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DayGlo is not just about those funky posters your older siblings used to hang up in their dorm rooms

"BEYOND FLUORESCENT," is how Stephen Jackson, president of US-based paint provider DayGlo, describes the company's new marketing direction. "We're proud of our history, but we wanted to show the fresh and exciting color effects made possible with DayGlo," Jackson said in a press release.

In late-June, with its newly redesigned website, the company launched a new messaging campaign: "Color. Only Better."

At the website, potential customers can utilize the site's interactive elements and the services of DayGlo's Brand Action Team to aid in the design and development a product.

"Computers are so prevalent in the design world" that the company adapted its site to be more interactive and provide better color resolution, said Kevin Sonby, vice president of marketing for DayGlo, in an interview with ICIS.

With "Color. Only Better," the company wants to communicate that it offers a variety of effects and enhancements for paints.

DayGlo paints are so bright because they reflect more light, including the ultraviolet wavelength - which is why the colors were perfect for the "blacklight" posters so popular in the 1970s.

Although DayGlo is transitioning from its glorious - and perhaps notorious - past as color provider for funky and trippy designs on posters, books and clothing, I am glad that Jackson acknowledges that past, even with a simple, yet somewhat exciting statement like "beyond fluorescent."

The company's quality may be its curse, though, if it ever wants to shed its psychedelic legacy: DayGlo is still the primary paint of choice when people make tie-dyed T-shirts.

SHUTTING DOWN
As ICIS Chemical Business transitions towards its new format, this column - like a redundant steam cracker - is being mothballed.

A big thanks to all the ICIS staff that over the years aided and abetted this column, and an extra-special thanks to all the chemical industry personnel who supported it before - by suggesting topics;
during - by being interviewed;
and after - by commenting on and sometimes even praising the results.
My gratitude.

Nobody's calling them locusts, okay? They are just grasshoppers--hungry, hungry grasshoppers

The US Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) issued a bulletin in early June warning the Mid- and Southwest States that large grasshopper outbreaks are expected this spring and summer.

"These estimates are based on the unusually high population of adult grasshoppers in these States at the end of the summer of 2009, indicating that a large number of eggs may have been laid," says APHIS in a release.

Since America's native locust, the Rocky Mountain locust, has long gone extinct, this cannot be properly called a locust infestation - thankfully avoiding the theological baggage an Old Testament-style "plague of locusts" brings with it - but the effects could be about the same:
Grasshopper eat about half their bodyweight per day, and if foliage is unavailable, the grasshoppers will eat wood and paint.

According to APHIS, grasshopper outbreaks can destroy 80% of the forage in areas as large as 2,000 square miles.

Last summer, The Wall Street Journal reports, one Wyoming rancher had everything on his 10,000 acres - including his wife's lilac bushes - devoured by a horde of the critters. Without grass, the rancher had to sell his cattle earlier and lighter, and the resulting total profit loss tallied about $30,000 (€25,182).

It is uncertain yet whether this pertains to the grasshoppers' swarming in America, but researchers at UK's University of Cambridge have discovered that when the desert locusts of Africa swarm, even though the bugs' bodies shrink somewhat, their brains grow by 30%, especially the areas for learning and information processing.

Cambridge's scientists say this happens to prevent cannibalism - their bigger brains enable the locusts to identify between friend and food during the high-density mayhem of the swarm - unlike, say, sharks during a feeding frenzy who become so crazed, they attack and eat each other.

Grasshopper swarms like the current one APHIS is warning about are cyclical, building to a peak, then quiet for two or three years after.

Perhaps some insect neurologist will be able to find a way to convince grasshoppers that they themselves are tasty and delicious next time they plan to take the plains.

An old, out-of-print book could introduce chemistry to a new generation - and it is available online

HAVING TROUBLE getting your kids interested in science, specifically chemistry? Tell them it's bad for them, and the government has banned it!

Okay, The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments (GBCE), written by Robert Brent, with excellent illustrations by Harry Lazarus, is not really banned: Original published by Golden Press in 1960, the book's copyright was not renewed since its last printing in 1971 - the edition I used to own - and is now sadly out of print.

Not that any publisher would touch this book these days: With more than 200 experiments to choose from, the GBCE expects junior chemists to be able to work around flame, be capable enough to carefully break glass pipettes, and maybe even make their own hydrogen or chlorine gas.

Of course GBCE warns, "Be careful not to breathe fumes!"

Absolutely none of this would pass any of the super-sensitive child safety regulations on the books these days.

But you can still get a copy of this fabulous primer via the website About.com. The site's chemistry editor, Anne Marie Helmenstine, has provided a link to a free pdf of the GBCE.

"For the aspiring chemist who can adhere to the safety precautions, this remains one of the best do-it-yourself chemistry books around," she writes.

One commenter at About.com, Jerry Svoboda, writes, "I learned to think for myself, how to get things done."

Blogger Chris Brunner goes farther, noting, "This book is... the bible for any young chemist-in-training."

"Comparable chemistry books sold today are designed for parents as much as for kids, offering the wan pleasures of experiments that require no glass pieces and no open flames and use only environmentally safe materials," laments Ken Silverstein, author of the non-fiction book The Radioactive Boy Scout, about a boy inspired by the GBCE to build his own nuclear reactor.

"The Golden Book, by contrast, promised to open the doors to a brave new world. It was the era of JFK and the New Frontier, of satellite launches and the race to the moon. The sky truly was the limit," notes Silverstein.

"Chemistry is one of the most important of all sciences for human welfare," the GBCE emphasizes in its introduction. "Chemistry means the difference between poverty and starvation and the abundant life."

And gosh, who wants kids to know about that?

By Anna Jagger

With fierce competition between tea brands, tea bag design has become more innovative. In a drive to improve sustainability, the latest bags are made from the bioplastic polylactic acid (PLA).

The advantages of the new bags are that they are made from a renewable material and are compostable, says Eamonn Tighe, business development manager at US-based bioplastics producer NatureWorks.

Developed by Helsinki-headquartered nonwoven materials specialist Ahlstrom, the bags are made from a lightweight nonwoven filament web based on NatureWorks' Ingeo PLA.
A group of committed tea drinkers at ICIS took a close look at some pyramid-shaped tea bag samples.

We agreed that the material was more transparent. "When you put them in the water, the bag becomes almost invisible, so you can see the tea better," remarked one colleague.

Another observed that, while the tea bags were relatively thin, they did not tear. But she did question whether the material was as porous as other bags, and whether that could have a detrimental effect on the infusion.

The idea is that the new bags, as well as being more sustainable, will increase consumer awareness about high-quality tea, says Marco Martinez, Ahlstrom's global communications manager. The brand will be launched this year, targeting the premium tea market.

Because the material can be sealed using the latest ultrasonic bonding technology, it is suitable for pyramid-shaped bags, which are becoming increasingly popular at the high end of the market, explains Martinez.

Until now, ultrasonic sealing has only been suitable for bags made from a woven nylon net.
"The new material is the first available alternative to the nylon woven materials," says Martinez. "Compared with nylon, there are some clear advantages in terms of sustainability."
Most tea bags are made of a mix of natural and synthetic fibers, usually polyethylene (PE) or polypropylene (PP), and sealed with heat or by crimping.

Ultrasonic bonding generates fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional materials, adds Martinez. And, most importantly, the material has no odor or taste.

And how did the tea taste? Pretty good. Now, where are the biscuits...?

The international auto market is in major flux as Ford sells Volvo at a loss to a Chinese company

IT WAS a fascinating coincidence, with metaphorical potential: the same day that Ford Motor Company's sale of its Volvo car unit was finalized, was also the day that the death of the designer of Ford's most famous car designer was announced.

At the end of March, the Hangzhou, China-based Zhejiang Geely Holding Group (ZGH) agreed to buy Volvo from Ford for $1.8bn (€1.34bn), $1.6bn of that in cash. ZGH's subsidiary, Geely Automotive Holdings is the twelfth-largest car maker in China, but that nation's second largest privately-owned auto manufacturer.

With the Volvo acquisition, for the first time a Chinese company is now in charge of a worldwide automobile brand. ZGH expects to sell 200,000 cars/year in China, and intends to open a Volvo plant there in the future. ZGH also expects Volvo's European division to be selling 600,000/year to Europe and North America.

Ford paid $6.4bn to acquire Sweden-based Volvo in 1999. Ford's strategy now is to divest itself of non-core units: Starting in 2007, the company sold off its high-end - and expensively purchased - Jaguar and Aston Martin lines.

One brand Ford will probably never let go of, though, is Mustang - a line practically synonymous with the company.

Although he passed away at the beginning of March, the death of Donald Frey, the Mustang's chief designer, was not publicized more widely until the end of the month: The New York Times obituary appeared the same day as the Volvo deal was announced. Born in 1923, Frey was 86 when he died.

Lee Iacocca and Donald Frey with their creation, 1964 (at right)

Called "Detroit's sharpest idea man," by Time magazine in 1967, Frey was so praised by car enthusiasts that at auto shows, he was treated like a movie star, autograph hounds included.

But in the early 1960s, smarting from the financial failure of the Edsel, Ford wasn't interested in a new sports car, and under the auspices of Ford's then-general manager (and future CEO of Chrysler) Lee Iacocca, Frey and his team worked in secret.

(Left) Frey at a speedway in the mid-1960s, watching product being tested

Frey had been partially inspired by his children, who told the engineer, "Dad, your cars stink. They have no pizazz."

"The whole project was bootlegged," Frey said in a 2004 interview with USA Today. "There was no official approval of this thing. We had to do it on a shoestring."

The rest is history.

HOLLYWOOD LOVES CARS, AND DETROIT LOVES HOLLYWOOD

It is ironic that Ford once owned Aston Martin, as the first time most people saw the Mustang, it was being torn apart by an Aston Martin.

While the Mustang was initially introduced at the 1964 World's Fair in New York City, it was through the medium of film that even more potential customers got a look at the sportscar: Iacocca had finagled the vehicle's appearance in what was then "the next" James Bond film, Goldfinger, offering the producers several autos to use.

The Mustang is driven by one of those beautiful and unfortunate women who routinely fall for the superspy, and at one point, Bond uses his MI6-tricked out Aston Martin to shred the Mustang's side panels and tires.

Thankfully, Steve McQueen showed up a few years later with the police thriller Bullitt and set all that right, with an incredible chase through the streets of San Francisco: McQueen's Mustang Fastback chasing a 1968 Dodge Charger.

Not to be outdone, several years after that, the producers of the James Bond films put 007 behind the wheel of the 1971 Mustang for Diamonds Are Forever.

Vroooom! (Those were the days...)

[Photos courtesy of Ford Motors]

Who needs wizards? We have scientists: Jetpacks are back, and the invisibility cloak is on the way

JETPACK? DONE that, been there. Invisibility cloak? Nah, it'll never happen. Those are the answers you used to get regarding those potential inventions. But advances in technology - as well as a dose of healthy tenacity - mean that consumers everywhere may soon have personal jPaks and iCloaks.

If his invention is not an elaborate prank, inventor and former biochemist Glenn Martin may find himself at the center of some attention. Because it looks like his company, the New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft has finally built an operational jetpack.

For $90,000 (€66,681), about the price of a Porsche Hybrid, and if you were willing to wait a year for it to be custom-built, you could become the owner of a working jetpack.

Called rocket belts when the US military was testing them in the 1960s, previous versions had flight times of less than 30 seconds and were fueled by pressurized hydrogen peroxide.

The Martin Jetpack (MJ) runs on 5.28 gallons (20 liters) of service-station quality gasoline, has a range of 30 miles (48.3 km) and a top speed of 60 mph.

In an interview with New Zealand television, Martin said the device could carry a person of average weight for about 30 minutes. "I see it very much like a jet ski for the skies," said Martin, adding that his teenage son has even taken a test flight.

"I'm not quite the mad inventor; maybe [an] eccentric inventor," he noted.
Compared to the backpack-sized unit the Pentagon designed, at five-feet-square, the MJ is a beast! But there's a parachute built in, and if your hands are off the controls, it goes into autopilot and hovers in place.

Martin has signed a deal to supply MJs to a government, but he could not say which one.

WHO NEEDS MAGIC?
Also gaining notoriety are the inventors of the invisibility cloak. A team lead by Tolga Ergin at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, in Germany, are in the process of creating a nanotech material that will "transform space," making a "carpet mirror" that bends light, rendering the wearer invisible.

With all those iCloaks out there, will jPaks come with built-in radar, or is that extra?

Color photos courtesy of Martin Aircraft Company
Other photo and illustration courtesy of US Department of Defense

If we really wanted to grab your attention, we should have illustrated this page with a dinosaur

IT WAS a great piece of legermain and the more I examined it, the more I appreciated it.

In mid-March, one news story was picked up by the various services of the blogosphere, and spread quite quickly: In all cases, the lede was about the hypothetical Nemesis star, a red dwarf in our immediate galactic area that supposedly exerts a level of gravitational force on the debris floating about the Oort Cloud, which surrounds our solar system.

Every 26m to 65m years, Nemesis unwittingly sends a comet or asteroid at the Earth, blasting everything into extinction.

This is all hypothetical, you understand, no one is really certain what wiped out the dinosaurs. But these stories are great propaganda for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite telescope program, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) latest project.

But WISE, usually mentioned in the final third of those various news stories I mentioned, is already fascinating enough: it does not need the bells and whistles of the alleged comet-murder of the dinosaurs for added public interest.

Not that I can blame NASA: slap a dinosaur on it, and the public comes running - myself included, no matter what it is .

Honestly, though, I'm glad the dinosaurs got killed: because if they didn't die, I wouldn't have fine petrochemical-based products to make my 21st century life so enjoyable.

EYE IN THE SKY
And speaking of 21st century products, the WISE telescope mission is pretty darn cool: Launched in December, made operational in January, WISE will take a photo every 11 seconds for a total of 1.5m snapshots of deep space.

Run by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, over the six to 10 months of its mission, until the satellite's coolant runs out, WISE will take images in the 3 to 25 micrometre wavelength range of 99% of the sky with its infrared cameras.

The coolant is imperative, as the telescope is infrared, and needs to be cooler than the objects being photographed.

So if there is a Nemesis star out in the Oort, WISE should be able to pick it up.

Giants once walked the earth, and now their histories are being added to the dustbin


THOMAS EDISON just isn't who he used to be.

In a mid-January article in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Bernie Carlson, a professor of science, technology and society at the University of Virginia, said, "Edison is so 20th century, much like Henry Ford."

This is where people are getting their info mixed up: While Ford is to be lauded as the innovator and essentially the creator of the assembly line, he did not invent the automobile.
Edison's role as industrialist is getting mixed up with his start as an inventor--the quintessential American ideal of the inventor, I might add.

Edison's nickname was the Wizard of Menlo Park, a reference to the New Jersey neighborhood where his workshop was established.

Carlson was quoted in an article about the resurgence in interest in the career and life of inventor Nikola Tesla.

While Tesla won the battle between alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC), which Edison had bet heavily on - even as the wires over the streets were cracking and flaming from his DC.

But Tesla was almost forgotten, and Edison was heralded in kids' textbooks from coast to coast.

However, as time marches on, Edison's most well-known inventions, the incandescent lightbulb, the phonograph and the motion-picture camera are all being left by the wayside.

Edison's bulbs are being phased out by fanatical environmentalists; the phonograph is twice removed: replaced by CDs, which were then replaced by Mp3s; and movies no longer use film, it's all digital, even the people.

Gosh, I guess Edison is "so 20th century."

21st century schizoid man

And then there's this:

"I can't imagine writing a song about Edison...too boringly rich, entrepreneurial and successful!" Andy McCluskey, a founder of the UK-based new wave band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, told the WSJ.

But I disagree: The drive and passion he showed made Edison a larger than life figure, a character who would not be out of place in the works of Jules Verne - or Mark Twain.

It is too bad Edison is being discarded. His inventions may be "historical curios," says WSJ, but his achievements are monumental and inspirational.

These 18th century ways of thinking are holding us back:
It's time to embrace our cyborg future!

YESTERDAY, I visited a cyborg. Sort of.

Okay, I will admit that perhaps I'm using the nomenclature incorrectly - no, the person I visited will not have bio-electronic, or bionic limbs.
He will not be able to lift an automobile over his head, he won't be able to run faster than a galloping horse, he will not be able to see in the dark or long distances, nor will be able to jump over walls and fences with accompanying metallic, echoing "nanana-nanana-nanana" sound effects.

Instead, I visited a man with a new stomach.

My good friend, RH - the initials changed, as they say on a thousand TV cop shows, to protect the innocent - is currently in the hospital with ulcerative colitis and has had a big chunk of his large intestine surgically removed.

RH now has to use a colostomy bag, and as unnerving as thinking about it, let alone actually seeing it, is, that's okay. With his new - as I perfer to call it - cybernetic appendage, he will be able to live a life, instead of being a shut-in, like RH has been for the past 18 months.

He will finally be able to get a good night's sleep without interrupting and frequent rushes to the toilet. The pain of his gut collapsing on itself, feeling like a knife in the belly, will be gone.

LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH

It is 2010, we have to get used to living in the future: Science has done more than save my friend's life, it has improved it.

Now RH will be able to accomplish all the things he used to love to do frequently:
go to the movies, attend live music shows and eat food that is not bland or watered down - but no nuts, it seems those could tear his bag:
As with most things, there is room for improvement.

I joke about my friend being a cyborg because thinking of RH that way is better than thinking of him as being afflicted. I am very happy for my pal, and science via medicine has helped and healed him.

Some people have to take pills, others have prosthetic limbs, some use medical attachments, like RH. A lot of us need to wear lenses over our eyes to see. Too many people never seem to disconnect themselves from their portable computing and communications units.

Nobody's perfect - we're all cyborgs now.

Ireland's new anti-blasphemy law is exactly the type of thing Galileo and Copernicus had to worry about

In the vendor stalls in South Africa, you can buy dried vulture brains. When the brain is crumbled and rolled into a cigarette then smoked, it's supposed to give you the ability of clairvoyance and premonition.

Wildlife protection groups are concerned because gamblers of all varieties are smoking vulture brains to play games of chance or bet on the ponies - and the upcoming World Cup in South Africa is guaranteed to increase consumption as bets are placed on the games.

But smoking vulture brains is a superstition, and those are hard to break, even when the evidence points elsewhere: people will be burnin' vulture brains while watching the World Cup on a 50-inch LCD TV and placing bets on-line.

It is regretful that vultures may be driven to extinction for something so stupid, but that's how it is: until other factors come along, people will believe what they believe, and the superstitions about vulture brains will go on.

But the Republic of Ireland is not helping the situation. On New Year's Day, the nation introduced a new law, one that makes "blasphemy" a criminal offence - punishable by a €25,000 ($35,882) fine.

Don't think that because Ireland is a predominantly Catholic nation that these laws are skewed towards the Holy See alone; the law defines blasphemy as, "publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion [my italics], thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted."

This goes beyond Ireland's borders: the new law "is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level," said Michael Nugent, chairman of the organization Atheist Ireland, in a statement.

It is doubtful anyone is going to determine that plastics or other petrochemicals are blasphemous any time soon - although if some crazed religious sect somewhere decides that burning oil is "despoiling the souls of our dinosaur brethren," who knows?

And what about biotechnology? There has already been controversy in the US over the use of stem cells used from embryonic fetuses - which itself developed from the spiritual/secular controversy in America over abortion, so what happens if stem cell research is declared blasphemous? And after that? Practically every form of medicine can offend someone somewhere.

Except smoking vulture brains.