A bit of a stretch for a chemistry blog, perhaps, but I couldn’t resist sharing this lovely find. The designer Makoto Tojiki has created some stunning light sculptures with a little bit of science thrown in. Well worth a look if you get a chance as they’re really quite beautiful. Pi is cited to a large number of decimal places along the side of the glowing twisted tapes that make up the sculptures, and he’s called the design ‘Archimedes dream’, apparently because Archimedes was renowned for being a bit of a visionary and ahead of his time.

In some places on the web people are saying that these sculptures are made from organic light-emitting diodes (which is what first attracted my attention). After a closer look, however, this doesn’t seem to be the case. The electroluminescent (EL) tapes appear to be a copper wire threaded through a layer of phosphor, covered in a protective plastic sheath. I’ve never seen them before, though, and I can’t locate more information than that – does anyone know which kind of phosphor is used for them? They tapes are available in a range of colours and I can think of a number of uses for them, though to be fair, most of them involve me doing my own Tony Hart impression and trying to create something artistic out of them.

Vicki

Vicki Cleave (Senior Editor, Nature Materials)