Color Changing Nails!

While in Puerto Rico, my husband and I stumbled upon a store in Old San Juan that looked suspiciously like a store I stumbled upon in Venice Beach, Florida.  Okay, so we failed a little at finding unique souvenirs, but they were at least cool souvenirs!

The store, Del Sol, sells articles that change color in the sunlight.  Yes, think back to those Hypercolor days!  They have a large assortment of t-shirts, but also sunglasses (the frames change!), hair clips, earrings, and sandals.  Even the bag we put our purchases in changed from white to pale pink in the sunlight.

However, my most favorite product: color changing nail polish.  This store had a large variety and I finally settled on a pale pink that turned a more mauve-y pink in the sunlight.  Very fun.  I nearly bought a silver glitter polish that became bright red glitter outside.

Del Sol website: www.delsol.com

Icebergs for drinking water?

When pieces of glaciers break off and venture into open sea on their own, they are called icebergs.  While they are floating in a salty sea, icebergs and glaciers alike are made from frozen snow (or freshwater) meaning that it is drinkable water if melted.  Icebergs can range in size from a small car (growler) to a something larger than three football fields (very large).  Instead of wrecking ships or migrating southward to melt into the salty ocean, it has been proposed that icebergs should be utilized as a fresh drinking water supply.

The process isn't so straightforward and seems to mostly be a hypothesis at this point, but the idea has been floated (hehe, good pun!)  Icebergs could be wrapped in plastic to keep them from melting and somehow pushed/hauled/coaxed to an appropriate processing area.  It's something that companies are looking into further!

Article about icebergs for drinking water: http://www.freedrinkingwater.com/water_quality/quality1/13-08-icebergs-for-drinking-water.htm

Phosphorescent Bays

My husband and I are currently traveling in Puerto Rico.  I desperately want to go zip-lining in the rainforest; he wants to show me the phosphorescent bays (also called bioluminescent bays).  We may not make it there this trip, but I have spent some time reading about them.  Holy amaz-a-balls.  They are gorgeous!

The protist dinoflagellate lives in the bays and upon a drop in pH (more easily defined on tours as "agitation of the waters") a molecule binds to a protein in the organism and emits a blue light.  These little creatures can use this to scare their predators - very cool.  For humans, the mechanism is beautiful to watch. 

A few of these bays exist in Puerto Rico and are really popular destination spots.  You can read more about them here:

Article on the bays: http://suite101.com/article/bioluminescent-bays-of-puerto-rico-a12954

Website for one of the bays: http://www.biobay.com/

Here are a few pictures:

Touch Screen Braille

With the advent of touchscreen phones, typing messages without the benefit of a tactile keyboard meant that the blind had an infinitely harder time typing.  Yes, a keyboard comes up on an iPhone, for example, but there's no raised markers to properly orient the fingers or edges of keys to be sure what buttons they are hitting. 

A new application called BrailleTouch has recently been released that allows the blind to type in Braille code quickly and efficiently.  They are able to send text messages as quickly as sighted people.  Of course, those who understand the Braille alphabet are also able to send text messages now without looking at their screens...

This video is excellent at demonstrating how it works - I was having a hard time visualizing how the phone should be held and where the fingers need to be placed.

Supertasters

The compound 6-n-propylthiouracil (also known as PROP) elicits three different reactions in people: no flavor, unpleasantness, or intense bitterness.  Those in the "intense bitterness" category are labeled supertasters and are quite sensitive to certain foods.  In fact, they "taste" differently than the majority of the population.  For example, coffee and hoppy beer might also be quite bitter.  Scientists have linked this supertasting ability to the gene TAS2R28, a taste receptor protein found in our cells.

Read more!   http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/human-biology/taste4.htm