Wednesday 23 January 2019

Some plants produce their own light

A plant was created by genetically modifying its structure to include luciferin, a chemical that gives jellyfish their radiant glow. 
Today we have used a chemical reaction  to make real flowers glow in the dark. Place a white flower into a glass for several hours to absorb the fluorescent highlighter ink.
When the flower has adsorbed the water, its petals will glow! 
This experiment uses a "black light".
 Black lights look  purple, but it's the light they produce that you can't see that's really interesting. Black lights produce ultraviolet (UV) light. Our eyes can't perceive UV light, but our skin can feel it; UV light is the reason we get sunburns.
Some substances, like the ink in many highlighter pens, will glow under a UV light. The fluorescent ink absorbs the energy in the UV light, and then emits it as visible light. 


Thursday 17 January 2019

Why are leaves green?

Chlorophyll is the pigment  in  leaves. Chlorophyll works by absorbing sunlight and turning it in to energy for the plant. 
We can better understand chlorophyll by extracting/removing it from leaves. 
This will show us what the true colour of the leaf is, which they can also see in autumn just before the leaves fall off trees.