Blue: In Search of Nature's Rarest Color: A Scientist's Search for Nature's Rarest Colour

Kupferschmidt; Kai

ISBN 10: 1615197524 / ISBN 13: 9781615197521

Published by The Experiment LLC, 2021

About this Item

A globe-trotting quest to find blue in the natural world - and to understand our collective obsession with this bewitching color. Blue is a rare color - natural blue, that is. From morpho butterflies in the rain forest to the blue jay flitting past your window, vanishingly few living things are blue - and most that appear so are doing sleight of hand with physics or complex chemistry. Flowers modify the red pigment anthocyanin to achieve their blue hue. Even the blue sky above us is a trick of the light. Yet this hard-to-spot accent color in our surroundings looms large in our affections. Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been fascinated by blue since childhood. His quest to find and understand his favorite color and its hallowed place in our culture takes him to a gene-splicing laboratory in Japan, a volcanic lake in Oregon, and to Brandenburg, Germany - home of the last Spix's macaws. From deep underground where blue minerals grow into crystals to miles away in space where satellites gaze down at our blue marble" planet, wherever we do find blue, it always has a story to tell."-No DJ.

Seller Inventory # 19009

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Blue: In Search of Nature's Rarest Color: A Scientist's Search for Nature's Rarest Colour
• Publisher: The Experiment LLC
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1615197524
• ISBN 13: 9781615197521
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

“This fascinating book delves into art, chemistry, biology, physics, geology, history, and literature in order to elucidate the beautiful mysterious color blue.”―Seattle Book Review

Blue is our favorite color globally―the darling of artists since the time of the pharaohs. So it’s startling to turn to the realms of nature and discover that
“true” blue is truly rare. The sea and sky are blue, but we can’t bottle this trick of physics. And the few creatures, plants, and minerals that appear blue are almost all deceiving us. There’s no blue pigment in a blue jay―it would be brown but for how its feathers distort light.

Kai Kupferschmidt has been enraptured by blue since childhood. In Blue, he invites readers on his globe-trotting quest to understand his favorite color― from Kyoto, where scientists are trying to engineer a blue rose, to Brandenburg, where conservationists hope to save the “little blue macaw.” Deep underground where blue crystals grow and miles overhead where astronauts gaze at our “blue marble” planet-wherever he finds this alluring color, it has a story to tell.

About the Author

Kai Kupferschmidt is a contributing correspondent for Science magazine, where he writes about infectious diseases as well as drug development, biotechnology, evolution, and science policy, and where his intrepid coverage of the coronavirus pandemic has gained international attention. He also writes for the German newspapers Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Die Zeit. When not doing these things, he is usually thinking about the color blue. He holds a degree in molecular biomedicine from the University of Bonn and lives in Berlin.