Accordingly logical

Happy October, All

This quote is from E.B. White, in response to a children’s librarian’s request to VIPs to help encourage kids to visit her newly-opened library in Troy, New York. Still relevant today, especially when times may be more sad than happy.

What makes fireworks colorful?

It’s all thanks to the luminescence of metals. When certain metals are heated (over a flame or in a hot explosion) their electrons jump up to a higher energy state. When those electrons fall back down, they emit specific frequencies of light - and each chemical has a unique emission spectrum.

You can see that the most prominent bands in the spectra above match the firework colors. The colors often burn brighter with the addition of an electron donor like Chlorine (Cl). 

But the metals alone wouldn’t look like much. They need to be excited. Black powder (mostly nitrates like KNO3) provides oxygen for the rapid reduction of charcoal © to create a lot hot expanding gas - the BOOM. That, in turn, provides the energy for luminescence - the AWWWW.

Aluminium has a special role — it emits a bright white light … and makes sparks!

Flowers are nature’s ad men. They’ll do anything to attract the attention of the pollinators that help them reproduce, and they taylor their displays based on the sensory capabilities of those pollinators. Bees can see visible and ultraviolet light, they have precise olfactory receptors, and now we know they can also detect electric fields.

Visible spectrum (photo). Particular bright colors and petal shapes attract particular pollinators. (Credit: Kevin Collins)

Ultraviolet (photo). Bees and other pollinators can see the ultraviolet end of the spectrum. They are guided by patterns on flowers that are invisible to humans. (Credit: Kevin Collins)

Fragrance plume (artist’s depiction). Bees follow specific odors to locate flowers and, once they arrive, use scent maps to move toward the center of the flower. Fragrance that clings to a bee provides information for other bees back at the hive.

Electric field (artist’s depiction). Flowers have a weak negative electric charge relative to the air around them. Different flowers have different electric fields, often with charge concentrated at the tips of the petals.

Les faïences anciennes & modernes by Auguste Alexandre Mareschal (1874) is one of many books donated by Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt to form the library in the newly created Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, which is now the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Faience is a type of ceramics that include majolica and Delftware.

Want to know more about the Hewitt sisters? There’s a two part series on the history of the sisters who founded the first museum dedicated to decorative arts in the United States.

Anthropologists have been busy studying the dings and dents in the teeth of Neanderthals and ancient humans in an effort to figure out more about their diets. Their conclusion: when it got cold and resources were scarce, Neanderthals shifted to a meat-heavy diet. Humans, on the other hand, maintained a mixed diet of meat, fruits and nuts.

Read the full story here.