Scottish Lustre Pure Light acne treatment - YouTube

Introducing Lustre Pure Light - a blue light treatment for acne which allows you to beat spots while carrying on with your life. More information at LustrePureLight.com

Many patients find that their skin improves and their spots seem better when they have been out in the sunshine (ref 1).

However sunlight also contains ultraviolet (UVA-UVB) light which can damage skin and even cause skin cancer.

Scientists have found that visible blue light at a wavelength of 420 nm does not cause damage to the skin but is effective in killing P. acnes, the bacteria which causes acne.

Blue light has been used by dermatologists for many years to treat acne.

“Blue Holes” in Bahamas: Strange Life Forms Found

Researchers have found new forms of life that are totally unkown in underwater caves in the Bahamas called "blue holes."

These caves can provide clues on how life evolved not only on Earth but possibly on alien worlds, researchers said.

The researchers, led by Tom Iliffe, a marine biologist at Texas A &M University at Galveston, examined three inland blue holes in the Bahamas and discovered that layers of bacteria exist in all of them, although the microbes are significantly in one sinkhole are significantly different from the others.

The findings that each cave has different conditions from the others and thus a different forms of life will help scientists analyze the diverse routes life might have taken on Earth, according to researchers.

"These bacterial forms of life may be similar to microbes that existed on early Earth and thus provide a glimpse of how life evolved on this planet," Iliffe explained. "These caves are natural laboratories where we can study life existing under conditions analogous to what was present many millions of years ago."

Iliffe and his colleagues said these findings might also shed light on how life might have developed on distant planets and moons.

The researchers noted that tens of thousands of underwater caves are scattered around the world, but less than 5 percent of these have ever been explored and scientifically investigated.

"We know more about the far side of the moon than we do about these caves right here on Earth," Iliffe said. "There is no telling what remains to be discovered in the many thousands of caves that no one has ever entered. If life exists elsewhere in our solar system, it most likely would be found in water-filled subterranean environments, perhaps equivalent to those we are studying in the Bahamas."

Other places have turned out to be habitats for life, including some which may be considered as strange or seeming inhabitable places on the planet. The website ouramazingplanet.com listed the strangest places that is home to life. Among them are:

• Bubbling lakes of hot tar, which seem unlike to host living things, apparently teem with microbial life. In Pitch Lake, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad the world's largest naturally occurring asphalt lake, each gram of sticky black goo can harbor up to 10 million microbes.

• Radioactive wastes can be home to some species of bacteria like the bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans which can take up to 5,000 grays with no visible effect, and can even withstand up to 15,000 grays, earning it the title of "world's toughest bacterium" in the Guinness Book of World Records.

• Boiling water which can kill humans is home to a dazzling array of life. Underwater hot springs in the Pacific Ocean teem with tubeworms and giant clams, while the Atlantic variety is typically home to eyeless shrimp and other extreme residents.

• The Dead Sea is one of the saltiest bodies of water in the world, making it too harsh for most life to thrive there. But salt-loving or "halophile" microbes can thrive in this water body.

• Frozen ice, like lakes buried under ice, has been home to microbes. In the oldest known ice on Earth in Antarctica, scientists revived microbes that had been frozen for millions of years.

Massive Blue Stars: Ambient molecular gas

Credit: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope/Coelum

Young massive bright blue stars illuminate the ambient molecular gas of NGC 7129 (top right), a spent star formation region in this image posted on Dec. 21.

The star cluster NGC 7132 (lower left) has existed far longer, and already freed itself from a nascent shroud of gas.

Ancient blue stragglers in constellation Cepheus

Mysterious "blue stragglers" are old stars that appear younger than they should be: they burn hot and blue.

Several theories have attempted to explain why they don't show their age, but, until now, scientists have lacked the crucial observations with which to test each hypothesis.

Armed with such observational data, two astronomers from Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison report that a mechanism known as mass transfer explains the origins of the blue stragglers.

Essentially, a blue straggler eats up the mass, or outer envelope, of its giant-star companion.

This extra fuel allows the straggler to continue to burn and live longer while the companion star is stripped bare, leaving only its white dwarf core.

The scientists report their evidence in a study to be published by the journal Nature.

The majority of blue stragglers in their study are in binaries: they have a companion star. "It's really the companion star that helped us determine where the blue straggler comes from," said Northwestern astronomer Aaron M. Geller, first author of the study.

"The companion stars orbit at periods of about 1,000 days, and we have evidence that the companions are white dwarfs. Both point directly to an origin from mass transfer."

Geller is the Lindheimer Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the department of physics and astronomy in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Robert Mathieu, professor of astronomy and chair of the astronomy department at UW-Madison, is co-author of the study.

The astronomers studied the NGC 188 open cluster, which is in the constellation Cepheus, situated in the sky near Polaris, the North Star.

This cluster is one of the most ancient open star clusters, but it features these mysterious young blue stragglers.

The cluster has around 3,000 stars, all about the same age, and has 21 blue stragglers. Geller and Mathieu are the first to use detailed observational data from the WIYN Observatory in Tucson, Ariz., of the blue stragglers in NGC 188.

They used the information to analyze and compare the three main theories of blue straggler formation: collisions between stars, mergers of stars and mass transfer from one star to another. The only one left standing was the theory of mass transfer.

The light from the blue stragglers' companion stars is not actually visible in Geller and Mathieu's observations.

While the companions haven't been seen directly, their effect on the blue stragglers is evident: each companion pulls gravitationally on its blue straggler and creates a "wobble" as it orbits, and this allows astronomers to measure the mass of the companion stars.

The WIYN data show that each companion star is about half the mass of the sun, which is consistent with a white dwarf.

The other two origin theories, collisions and mergers, require the companion stars to be more massive than what is observed.

 In fact, in both scenarios, some of the companion stars could be bright enough to be visible in the WIYN data, which is not the case.

Blue Hue in Geyser Water: Haukadalur valley, Iceland

A mysterious blue colour is clearly captured in the split second before a geyser violently erupts.

The hue was captured on camera as a torrent of scalding water exploded from within the crater.

Photographer Tatyana Kildisheva was left baffled when she checked her images and discovered the sight.

She thinks it is either produced by chemicals in the exploding water or a light effect caused by the sun. Tatyana took the image in the Haukadalur valley, Iceland.

She said: "I wanted to capture the moment right before the geyser erupts, when a bubble is growing and is at its biggest size. It took me a while to catch this particular image, because this moment lasts for a fraction of a second.

I don't know what causes the blue colour. It might be chemicals - not far from this geyser is a blue water pool."

Picture: Tatyana Kildisheva/Solent News

Researchers Create a new light source

Scientists have created a completely new light source by getting light particles to act like atoms.

By cooling photons, the light particles condensed so they could behave like a single entity.

Researchers at the University of Bonn have shown that super particles can be made with light.

Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose thought this was possible back in 1925.

The Bonn researchers proved Einstein and Bose had the right instincts all along.

Why should you care? Well, the discovery could one day shrink electronic devices.

Until now, this behavior has only been seen in atoms. The applications of this physics breakthrough could one day be used to build more powerful computer chips and make lasers that work in the X-ray range.

Nobody has ever created a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) with photons before. BECs are usually made with cold atoms of gas.

In the 1920s, it was thought this strange quantum phase of matter existed. If the atoms were cooled to close to absolute zero, then the atoms would be pushed into the same quantum state and they’d act as one.

Zeeya Merali wrote in Nature:
In 1995, two experimental groups independently produced the first examples of BECs with rubidium and sodium atoms. In theory, physicists knew that it should also be possible to form a BEC using particles of light, or photons. But in practice it seemed near impossible because, unlike atoms, the number of photons in an experiment is not conserved.

Scottish Scientists advance Hospital Hygiene (HINS)

Superbugs are a huge problem in hospitals, but scientists have been working on a number of ways to combat the spread of the potentially deadly pathogens.

There’s anti-pathogenic drugs to treat superbugs and a coating that can kill MRSA upon contact.

Now, scientists at the University of Strathclyde have shown that special light is enough to make the bacteria basically commit cell suicide.

Clinical trials proved the HINS-light Environmental Decontamination System is effective in getting rid of bacterial pathogens in the hospital setting - at least the light system works better than traditional wipe down methods.

“The technology kills pathogens but is harmless to patients and staff, which means for the first time, hospitals can continuously disinfect wards and isolation rooms,” Strathcylde professor John Anderson said in a statement.

“The system works by using a narrow spectrum of visible-light wavelengths to excite molecules contained within bacteria. This in turn produces highly reactive chemical species that are lethal to bacteria such as meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, and Clostridium difficile, known as C.diff,” he added.

The light prevents the pathogens from being transmitted through the environment - which ultimately lessens the spread of the infection among patients.

As you’ll notice in the picture, the light gives off a purple color. To make the lights appear more normal, the scientists designed the system with LED technology to off-set the violet colour.

Cassini image: Saturn's moon Dione against hazy Titan

The surface of Saturn's moon Dione is rendered in crisp detail against a hazy, ghostly Titan.

Visible in this image are hints of atmospheric banding around Titan's north pole.

The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 10, 2010.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Dione and 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Titan.

Scale in the original image was 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Dione and 16 kilometers (10 miles) on Titan. The image has been magnified by a factor of 1.5 and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute