Some say that I have a thing for glowing, ambient lights. Very true. Hence why I’m kind of going ga-ga over LumiGram’s LumiTable. It’s a 63″ x 13″ and costs $195 but boy will it pay off when you throw a party. It’s made of LumiGram’s proprietary fiber optic material called Luminex (boy, such originality with product names!). The LumiTable really looks like it belongs in The Matrix, with that suave green top. I’d buy one if I actually cleaned my apartment.
Ryan was showing me some video of a hornet killing a cicada whilst we discussed posts about bugs. Then, I suddenly stumbled upon this video of a glowing trilobite beetle. Watch how it lights up in the dark like a raver’s glowstick. The ‘net doesn’t say too much about the creature but I did find this information on Mahalo:
The Trilobite Beetle is a beetle from Borneo that resembles the extinct Trilobite. The short YouTube video of the oddly shaped insect has been viewed more than 200,000 times. Borneo, Southeast Asian island on which the beetle resides, is renowned for its abundant flora and fauna.
I’d like to scoop 20 of these suckers up and throw them in a jar with some grass and air holes. Boom. Instant DIY night light.
We get it. Sometimes you need some light over your new Lou Reed poster but you’re too cheap to buy a black light. Keith Neufeld has got your back. He’ll show you how to build edge-lit Plexiglas strips out of CD case scraps using a white LED that is then heat shrinked to fit the end of each piece.
The result is an impressive DIY light show that you can arrange in any way you see fit. It’s more radiant than a black light and it shouldn’t cost you more than a few bucks to put together.
Three scientists have won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien and Japan’s Osamu Shimomura discovered and successfully developed a fluorescent protein found in jellyfish. Jellyfish will glow under blue and ultraviolet light because of this protein which the three scientists have become known for.
It might not sound like much, but this jellyfish protein has been widely used to study the spread of cancer, how brain cells develop and bacterial growth. Still don’t think it’s a big deal?
The academy compared the impact of the protein on science to the invention of the microscope, saying that for the past decade the protein has been ‘a guiding star for biochemists, biologists, medical scientists and other researchers’.
Yes, this is a big deal.
Link
I recently bought a new pair of sunglasses and didn’t need these cheap $6 Walgreens sunglasses I bought in Florida a year ago. With some time on my hands, I quickly modded them to resemble the pair Arnie wore in the classic action flick, The Terminator. This mod can most likely be done without solder, but we’re going to make our pair with solder. Ready to make? Read on.
In your neighborhood, you may have noticed that the street lights can be almost as horrendous looking as the telephone lines. Designer Jongoh Lee must’ve been disgusted by the intrusion on mother nature for having come up with these solar powered street lights that imitate leaves, called Invisible Streetlight. The lights are comprised of a double injection of silicon, aluminum materials and a photocapacitor, which keeps it glowing all night long.
While it’s by no means a bloomin’ dildo light source, it’ll at least fit in with the other leaves on the tree. Though we’re more impressed with leaves that want to be lights rather than lights that want to be leaves, the Invisible Streetlight is a fine alternative to power wasting street lights.
