Question: what stories do you like writing ???

Paul Brack answered on 13 Jun 2015:

I like telling the stories that happened in science and the history of science.
Let me share one I wrote recently.

Title: The colour of the gods could soon be in your banknote…

Colour is an integral part of human civilisation. Since ancient times, we have taken pleasure from using colours to express ourselves through art. In ancient times, one stood out from the rest; blue. The colour of the sky, blue was often associated with the gods. This was certainly true in Ancient Egypt. Here, blue represented the universe, and, due to it also being the colour of the Nile, fertility and creation. In ancient times, only the earth colours (the colours provided by the surface soil) could be used as pigments. Blue is not one of these, and was only available to our ancestors if they were lucky enough to find rare minerals such as lapis lazuli, which was mined in only one location (situated in modern day Afghanistan).

However, the ancient Egyptians were exceptional chemists, and at some point around 2600 BC, they discovered that they could make a blue pigment. This was a seriously impressive scientific achievement. The Egyptians also found that they could subtly tune the blueness of this material by grinding it down to different sizes, and took advantage of this to produce some stunning artwork.

Mixtures of this compound with glass came to be known as Egyptian Blue, and use of the pigment gradually spread across the ancient world as far as Mesopotamia and the Roman Empire before being apparently lost in the Dark Ages. However, 200 years ago, Sir Humphry Davy rediscovered Egyptian Blue in a pot in Pompeii and some Roman baths in Rome, and a recently discovered property of Egyptian Blue could see it being used for things the Egyptians could not have dreamed of.

The property of which I speak is called near-infrared luminescence; basically this means that if you shine a special type of light onto Egyptian Blue, it glows really brightly, so strongly that the presence of minute amounts of Egyptian Blue can be detected even when no blue colour is visible to the naked eye. The British Museum was able to use this technique to provide the first proof that the Elgin Marbles had once been painted, finding Egyptian Blue on several sculptures from the Parthenon.

Though this property of luminescence has initially been exploited by those interested in the history of art, Egyptian Blue could perhaps be used to replace the expensive lanthanide compounds in security inks in banknotes. The colour of the gods could soon be coming to your wallet.