Snooping Around

It's so magical... A night at the disco. Flashing colors all around. A little glowing bracelet around your wrist. The music is so loud you don’t care about everything. But maybe a little question makes its way into your mind… How does this stuff glow? Well, here I am to tell you why. All the glowing in the dark products contain a chemical structures called phosphors. This name is given to any substance that emits light after being energized in some way. Thousands of chemicals can be classified as phosphors. The great variety of chemicals with this property permits lots of degrees of brightness, color, and length of time they glow after being energized. A phosphorescent eagle There are three main types of ways these phosphors can absorb energy and then releasing it: Phosphorescence, Chemiluminescence and Radioluminescence. Phosphorescent structures , most common for glow in the dark items, are things like the glow in the dark stars many people put on their ce...

As a child I've always thought fireflies were magical creatures. And that is due to the lower part of their abdomen. The magic has a name: bioluminescence , the light produced by a small cells called photocytes, reflected off several layers of reflective cells, with a consequent emission of a greenish-yellow glow. Inside this light producing cells within the firefly is an organelle called a peroxizome . The chemical part within it is what creates the light. Magnesium and ATP (so it's called energy in biology) combine with an enzyme known as luciferase and the protein luciferin . This combination creates a very excited molecule. When oxygen is introduced into the mix, the molecule goes from excitement back to a steady state. This transaction releases energy in the form of a photon of light . The mechanism that starts this light show is not very well known. The main theory revolves around the firefly’s ability to control oxygen within photocytes. The organelle that cont...