Sampling of recent press collected from ISSUU, newspapers, Google News & more.
BERKELEY, Calif. There are no windows in the underground laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley’s Hildebrand Hall. No portals through which to see the sky. The bluest things in sight are the cobalt-colored lab coats worn by two chemists huddled around a beaker of white viscous liquid, its temperature slowly climbing.
On a Monday afternoon in August, the blue-coat technicians watched the liquid with a spellbound intensity. Their resident leader, a woman named Olga Alexopoulou, was positioned in an adjacent room the size of a small walk-in closet, illuminated only by the phantom glow of ultraviolet light.
Inside, she slowly peeled back a sheet of aluminum foil to reveal four glass microscope slides, a globule of liquid the size of a thumbprint on each. Like alien droppings, they glowed underneath the UV bulbs with a cinematic ferocity.
“The average person has never seen this kind of purity of color,” Alexopoulou told me.
Alexopoulou isn’t a scientist. She’s an artist. But, inside the tiny lab in Berkeley, shaded from the unceasing clamor of the world outside, she and her methodologically-inclined counterparts are on the same curious quest: They are attempting to engineer a new pigment of blue.
Over the course of 10 months, Alexopoulou has project-managed her secretive team from Istanbul, communicating through email and Skype to check up on the mysterious liquid. According to Alexopoulou, the blue she’s after is different than all the man-made blues that have come before it. Hers is “the blue of the future,” a pigment that dazzles in its sheer purity and depth, emitting a radiance more often associated with neon lights than the contents of a tube of paint.
With an undeniable weight of seriousness, Alexopoulou has dubbed her pigment Quantum Blue.
Read more here.
To post a comment, please login.
View this profile on InstagramDr. Wallace J. Nichols (@wallacejnichols) • Instagram photos and videos
Where did our water come from? One theory is from comets and asteroids nearly 4 billion years... continue
The ocean has long been a source of fascination and wonder for humans. Its vast expanse, rhythmic waves... continue
Red Bull surfer Kai Lenny will take any chance he can get to spend time in the sea. &ldquo... continue