer manage quite well in the dark because they can see in the ultraviolet range of short-wavelength light, which is invisible to us humans and most other mammals.17
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Anonymous
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The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird. What is she seeing? I wonder, and my brain does flipflops trying to imagine it, because I can't.I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Hawks, like other birds have four. This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultra-violet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can't possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I'm standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the hawk watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own.
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Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk)
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To keep songbirds from crashing into our storm doors, I put up stickers impregnated with a chemical that reflects ultraviolet light, which birds can perceive but people cannot.
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Margaret Renkl (The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year)
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Sea-foam tumbles onto the shore, claiming me gently in the way I've always craved. The ocean gathers me, carrying me over the surface like Cleopatra--- and I, every ounce as lovely as her and Aphrodite combined. Bit by bit the water swallows me, gently nipping at my skin until I dissolve into an aquatic spirit. Only then do I understand the language of angelfish and squid, and I move just as languidly. The sirens gape at me with their jewel-bright eyes and try to steal me as their own. But before I can be taken by those curious witches, I rise to the surface again.
Everything glimmers here.
I embrace the dusk with a hopeful smile. The sky blends into a watercolor of pastels and ambrosial stars. It's an aurora borealis of magenta and lavender, tempting me into the forest and away from the safety of the shore.
Something's in the wind. I can feel it--- like the twinkling stars will finally lead me to the love I desire. I want it more than anything. The thought of it turns me feral, like a vampiress thirsty for a drop of blood. I dart through the forest, trailing a path of golden light. Past the evergreens and pines, underneath the moon, I become wild and free.
Sweet summer fruit grows from trees, ripe and sparkling. With every cautious step I take, the flowers blossom. But they don't just grow. They glow. Ultraviolet irises, sugar-dusted peonies, and iridescent rosebuds unravel beneath my feet. Foxgloves bloom like trumpets, playing a regal procession beside twinkling bluebells. As I journey deeper into the forest, fireflies circle me, illuminating my path.
And then I see him.
I blink. He's awfully familiar, but I can't place my finger on who he is. He's beautiful. A boy with white-blond hair and viridescent eyes. Where have I seen him before?
"Hello, Lila," he says.
I stumble back. "How do you know my name?"
He's peculiar. So unbelievably enchanting. I'm enthralled by the sound of his voice alone.
"Don't be scared. You're safe here. I wanted to bring you somewhere special. Somewhere where you can make the forest beautiful with your dance."
My dance.
Of course, my dance.
Witchlight flickers in his eyes. This world is meant for me. A gift wrapped up in velvet petals and sweet perfumes.
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Kiana Krystle (Dance of the Starlit Sea)
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Cholesterol is the body’s equivalent of duct tape. It’s one of the most versatile nutrients our cells have and they use it for solving all sorts of problems. And it’s more than just a problem-solver; it’s also a building block: • It enables cell division. The rapidly dividing cells in our intestinal tract, skin, and bone marrow need it more than most other kinds of cells in our bodies. • It enables cell transport and communication. Cells need cholesterol to create structures called “lipid rafts” that are essential to responding to hormones and to moving large molecules into the cell, out of the cell, and from place to place within the cell. • It’s the precursor for vitamin D, which forms when ultraviolet light rays strike cholesterol in the skin. Vitamin D helps our bodies absorb calcium. • It provides waterproofing for our skin and other boundary layers within our bodies. • It helps our brains and nerve cells conduct electricity. The brain is 15 percent cholesterol by dry weight, a higher proportion than any other organ in our bodies. • It’s the precursor to numerous hormones, called steroid hormones. These include the well-known sex hormones testosterone, estrogen, and cortisol—which give us energy. And there are dozens more, including the supplements many people buy for health and performance enhancement, such as DHEA and adrenal extracts. Doctors know all this, but the
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Cate Shanahan (Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back)
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Vision is acute in the typically diurnal lizards, where it is essential for catching live prey such as fast-moving insects, and even grabbing flying insects out of the air as they pass. Their colour vision is also excellent, better in some ways even than that of humans, because as well as discriminating between the three primary colours that we do, some lizards’ eyes also have receptors sensitive to ultraviolet light. It is therefore no surprise that colour plays a more important role in the behaviour of lizards than in any other group of reptiles. Some species display extraordinarily conspicuous vivid colours and patterns to attract mates, even at the risk of increasing the chances of their being caught by a predator. For example, the garishly multi-coloured male of the Augrabies flat lizard of South Africa combines a bright blue head, greenish-blue front trunk, yellow front legs, orange hind legs and trunk, black belly, and tan and orange tail, not to mention a UV-coloured throat invisible to us. The female, in contrast, is mostly dark brown with cream stripes.
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T.S. Kemp (Reptiles: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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As animals died, the plains were scattered with the torn carcasses left by carrion feeders. Quickly, the skeletons, bleached and burned by ultraviolet light, once again became part of the whirling waltz of ecology. This was one of the great insights of ancient Greece: the world’s energy as Heraclitean fire, part of a closed system, from sky to stones, from grass to flesh, from flesh to earth, under the watchful eye of the sun that offered its photons to the nitrogen cycle. The Bardo Thodol—the Tibetan Book of the Dead—offers a similar theory to that of Heraclitus and the philosophers of flux. Everything passes, everything flows, the wild donkeys run, the wolves hunt, the vultures hover: order, equilibrium, under the sun. A crushing silence. An unforgiving light, few men. A dream.
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Sylvain Tesson (The Art of Patience: Seeking the Snow Leopard in Tibet)
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Melanotan I (Scenesse) darkens our skin by stimulating the production of melanin pigment production. Melanotan I is FDA-approved for treating skin damage in people with light intolerance, and may also help those struggling with mold toxicity. For the rest of us, it offers aesthetic benefits while protecting against damaging ultraviolet radiation. It also has some intriguing potential side benefits: reduced appetite, higher fat metabolism, and increased sex drive.
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Tony Robbins (Life Force: How New Breakthroughs in Precision Medicine Can Transform the Quality of Your Life & Those You Love)
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BenzVac
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The eyes go for different reasons. The lens is made of crystallin proteins that are tremendously durable, but they change chemically in ways that diminish their elasticity over time—hence the farsightedness that most people develop beginning in their fourth decade. The process also gradually yellows the lens. Even without cataracts (the whitish clouding of the lens that occurs with age, excessive ultraviolet exposure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and cigarette smoking), the amount of light reaching the retina of a healthy sixty-year-old is one-third that of a twenty-year-old.
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Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
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You explained to me theories about different realities. What if this is true for all of us, and we are unaware of these realities, in the same way we can’t hear a dog whistle or see ultraviolet light, but we know those sounds and sights are real? What if there are as many Garretts as there are Daphnes? What if reality is so complex that there are worlds upon worlds of alternate realities and alternate Carolines, Garretts, Daphnes, and Toms? What if there’s a Garrett who is running a rat experiment right now, and one who’s a physicist and one who is serving his country in Vietnam, but we have no access to these realities?” “Exactly,” I said. “What if?
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Laurel Brett (The Schrödinger Girl: A Novel (Kaylie Jones))
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humans; we’re not aware of the ultraviolet light in the first place, so we don’t lose anything when it gets turned into something we can use.
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Helen Czerski (Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life)
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Stereolithography (SLA) is an additive manufacturing process that belongs to the Vat Photopolymerization family. In SLA, an object is created by selectively curing a polymer resin layer-by-layer using an ultraviolet (UV) laser beam. The materials used in SLA are photosensitive thermoset polymers that come in a liquid form.
SLA has many common characteristics with Direct Light Processing (DLP), another Vat Photopolymerization 3D printing technology. For simplicity, the two technologies can be treated as equals.
A laser beam is directed in the X-Y axes across the surface of the resin according to the 3D data supplied to the machine (the .stl file), whereby the resin hardens precisely where the laser hits the surface. Once the layer is completed, the platform within the vat drops down by a fraction (in the Z axis) and the subsequent layer is traced out by the laser. The resin that is not touched by the laser remains in the vat and can be reused. This continues until the entire object is completed and the platform can be raised out of the vat for removal.
Support structure is always required in SLA. Support structures are printed in the same material as the part and must be manually removed after printing. The orientation of the part determines the location and amount of support. It is recommended that the part is oriented so that so visually critical surfaces do not come in contact with the support structures
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Locanam 3D Printing
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Somewhere in that lake are the drops of water that, over the next several months, will travel down miles of tubes, get sprayed with chlorine, zapped with ultraviolet light, and eventually climb the pipes of Joe Coffee’s sink and land in my cup.
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A.J. Jacobs (Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey (TED Books))
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for Ceres, like all readers, was altered by every book she read, and so her life became a record of their consumption. Were an ultraviolet light to be shone on her in a darkened room, their titles might have been written on her skin, so many as to be as tangled and intertwined
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John Connolly (The Land of Lost Things)
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Ultraviolet light attacks and eliminates Alien Parasites.
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Laurence Galian (ALIEN PARASITES: 40 GNOSTIC TRUTHS TO DEFEAT THE ARCHON INVASION!)
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The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird. What is she seeing? I wonder, and my brain does backflips trying to imagine it, because I can’t. I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Hawks, like other birds, have four. This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultraviolet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can’t possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I’m standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the hawk watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own. And all I can think is, I want to go back inside.
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Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk)
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These statistics, and all the various facts about subatomic particles, quanta, neutrinos, and so forth, constitute in effect the infrared and ultraviolet light at either end of the spectrum. They are too big and too small to see, to understand; they are more or less invisible to me though present, and peripheral to me in a real sense because I do not understand even what I can easily see.
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Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
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As though the musicians were not nearly so much playing the little phrase as performing the rites on which it insisted before it would consent to appear, and proceeding to utter the incantations necessary to procure, and to prolong for a few moments, the miracle of its apparition, Swann, who was no more able to see it than if it had belonged to a world of ultra-violet light, and who experienced something like the refreshing sense of a metamorphosis in the momentary blindness with which he was struck as he approached it, Swann felt its presence like that of a protective goddess, a confidante of his love, who, in order to be able to come to him through the crowd and to draw him aside to speak to him, had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of sound.
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Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way: A Graphic Novel)
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The very best pigments for creating light are fluorescent colors, because they absorb photons at higher-energy wavelengths that lie in the invisible ultraviolet range and reflect them back at visible wavelengths. This makes them look brighter than normal colors, almost as if they’re glowing.
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Ingrid Fetell Lee (Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness)
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I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Hawks, like other birds, have four. This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultraviolet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can’t possibly resolve from the generalised blur.
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Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk)
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Ultraviolet light is a known carcinogen and can affect human health in many ways that are only just starting to be understood.
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Steven Magee
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Nikolai sat inside the shade of the vine shelter and watched a single nimbus of sunlight shine through the leaves and into Renata's dark hair while she slept. Ultraviolet light was toxic to his kind—lethal after about half an hour's sustained exposure—but he couldn't work up the desire to patch the small hole in the vegetation and snuff out the errant ray. Instead, for the past several minutes, he'd been sitting next to Renata and watching, admittedly, much too intrigued, as the light soaked into her ebony hair, infusing the silky strands with a dozen different shades of copper, bronze, and burgundy.
What the hell was wrong with him?
He was sitting there staring at her hair, for crissake. Not just staring, but staring with total rapt fascination. To Niko, that seemed to indicate one of two equally disturbing facts: Either he should seriously consider looking into night courses with Vidal Sassoon, or he was a complete goner when it came to this female.
Goner as in gone for good, ruined for any other.
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Lara Adrian (Veil of Midnight (Midnight Breed, #5))
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Nedda’s dream eye kept traveling as she slept, searching for all the things she missed: the town, the buildings inside it, the houses, rooms, and people, like dolls, whose hearts she knew. The seismic hiccup of the launch rolled through her. She saw glasses break at the Bird’s Eye, and Ellery Rees sweeping up a shattered sundae dish. The gators at Jonny’s Jungle World sank into their ponds like beans in soup, hugging the murk at the bottom. Then the surge from Crucible ran through her like an electric shock, hot and cold at once. Strong. It coursed through power lines, the lines to the college, the wires in the walls, through the outlets in the labs. It pulsed across a gold-plated switch, shattering a glass divider beneath it. Light spilled from Crucible, infrared and ultraviolet, escaping everything meant to contain it. Her father’s machine was as much hope and wish as it was metal and glass.
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Erika Swyler (Light from Other Stars)
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Pasting a particular DNA gene/paragraph from a jellyfish into the genome of a mouse created mice who glowed bright green under ultraviolet light.
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Nessa Carey (Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures)
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I have every expectation that mirrored buildings will be regarded as an architectural cock-up in the future.
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Steven Magee
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The gamma ray, yet another form of nuclear radiation, is an electromagnetic wave similar to ultraviolet light or x-rays, only it is far more energetic. A gamma ray of sufficient energy can penetrate your car door, go clean through your body, and out the other side, leaving an ionized trail of molecular corruption in its path. It is the product of a rearrangement or settling of the structure of an atomic nucleus, and it naturally occurs often when a nucleus is traumatized by having just emitted an alpha or a beta particle. Gamma rays can be deadly to living cells, but, unlike the clumsy alpha particle, they can enter and leave without losing all their energy in your flesh. It’s the difference between being hit with a full-metal-jacketed .223 or a 12-gauge dumdum. Both hurt.
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James Mahaffey (Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima)
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This was not a romantic half-light, the white tailor’s dummies that stood like Terracotta Warriors forever on guard in her basic room, infused up the eerie glow like sunbathers soaking up the ultra-violet rays on a beach.
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Jim Lowe (New Reform (New Reform Quartet #1))
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Light boxes produce artificial light that mimics the sun’s intensity without emitting ultraviolet radiation.
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Kelly Brogan (A Mind of Your Own: The Truth About Depression and How Women Can Heal Their Bodies to Reclaim Their Lives)
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Not only did Maxwell’s theory describe visible colors, but it also predicted the existence of invisible electromagnetic waves. Sure enough, these were found from the 1870s onward. Radio waves, for instance, have frequencies that range from fewer than a hundred oscillations per second to up to around three million. The term microwave covers a range from there up to three hundred billion. Infrared sits between microwaves and visible light. When frequencies are greater than that of blue light, they are ultraviolet rays. Then comes X-rays, and oscillating up and down over a hundred billion billion times per second are gamma rays. The entire range, from radio waves to gamma rays, is called the electromagnetic spectrum.
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Paul Sen (Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe)
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Einstein explained this as follows: Light consists of lumps of energy, but the amount of energy in each lump depends on the frequency of the light. So, a lump of red light is smaller (i.e., contains less energy) than a lump of blue light. A lump of blue light is smaller than a lump of ultraviolent light. Shining red light on a substance, therefore, is akin to bombarding it with feathers. If a hundred feathers blew into your face, you could brush them off with little difficulty. Shining ultraviolet on something is equivalent to firing bullets at it. A single bullet will do far more damage than a hundred feathers. In the same way, a few particles of ultraviolet light will generate far more electric current than a large number of red-light particles.
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Paul Sen (Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe)
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As schoolchildren learn, the sun washes Earth with every imaginable type of light wave—X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared radiation, microwaves, radio waves, you name it. About a third of the total is reflected from clouds. Another sixth is taken in by airborne water vapor. That leaves roughly half of the incoming light—most of which is visible light, as it happens—to pass through the atmosphere. Almost all of that half is absorbed by the land, oceans, and vegetation on the surface. (A little is reflected.) Having taken in all this solar energy, the ground, water, and plants naturally warm up, which makes them emit infrared light, radiating it into the air. Most of this secondary infrared is absorbed by airborne water vapor, heating it up. Usually water vapor comprises between 1 and 4 percent of the atmosphere by weight. (The exact number changes with temperature, wind, and surface conditions.) But this relatively small quantity—1 to 4 percent—packs a big punch.
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Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
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Pollution is reducing the amount of natural ultraviolet (UV) sterilizing light outside of the tropics and increased rates of diseases are the expected outcome.
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Steven Magee