Cool Things You Can Do With a Blue Laser: Reflection vs. Fluorescence
[W]hat is going on here? This isn’t just reflection, this is something else. How do I know? If it were just reflection, the only color would be green (same as the incident light). This is an example of fluorescence. Basically, in fluorescence, the light doesn’t just oscillate the electrons. The light excites the electrons to a higher energy level.
The pressure of living on a spinning planet
This almost seems like a force, doesn’t it, something pushing the air around? In many ways it does act like a force, though it depends on whether you’re looking at it from the ground, rotating with the Earth, or from space, watching the Earth spin beneath you. This whole thing was first figured out in detail by Gaspard Gustave de Coriolis in the 1800s, and we name it after him: the Coriolis effect (or, sometimes, the Coriolis force).
It’s not about plastics
Far From Any Lab, Paper Bits Find Illness
While other scientists successfully shrank beakers, tubes and centrifuges into diagnostic laboratories that fit into aluminum boxes that cost $50,000, George Whitesides had smaller dreams.
The diagnostic tests designed in Dr. Whitesides’s Harvard University chemistry laboratory fit on a postage stamp and cost less than a penny.
His secret? Paper.