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.

World’s Most Powerful X-Ray Laser Created

Scientists from the Oxford University in the UK and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have invented a powerful X-ray laser - the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS).

For the first time, this laser will allow the heating of matter up to 2 million degrees Celsius, in a controlled setting.

The researchers tested the laser on a piece of aluminum foil and created hot dense matter (or a solid plasma).

The process of heating took less than a trillionth of a second.

According to the scientists, this represents a major step forward in understanding the composition of the more extreme forms of matter found in stars and giant planets; this could also help in experiments aimed at recreating the nuclear fusion process that powers the Sun.

"The LCLS X-ray laser is a truly remarkable machine," said Sam Vinko, a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford University, "Making extremely hot, dense matter is important scientifically if we are ultimately to understand the conditions that exist inside stars and at the center of giant planets within our own solar system and beyond."

"The LCLS, with its ultra-short wavelengths of X-ray laser light, is the first that can penetrate a dense solid and create a uniform patch of plasma - in this case a cube one-thousandth of a centimeter on a side - and probe it at the same time," said Bob Nagler from the SLAC.

"Those 60 hours when we first aimed the LCLS at a solid were the most exciting 60 hours of my entire scientific career," said Justin Wark, also from Oxford, "LCLS is really going to revolutionize the field, in my view."

Sea urchins see with their entire body

Many animals have eyes that are incredibly complex – others manage without. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have shown that sea urchins see with their entire body despite having no eyes at all.

The study has been published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Most animals react to light and have developed a very sophisticated way of seeing complex images so that they can function in their surroundings.

Good examples include insects’ compound eyes and the human eye. Charles Darwin and other evolutionary biologists were bewildered by the eye’s complexity and wondered how this kind of structure could have evolved through natural selection.

But some creatures, such as sea urchins, can react to light even though they do not have eyes. Previous studies of sea urchins have shown that they have a large number of genes linked to the development of the retina, which is the light-sensitive tissue in the human eye.

This means that sea urchins have several genes that are coded for a widely occurring eye protein, opsin.

“It was this discovery that underpinned our research,” says Sam Dupont from the University of Gothenburg’s Department of Marine Ecology, one of the researchers behind the study and co-authors of the article.

“We wanted to see where the opsin was located in sea urchins so that we could find the sensory light structures, or photoreceptors. We quite simply wanted to know where the sea urchin sees from.”

The research group behind the study showed that the photoreceptors seem to be located on the tip and base of the tube feet that are found all over the sea urchin’s body and are used to move.

“We argue that the entire adult sea urchin can act as a huge compound eye, and that the shadow that is cast by the animal’s opaque skeleton over the light-sensitive cells can give it directional vision,” says Dupont.

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