colors

Periwinkle

Periwinkle There is a cornucopia of oddly named, obscure colors out there – incarnadine, filemot, and smaragdine, for example. As a toddler begins to amass a vocabulary, these hues likely won’t beat blue, red, or green into the stable. Some colors with strange monikers are more familiar, perhaps because they found a spot in Crayola’s box at some […]

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The Whitest White

The Whitest White We learned the Blackest Black has some incredible applications, beyond turning objects into mind-melting black holes. A substance that can absorb nearly all the light that hits it can work marvels on telescopes or solar cells. The secret to carbon nanotubes – the structures that make the serious blacks possible – is to bounce

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Eigengrau

Eigengrau   Close your eyes. What color do you see? Disregard any of the artifacts that linger from light sources that impacted your eyes before you closed them. Those kaleidoscopic blobs are fascinating, but they’re not what we’re after here. They should fade relatively quickly. Some people experience these light shows all the time, thanks

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The Liquid Rainbow

The Liquid Rainbow The Andes dominate the western portion of South America, forming a continent-long spine of gnarly mountains. In Colombia, near the northern reaches of the Andes, another range sits just 25 miles to the east. The Serranía de la Macarena run for 75 miles north-to-south and stretch just 20 miles in width. The tallest

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Roy G. Biv

Roy G. Biv   Many students learn the mnemonic Roy G. Biv to recall the visible colors: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. It’s a handy way to quickly remember the order of a rainbow spectrum. Have you ever asked yourself, “what exactly is indigo?” Is it near blue? Near violet? A mixture of the two? If

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