The color of micro-organisms (fungi, bacteria, algae, and such) is due to different colored substances in the cells. For instance, bacteria use variants of chlorophyll (the green in plants) but absorb light of different wavelengths creating natural colors of purple, pink, green, yellow, orange, and brown.
While a few of the images have been color enhanced or stained with dyes for better viewing under a microscope, and the Petri dishes contain and added vivid color of a growth medium, microbiology is a wonderful source of color inspiration.
Imagine hiking on a sunny mountain and witnessing an unforgettable phenomenon worthy of a Hollywood special effects team: as a bank of chilly fog rises from a couloir, your shadow grows to gigantic proportion (hundreds of feet high), surrounded by a prismatic halo.
In olden times, the spectre was considered to be of supernatural origin and fearfully ominous in nature. Today, the phenomenon is known as a "Brocken Bow," named after a mountain in Germany. Like a small, circular rainbow, a foggy Brocken Bow tends to last from several seconds to fifteen minutes. Bands of color surround the gigantic shadow at a distance of several feet. The outermost band is red, and the others follow the order of the typical rainbow. In some cases, a Brocken Bow is surrounded by a second bow, whose color order is reversed. A similar phenomenon, known as a Glory, is distinguished by the fact that the bands of color touch the head of the shadow. Glories typically sport seven bands of color and can last for hours at a time. Sometimes Glories are surrounded by glowing white fog bows.
Imagine if an artist could take millions of years to complete a single painting.
Over millions of years the natural process of water penetrating and seeping into stones, bringing with it solutions of iron and magnesium, along with other elements, leaves traces of color and forms within the stone. This, along with cracks created from pressure and channels of water, combine their lines to push up imagery of mountains and trees, creating landscapes of unmeasurable beauty.
Known under a few names, such as: scenic stone, pictorial stones, pietra paesina, marble ruiniforme, lithographic limestone, and stone Florence (there may be others too), these stones were highly prized in early modern Europe and, before that, Asia, because of the beautiful naturally created organic landscapes.
There are three areas in particular that are known (or were known at some point in time) for these types of stones: Florence, Italy; Jasper, Oregon; and Cotham, England.
Artists also used these stones as a canvas adding their own hand and transforming the natural lines and shapes of the stone's face with their own paints, like the one on top painted by Dutch painter Hercules Segers, and the other one by Johann König.
Currently, there are 4000 known minerals, with new discoveries being made year after year. Here are a few yellow minerals to inspire your next palette.
Color in Minerals
The absorption of light, and the apparent color, is determined by a mineral's atomic bonds which are made up of electrons that absorb certain wave lengths. The colors produced through absorption and emittance are usually produced by transition metals. Even trace amounts of these elements can have a drastic effect on color.
Cobalt produces the violet-red color in erythrite, (cobalt arsenic sulfide).
Chromium produces the color orange-red color of crocoite, (lead chromate).
Copper produces the azure blue color of azurite, (copper carbonate hydroxide).
Iron produces the red color of limonite, (hydrated iron oxide hydroxide).
Manganese produces the pink color of rhodochrosite, (manganese carbonate).
Nickel produces the green color of annabergite, (hydrated nickel arsenate).
Uranium produces the yellow color of zippeite, (hydrated potassium uranyl sulfate hydroxide).
Vanadium produces the red-orange color of vanadinite, (lead vanadate chloride).
Winslow Homer's 'For to Be a Farmer's Boy' depicts a worker in the field picking pumpkins as he gazes off into the distance, but after years of deterioration some of the red and yellow pigments have faded in the sky, leaving that area virtually without color. Now, Richard Van Duyne, a chemist at Northwestern University, along with Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and Francesca Casadio, a conservation scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago, are working to determine what the original colors were, and in turn, changing our ideas about the painting's true meaning.
In perpetration for the Art Institute's major Homer exhibition, "Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light," conservators discovered, using X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and visual examination through a microscope, that the painting's white skies were originally painted in unstable red and orange dyes that have almost completely faded.
To solve this mystery, they are using surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), the analytical technique pioneered by Van Duyne in 1977. SERS uses laser light and nanoparticles of precious metals to interact with molecules to show the chemical make-up of a particular dye.
SERS is a variation of Raman spectroscopy, a widely used technique first developed in the 1920s. What sets SERS apart is its ability to analyze extremely minute samples of organic dyes; some samples are so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye.
- Science Daily
Before synthetic dye was developed in the late 1800's, artist used organic dyes which are more susceptible to damage, especially red dye. That is why the researchers have been focusing their efforts on red organic dyes specifically.
Neil Harbisson suffers from achromatopsia – or complete congenital color blindness, and until meeting Adam Montandon, a cybernetics expert who was giving a speech at the art school which he was attending at the time, he only painted in black and white. Montandon had the idea of creating a way to harness the frequencies at which different colors reflects light; violet vibrating at fastest rate, red the slowest.
Queen Elizaborg
The first design for such a device only enabled Harbisson to hear six different frequencies and analogously, 'see' six different colors, but after a some time of research, the Eyeborg system was developed that allowed him to 'see' 360 colors.
Harbission is able to discern the differences in the colors on the paint palette in front of him by wearing a headset integrated with a digital camera connected to a backpack containing a computer which slows down the frequency of the light waves to the frequency of the sound waves. The translated tone is heard through an earpiece.
“I used to paint rather literally,” Harbisson said. “I would stand in front of something and just paint what I saw immediately before me. Now I’m doing more abstracts and being much more free and liberal with my art.”
Part of the mollusk phylum, Nudibranchs are the shell-less relatives of the snail and are known for their garish colors. These tiny sea creatures are usually only 2cm - 6cm in length and can be found worldwide. They are able to thrive in any depth of salt water from the deepest darkest ocean floors to warm shallow water.
There are over 3,000 known species of nudibranchs, and scientist estimate that only half have been discovered so far. The creatures soft-body and short life span of 1 year make it possible for many of them to live undetected and vanish from the earth without a trace.
Nudibranchs are blind, and the animal relies on smell, taste and feel to navigate their surroundings to find coral, sponges, eggs, small fish, and other nudibranchs to eat.
Commissioned by Animate Projects in association with Arts Council England, Magnetic Movie was created by artists Ruth Jarmen and Joe Gerhardt, also known as, Semiconductor.
The film follows Scientists from NASA's Space Sciences Laboratory excitedly describing their discoveries while the animation of Jarmne and Gerhardt bring to life their descriptions with visualizations of the magnetic life all around us. One scientist describes a field as a 'hairy ball' with ingrown hairs that turn back towards the source creating loops. Another scientist describes another field as 'dancing dots' that collide canceling out or merging with each other.
The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons . Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?
Some interesting research has emerged regarding the effects of feather colors on a bird's internal physiology. So, we're taking a look at what they found, mixed in with a little bird palette inspiration.
It has always been thought that the bird made the color, but now scientist have found that the color of a bird's feathers can have a dramatic impact on a bird's physiology.
"The traditional view is that internal processes of birds determine their external features -- in other words, physiology forms the feathers," said Kevin McGraw, an assistant professor at ASU's School of Life Sciences. "But our results indicate that a perceived change in the color of an animal can directly affect its internal physiological state. A barn swallow's hormonal profile is influenced by its outward appearance."
The Lilac-breasted Roller, Coracias caudataus, is a member of the roller family of birds. It is widely distributed in sub-Saharan Africa and the southern Arabian Peninsula, preferring open woodland and savanna; it is largely absent from treeless places. Usually found alone or in pairs, it perches conspicuously at the tops of trees, poles or other high vantage points from where it can spot insects, lizards, scorpions, snails, frogs, small birds and rodents moving about at ground level.
"In the animal world, sexual signals by males -- from the antlers of elk to the gaudy tail feathers of peacocks -- have evolved to convey honest, accurate information about the animal, McGraw said. Evolutionary biologists believe the top males in a population can afford the physiological costs of expressing the most exaggerated forms of sexual signals, like a conspicuous dark feather color that is either biochemically costly to produce or makes those individuals more susceptible to predators, he said."
When scientist first started working to genetically modify Zebra fish, it was in the hopes that a small mutation would allow the fish to identify certain pollutants in waterways wherever they were introduced.
In 1999, Dr. Zhiyuan Gong and his colleagues at the National University of Singapore extracted the green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene from a jellyfish that naturally produced bright green bioluminescence. They inserted the gene into the zebrafish genome, causing the fish to glow brightly under both natural white light and ultraviolet light. Their goal was to develop a fish that could detect pollution by selectively fluorescing in the presence of environmental toxins. The development of the always fluorescing fish was the first step in this process. Shortly thereafter, his team developed a line of red fluorescent zebra fish by adding a gene from a sea coral, and yellow fluorescent zebra fish, by adding a variant of the jellyfish gene. Later, a team of Taiwanese researchers at the National University of Taiwan, headed by Professor Huai-Jen Tsai (蔡懷禎), succeeded in creating a medaka (rice fish) with a fluorescent green color.
The fish were first introduced into the U.S. market in 2003 after FDA approval:
Because tropical aquarium fish are not used for food purposes, they pose no threat to the food supply. There is no evidence that these genetically engineered zebra danio fish pose any more threat to the environment than their unmodified counterparts which have long been widely sold in the United States. In the absence of a clear risk to the public health, the FDA finds no reason to regulate these particular fish.
- FDA
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